During the second concurrent session, Jean Rainwater and Bonnie Buzzell from Brown University talked about the challenges involved in borrowing materials not located in their own collections. In “Don’t Make Me Choose! (or, Just Get What I Need!),†they showed how it took 33 clicks to borrow an item from another library within the multiple consortia they belong to, which is 9-10 times the number of clicks the typical user will put up with. Rather than waiting for vendors to come up with a solution, they decided to develop one in-house, even if it was only a partial solution. When a new University Librarian (i.e., head of the library) was hired, this person made simplifying the borrowing process a priority, and put together a team with different, complementary skill sets to do the job.
The “guiding principles†for this project were that the system they developed had to be:
- Simplicity for the user.
- Work with what is.
- Release early and often.
- Expect change.
They called their system “easyBorrow,†and used WorldCat as their starting point for acquiring materials not in the collection. They placed a simple search box on the page that pops up when a search returns zero results, with three-step instructions on how to proceed. As they moved through the system, it did require an extra authentication step, but in the end, it took only 10 clicks to borrow the same item from the same source. It required a combination of open source tools (Java, Tomcat, Python, Django, PHP, MySQL), APIs and system components to do so, and resulted in a marked increase in ILL requests and user satisfaction.
In a time of shrinking budgets and other resources, this project clearly demonstrates the value of agile software development, and having the staff available to make this happen. Commercial software companies, despite devoting enormous resources and funds to design and development of library systems, cannot keep up with the changing and evolving needs of patrons. Libraries need effective teams with a complementary skill sets to “stitch together†disparate systems to make serving the public more efficient and effective. The presenters used a quilt analogy in presenting this topic, and it rings true: libraries have a patchwork of different services and systems, which will be more immediately and effectively utilized when someone can sew them together, a few squares at a time, into a coherent whole, instead of waiting for a vendor to assemble the machinery to turn out a software “blanket†system.