Give 'Em What They Want: Textbooks & ILL
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Presented at the ILLiad International Conference, 2015
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Give 'Em What They Want: Textbooks & ILL
- 1. Give ‘Em What They Want: Textbooks and ILL Nora Dethloff Asst. Head of Information & Access Services University of Houston Libraries ndethloff@uh.edu
- 3. Information & Access Services Interlibrary Loan
- 4. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnystiletto/6267492486/sizes/l . Recolored. Our Service Philosophy = Pickles
- 5. Textbook requests at UH: A Brief History Image source: https://craftytxlady.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/pulling-your-hair-out-girl.jpg
- 6. Bookstores Don’t Do Authority Control (Or, at least, ours doesn’t)
- 7. Image source: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8469/8426525097_cf3ed2db55_b.jpg There were some imposters
- 9. June 2012: New overdue & billing policy for textbooks.
- 10. Hallelujah!
- 11. Image source: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8221/8322120385_7b28b96325_b.jpg The Big Idea: What if we just gave people what they wanted, and only penalized the people who broke the rules?
- 12. Image source: http://cache3.asset-cache.net/xc/474192957.jpg?v=2&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=4nxRZG_6lbK5CINGwwUsc9z1KjdmSa92W8oMpKwOgQs1 an Experiment: - Process all requests. - Don’t care if they’re textbooks. - Check overdues for course-assigned textbooks. - Send the overdue textbook email notifying patron of potential for big fines.
- 13. Image source: https://farm7.staticflickr.com/6114/6340984211_4ba6103138_b.jpg Only 9 textbooks have been more than 1 week overdue. Only 2 textbooks were so overdue that patrons were charged. We’ve never had to charge the full replacement fee.
- 14. Image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Pickle.jpg/640px-Pickle.jpg More Pickles Buy for course reserves: -5 or more holds in ILS / ILL requests -Hot reserves items that are frequently out when asked for
- 15. Drawing conclusions: What we’ve learned Image source: http://farm1.staticflickr.com/100/290546350_de02738d2e_z.jpg
- 16. https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4047/4190477130_05f66cf528_b.jpg Happy thoughts Big time savings for processing ILL borrowing requests In keeping with our service philosophy Very few instances of overdue materials Helping students
- 17. Image source: https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2422/3981364314_1d200e2f7d_o.jpg Unfortunately…. These are hard requests to fill
- 18. Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/austinevan/1225274637/sizes/o/ Highly desired materials? 19 items purchased 4 circulated
- 21. TIPS Be a lender Know why you’re doing it Dip a toe in first Set realistic limits Have your talking points ready Create custom holdings groupImage source: https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8261/10232347475_b270eacde6_h.jpg
Editor's Notes
- ≈ 40,000 students (≈30,000 undergrads, 10,000 graduate & professional) Urban setting, many commuter students (although on-campus population is growing) M.D. Anderson Library & branches: 67 staff members, 51 librarians, over 100 student assistants 17,000 door count on 1 day – busy place!
- Information & Access Services: Circulation, Reserves, Shelving, Interlibrary Loan, Reference, and computer labs (ARC & LC) Part of public services – basically the public areas of building are ours Highest # staff of any department – 18 , majority of student workers - 52 ILL – 4.5 FTE, plus Nora – 9 students Tasks handled in ILL: - ILL Borrowing / Lending - Document Delivery (Faculty, Graduate Students, & Distance Ed.) - Paging / Holds / Check-in - Delivery service (physical books – faculty) - Book drop pick up / Branch courier service - Miscellaneous Volume: avg. 155 Lending requests, 67 Borrowing requests per day, 25 document delivery requests per day avg. 20 delivery items per day avg. 40 paging requests / day
- For about five years now our department has had a mantra. You may have heard of Bob Farrell & the “Give ‘em the pickle” philosophy From Bob Farrell’s Give ‘em the pickle website: “When something happens with a customer and you’re not sure what to do? “Give ’em the Pickle!” Do what it takes to make things right!” We try to let this philosophy inform our daily interactions and also our decisions about services. My personal philosophy – Why do extra work to avoid providing service? This is what it felt like we did with textbooks.
- Textbooks have always had us pulling out our hair When I arrived at UH, we had a “core course” reserves shelf Idea was to provide textbooks for the most common lower-level courses It was a constant pain the in the butt Couldn’t get the list (more on that in a moment) VERY high theft rate Eventually pulled the plug (happily) The bookstore list Try to get the list of assigned texts from the bookstore This was used for both the core course books and ILL cancellations Had a difficult time getting the list Often, the bookstore did not have a “list” per se, in a format they could pass to us Usually 6 weeks in to the semester by the time we’d get the list The bulk of textbook requests through ILL come in during the first weeks of the semester, so this was pretty pointless Eventually, the bookstore got a searchable site Seems like a “hooray”, but sadly not so much (more on this in a minute) So here’s what our process looked like: Unrealistic to check every loan request, and not really necessary So, the rule was to check “suspicious” titles Some staff members were really good at “smelling” textbooks, others were not If it was on the assigned textbook list, we cancelled the request with a custom cancellation directing them to the bookstore NO TEXTBOOKS was literally in all caps, in red, on our ILLiad login page, and in our user agreement (super friendly, right?) – didn’t phase them
- So we’re putting a lot of work into detecting these textbooks, searching the bookstore site for titles we think are suspicious. But, the bookstore isn’t really built on a model where people search by title. Their model is students looking for books by course – a very different purpose. Sometimes we have an ISBN, which helps. Searching by title is fraught, as you can see from this example. Abbreviations in weird places, no consistency between titles, it’s a librarian’s nightmare. So, even when we’re expending time and effort to search for these materials, we’re not guaranteed to find them on the bookstore site, even if they are assigned textbooks.
- So, given the inconsistencies of the process, you can imagine that some folks managed to get their textbook requests through. Worse, we’d hear all the time from patrons whose requests we had caught and cancelled, “Well, my friend got this book from you guys!” – Service is unequal! In the last year of the “no textbook” policy, we cancelled 221 requests as course-assigned textbooks. (That’s about 1.5% of our total requests, or about 18 a month.) So, we’re spending a lot of time trying to prevent these, we’re only catching a small portion of our overall transactions, we’re providing unequal service. This is a bad system!
- The worst part – or at least the part that bothered me the most: We had a huge problem getting these materials back. If someone managed to get a textbook, they kept it until the end of the semester. No incentive for bringing material back. They know we won’t get them another copy, so they’ll just keep the one they have. Our billing policy did not provide a disincentive: - In keeping with our service philosophy, we don’t charge fines for overdue materials. - Only penalty that was passed on to the students was when the lending library billed us. (We bill patron in turn, plus a $25 processing fee.) - When the book was returned – at the end of the semester, usually – we’d waive all fees except the $25 processing fee. - Basically, a student rented a textbook for $25 / semester. No wonder they wouldn’t bring them back! Meanwhile, we’re sending overdues, stopping their accounts, talking to the lending library, doing paperwork to add fees to their account, then doing the same paperwork to remove those fees when the item finally came back. We were getting $25 out of these transactions, and doing WAY more than $25 worth of work. Essentially, we’re subsidizing a very inexpensive – and mildly irritating – textbook rental service.
- So, in June of 2012, we decided to crack down on the problem. We wanted to make ourselves more expensive than buying the textbook. Textbooks still not allowed. Added steep penalties for overdue textbooks: After the third week, $25 fine per week – nonrefundable! After 6 weeks, charge the full replacement cost of the book, in addition to the processing fee for each week. Sent them a warning email the first three weeks, then sent an email each week notifying them of their total amount owed – it adds up quickly! All charges were non-refundable. All staff members were told not to waive them.
- Cue Handel’s chorus: They brought the books back! From June 2012 through September 2014, while this policy was in effect, out of 23 overdue textbooks, only 2 got to the point of fines. Those 2 both brought the book back before the 6th week, when the replacement cost would have kicked in.
- So this is what gave us our big idea – If the threat of stiff fines will get even the worst offenders to bring back textbooks, Why not just let people request textbooks and rely on the fines to bring the books back? Then WE get to stop doing all the up-front work, and get to offer a valuable service to patrons who want to play by the rules. WIN!
- We decided to try an experiment: Let’s totally reverse our traditional ILL textbook policy. All textbook requests allowed. We’ll treat them exactly like we treat any other request. (One exception: we will not purchase to fill the request.) UNTIL they become overdue: Then, Our ILL financial specialist checks the overdue queues to find any textbooks. If they’re found, we send them the scary emails explaining that fines will be assessed starting week 3. Follow the same overdue textbook policy that we’d had success with for the last 2 years. Policy changed in early October 2014 – we purposefully wanted to miss the big rush of the first 6 weeks of the semester This was never meant to be a permanent change: We wanted to see what would happen if we went no-holds-barred on textbooks, but we anticipated that we might modify the policy at a later time.
- SO FAR: In terms of overdues, its worked unbelievably well. Only 9 textbooks have become more than 1 week overdue – Obviously that first email gets people’s attention. Only 2 textbooks incurred charges: 1 $25 charge (4 weeks overdue) 1 $50 charge (5 weeks overdue) To date, we haven’t had to charge the full replacement fee. No textbook has been 6 weeks overdue. Turns out, students are much more likely to bring books back when they can just clone the request and get another one. (And also when the threat of heavy fines compels them to.) We were genuinely surprised by this. We were expecting the hefty overdue fines to bring the items back, and thought we’d be sending out a lot more threatening emails.
- The new textbook policy is much more in keeping with our “pickle-based” service philosophy. In addition, we decided to take a proactive approach to tackle the textbook issue from several angles: We created a process for a “highly desired materials” Items with 5 or more holds in ILS Items requested 5 or more times via ILL Items already on reserve that are frequently asked for and already checked out These items may be discovered in the course of processing holds (Sierra, our ILS, will show if an item already has multiple holds on it) OR We run a report in the early weeks of the semester to find items in our ILS with more than 5 holds In ILL, this is an inexact science, relying on folks processing borrowing requests to recognize titles being requested multiple times. (I’m sure there’s a way to run a search for these. We haven’t gotten this far yet.) To report these items, we developed a new web form on our intranet. Any staff member or librarian can fill it out with bibliographic information and the reason an item should be on reserves (or an additional copy purchased for reserves). We expected big referrals from Service Desk, ILL, and possibly Liaisons. (If student reports issue to them, or if they notice items in their subject area).
- So, although we’ve only been under the new policy for 6 months, there are some patterns we’ve been able to spot.
- So, after five months of the new, no-holds-barred, textbook policy – there are some real advantages to the new system. It seems to have solved the problems we were interested in addressing, particularly the work of searching for textbooks and the overdue textbook issue.
- Unfortunately, there is also a down side. Unfilleds have become a big issue. Many libraries will not loan textbooks Many of them have a lot of holders in OCLC, but not many holders who will loan Since the experiment is to treat textbooks like any other request, we keep trying until there are no more potential lenders. The requests can often go through several lender strings of 15 lenders, coming back to the unfilleds queue in between, before someone finally loans it. Some of them we can never get, but it takes a loooong time to exhaust the list of potential lenders. This clogs up the unfilled queues and creates extra work for borrowing staff. It’s also not great customer service – since patrons often have to wait a long time just to get a cancellation When the policy was changed, we updated our ILL page to indicate that textbook requests were allowed, but not recommended. “We will make every reasonable effort to obtain textbook titles requested. However, textbooks are often difficult to obtain through ILL. Many libraries do not collect them, and many others will not lend them.” We did create a custom holdings group for libraries willing to loan textbooks. This has helped, but we’re still making adjustments.
- Another area where our efforts have thus far yielded underwhelming results Our attempts to be proactive don’t seem to have borne much fruit thus far. Of the 19 items purchased in the Fall semester for course reserves through the new “highly desired materials” process, only 4 had circulated at all by March. It would appear that many patrons desire these items only if they can keep them for longer than a few hours. We haven’t pulled the statistics for the Spring semester yet. Hoping for a better result. If not, we’ll probably have to rethink or retool this process.
- Another side effect reported by both ILL and Service Desk staff is an increased sense of entitlement and attitude from students. Some students have contacted library staff to report their unhappiness with textbook due dates, speed of delivery, and other issues. One student last week was told her requested item had been shipped by the lending library. She asked us to “intercept” and “expedite” the shipment because her midterm was in a few days and she needed the textbook to study. (There’s a lot wrong with that demand.) Unfortunately, she’s not the only one. I’m not convinced that these are actually on the rise. I think it may be that our staff are not as comfortable responding to them now. Previously they had the “Well, textbooks aren’t even allowed” response to fall back on. Now the response is a bit more nuanced. We’re working on talking points, including an email that directs them to the bookstore and textbook rental services.
- Well, we’re 6 months in. We’ll certainly continue the current plan through the Spring and Summer semesters. Over the Summer we’ll be examining the statistics to determine what changes might be appropriate. I sort of see it as a pendulum: We did not allow textbooks at all Now we’re addressing the need for textbooks in a variety of ways, and giving them a lot of attention We’ve swung from one extreme to the other I see the next step as coming back to the center. Some limits to the lengths we’ll go to in ILL maybe one lending string for textbooks? maybe we’ll cancel ILL requests for items already on course reserve?
- So, here are my tips for anyone who wants to start borrowing textbooks: First, this goes without saying but I’m gonna say it – You need to be willing to lend textbooks! (For the record, we’ll lend anything in our collection, with the exception of items in our Special Collections department. We’re a very liberal lender, so this wasn’t an issue I needed to address, thankfully.) Second, know why you’re doing it: you need to have a good reason for offering the service. This is an area that academic libraries have traditionally avoided and, as it turns out, for some good reasons. In our case, we wanted to address some problems we were having on the back end, and we wanted to expand the service to be more in line with our service philosophy. Knowing these goals helped us to frame our roll-out. Third, dip a toe in first. From this point on the list of tips gets a little “do what I say, not what I did.” We were going in whole hog to see what would happen, but I don’t actually recommend that approach. If I were doing this over again, I’d move the line a little instead of erasing it completely. Going along with that, Set realistic limits, remembering that you can always widen the service later. It’ll be easier on staff (and, perhaps, produce less entitlement in students) to begin allowing textbooks in very limited ways (i.e. when a copy is not available in course reserves, or when it can be obtained in the first lending string). Have your talking points ready: Be ready to respond to student questions with an explanation of the limitations of ILL as a textbook service. Have on hand an email script including this explanation, along with links to the bookstore and some textbook rental services. Create a customs holding group for textbook lenders: This can be hard to determine in advance, but if you do the work of creating the group up front, you can start adding to it when you find good libraries. You can also ask other libraries who borrow textbooks who’s in their group.
- This is my questions slide, in case you couldn’t tell. Happy to answer any questions about what we’re doing, But I’d also like to hear from any of you who are borrowing textbooks or addressing this need in some other way.