Interlibrary Loan, Visualized…

A few months ago a subscriber to ILL-L posted a message about using a paper map in his office to help both library colleagues and customers better understand ILL service by marking the institutions where they borrow from and loan to. I thought this was a great idea and asked the staff in the UR ILL office if they could try something similar, which they did. However, when Google rolled out the new My Maps service as part of Google Maps, I instantly thought about transitioning our paper map to an online version, something we could easily share with the entire UR community to help interlibrary loan service to be better understood, both from a borrowing point of view as well as lending, since both are ILL’s core mission.

Yesterday I met with our ILL staff and showed them the initial map I created. We then reviewed what content to include and how to add it. We decided to include all borrowed and loaned items since January of 2007. Most of the data is now entered, but there’s some that’s still outstanding, but I’m very impressed with the results. Here’s a link to the map (we’re also working on an embedded version that we’ll host locally):

UR Interlibrary Loan - Borrowing and Lending

Let us know what you think!

May 19, 2007 | Filed Under ILL-L, Libraries, UR Libraries 

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