Hampshire County Council is the first authority in the UK to provide all its branches and mobile libraries with direct online access to the UnityUK national resource sharing service. As a result of this forward thinking approach to using UnityUK, branch library staff across Hampshire can manage requests and update customers about progress, at any time of day, without the need to refer to the Central Interloans Team.
By bringing UnityUK into each branch, staff can check the progress of a request, receipt items, carry out renewals and return items directly to the supply library. Library customers benefit as they receive real time information about the progress of their requests, without having to wait for their local branch to check with the central bibliographic services unit.
Carol Marshall, Requests Manager at Hampshire Libraries commented, “We always believed that trusting the branches with UnityUK was the way forward and they have coped really well. Customers expect up to the minute information and progress tracking online for anything they order over the web. Interlending services needs to be able to meet that expectation if they are to be taken seriously.”
Enabling Hampshire’s branch staff to manage areas of the request process directly has reduced the paper trail between the branches and central team and as a result, four filing cabinets of paper have been eliminated from the process. The service has also speeded up the interlending process and reduced the administrative burden on the central team.
All branches and mobiles were online with UnityUK by 1st January 2007, and all have successfully upgraded to the new version of UnityUK, which was released in April 2007.
Between August and December 2006 the Interloans team trained 150 trainers at regional sessions including representatives from all 54 branches, 19 mobiles and the regional Library Development Teams. These trainers cascaded the training to the staff back at their home base.” Training notes and crib sheets were produced by the central team, based on the standard training notes provided by OCLC PICA.
OCLC PICA supported the branch roll out in other ways, as Carol explains, “The support desk have always been great, even when we’ve gone to them with a non-standard question. They provided reports that enabled us to trace where branches had not changed the status of an item for a given time period. This helped us to track problems with individual requests and to identify which branches required further training.”
Hampshire is planning to develop branch services further. A pilot is underway where branches initiate their own periodical requests in the system, which are then automatically picked up and progressed by the Central Interloans Team. If the pilot continues to be a success, the team are planning to start rolling out this service to all branches later in 2007.
