STARS Section Report

Katharine Calhoun, Editor

From the Chair

Hi!  As the new chair of STARS, I am very excited to be working with all of you!  I marvel at the talents and abilities of the STARS membership, and I look forward to guiding the STARS group on to another exciting year!
First, I want to thank everyone for a great conference at Anaheim.  Here are some brief highlights of the activities:

  • We had a very successful preconference, Throw Off Your Policies and Expose Your Resources, which explored new possibilities and innovations in resource sharing.  Not only did participants get inspired from the speakers, but also the winners of the Rethinking Resource Sharing Innovation Awards gave us a sense of what is possible.  The North Carolina Libraries for Virtual Education (NC LIVE) made more than 500 hours of licensed PBS videos available to its 198 members via streaming video files.  A team at SUNY Geneseo designed the Information Delivery Services Project (IDS) to provide rapid access to more than seven million volumes to 27 academic libraries in New York.
  • STARS featured two programs on Saturday and Sunday of the conference.  ILL Data Collection, Definition and Analysis examined the differences in statistics produced by various resource sharing systems.  Don't Run a Mickey Mouse ILL Operation used skits and other methods to illustrate key parts of the revised ILL Code & Explanatory Supplement and to provide a basis for best practices.  Both programs were well-attended and informative.
  • At the ILL Discussion Group, the membership voted on a bylaws change to allow for two webmasters on staggered terms.  The change was proposed to enable more than one person at a time to maintain the STARS website and to provide better continuity for website maintenance over time. The bylaws change was accepted.

In the coming year, STARS has two programs in the works, plus a possible preconference in 2010.  STARS Codes, Guidelines, and Technical Standards Committee will be working on turning two reports, Qualifications for Interlibrary Loan Operations Management and Resource-Sharing Response to Natural Disasters, into guidelines.  The STARS International ILL Committee will complete their analysis of their survey and will present a report on the various issues that hinder international resource sharing.  The STARS Organization Committee is creating a section handbook wiki to assist STARS leaders and members in carrying out the important work of STARS.
These and many more are the exciting activities of STARS!  I can’t wait to share further developments of our section!
Stephanie Atkins, STARS Chair
satkins@wustl.edu

Committee & Discussion Group Reports

Boucher Award Committee

Start thinking whom you'd like to nominate for the annual Virginia Boucher-OCLC Distinguished ILL Librarian Award.  Calls for nominations will be coming out soon!

Cherie Weible, Chair
cweible@illinois.edu

Cooperative Collection Development Committee

The Committee began planning for future forums and programs. We hope to have a forum on database licensing language for ILL and collection development librarians at ALA Annual 2009 and a forum on current models for shared storage of print collections at Midwinter 2009. Several other interesting ideas, including subject-based cooperative collection development schemes and shared purchase of various formats, were also discussed. One of these topics may be developed into a formal program at Annual 2010. The Committee also hopes to develop best-practice clearinghouses for some of these topics using the committee’s wiki.

Michael Levine-Clark, Past Chair
michael.levine-clark@du.edu

Hot Topics Discussion Group

The STARS Hot Topics Discussion Group met at ALA Anaheim on Saturday, June 28th.  There were over one hundred individuals participating in lively discussion.  The topics covered were:

  • The Good, the Bad, the Ugly:  Direct Shipping to Patrons
  • Stepping Too Far Out of the Box:  Patron Self Pick-up and Check-out of ILL Material
  • Budget Cuts and Inflation:  How to Avoid the Rise in Shipping Costs and Other Necessities       

 

Topic 1
Some concerns voiced by attendees were:

  • Books being lost;
  • Lack of sufficient insurance to cover the cost of lost material;
  • The challenge of shipping to distance learning students;
  • The possibility of direct shipping being a violation of patrons’ privacy;
  • The problem of the patron’s address being inaccurate in ILLiad or other ILL management systems;
  • The cost of shipping/borrowing vs. purchasing.

Topic 2
Various checkout methods and lending periods were discussed.

Topic 3
Here are some solutions that were suggested:

  • Purchasing the material and giving it to the patron instead of borrowing or purchasing it for the library;
  • Increase local borrowing;
  • Eliminate all payments except IFM.

This session also included the election of the officers for next year.  The results were:

Chair - Margaret Bean (Resource Sharing Librarian, University of Oregon)
Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect - Candace Townsend (Head, Reference Section, Collection Access Loan Management, Library of Congress)

A special “thank you” to Douglas Hasty for volunteering to take notes.

Kevin Wilks, Past Chair
wilks@crl.edu

Interlibrary Loan Committee
The ILL Committee had a great meeting at Annual with most members in attendance as well as a guest who came all the way from Saudi Arabia’s Dar Al-Hekma College – Interlibrary Loan really is a global effort!
Laurie Preston (Randolph Macon College) stepped in to chair the committee beginning post-Annual. Thank you, Laurie!
Sue Kaler is still heading the huge effort to create a comprehensive AV Lending list in spreadsheet form.  Once it is completed, it will be posted to the ShareILL wiki.
During our meeting, we discussed the Vendor/Liaison reports that have been historically collected and disseminated via our Committee, and we decided to cease serving as the distribution point for them. With the advancements in technology since these reports were first collected and distributed in paper form, there is no longer the need for our involvement. We will be informing all the vendors/liaisons shortly and advising them to post to ShareILL if they wish to target an Interlibrary Loan audience.
Our program, “Resource Sharing in the 21st Century: Beyond Books and Journals” was approved for Annual 2009 in Chicago! We’ll have a Sunday 1:30 to 3:30 slot and the program description is:
Although books and journals constitute most resource sharing, users increasingly ask for access to other materials in a variety of formats. How can we share these digital (streaming video, downloadable audio files, e-books, etc.) and non-print collections through traditional ILL or cooperative sharing? What is the current state of resource sharing with regard to formats other than print, and how are we providing greater access to each other’s collections through consortial borrowing and circulation?
Nancy Patterson, Past Chair
npatters@hshsl.umaryland.edu

 

Membership Committee

The Membership Committee hopes to conduct an e-mail survey of current STARS members (perhaps even all RUSA members) to help us address issues relating to member satisfaction. In addition, we believe the "STARS - ALA/RUSA" group on Facebook can help with communication and marketing.  Committee members are also working on a new welcome letter.

Robert Cagna, Chair
rcagna@hsc.wvu.edu

Organization Committee

The Organization Committee met during the All-STARS meeting at Anaheim and continues to add material to the STARS Handbook wiki.

Robin Moskal, Co-Chair
moskal@umbc.edu

Research & Statistics Committee

The following are highlights of the Committee’s activities at the Anaheim conference:

  • The Committee’s main activity was sponsoring the program “ILL Data Collection, Definition & Analysis: Why don’t MY data match what I get from my ILL management system, OCLC and my consortial circulation system?” on Saturday afternoon, June 28th.  The speakers were Todd Carpenter, Managing Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO); Genie Powell, Vice President for Support and Training of Atlas Systems; Gail Wanner, Resource Sharing Specialist for Sirsi/Dynix; and Anya Arnold, Product Specialist of Delivery Services for OCLC. The program was well received by the approximately 75 attendees who accepted the challenge to find the Adventure Room in the Disneyland Hotel.
  • The Committee is currently searching for a sponsor to fund a proposed Distinguished Research in Resource Sharing Award.  If anyone is interested in underwriting this proposed award, please contact the Committee.
  • We are also attempting to organize a preconference session for the 2010 annual meeting on “How to Manipulate Your Resource Sharing Data to Meet Your Needs.”  We hope to have a proposal submitted to the STARS Executive Committee sometime this fall.

 

Johnny L. Johnson, Chair
johnny.johnson@okstate.edu