SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library and the IDS Project win prestigious award

SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library and the Information Delivery Services (IDS) Project are winners of a the national Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative Award, created to encourage libraries and librarians to make changes in how they do resource sharing and improve service to users.

The IDS Project was recognized for designing rapid access to more than seven million volumes for 140,000 students and 10,000 faculty members. The project was developed by a team at SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library and currently serves 27 academic libraries in New York, both public and private.

The IDS Project bases its benchmarks on a user-centric definition of an ILL transaction, "...from the time the user places a request until the time the user is notified the loan is ready for pickup or the article is ready to be retrieved from the Web." The IDS Project benchmarks for delivery are 48 hours for articles and 72 hours for loans (excluding weekends and holidays). Performance improvement since the inception of the pilot program has been dramatic in IDS Project libraries, as shown below:

Outcome Measures between Spring 2004 and Fall 2007
Spring 2004
Loans filled within 72 hours 32%
Articles filled within 48 hours 52%
Total Filled Requests 3,794

Fall 2007
Loans filled within 72 hours 58%
Articles filled within 48 hours 88%*
Total Filled Requests 23,513
*Over 25% of the article requests were filled within 12 hours.

Congratulations to the IDS Team at SUNY Geneseo and all the libraries that participate in IDS!

Kate Pitcher Awarded RRLC Scholarship

Milne Library's Kate Pitcher was recognized at the Rochester Regional Library Council's 42nd Annual Membership Meeting as this year's winner of the RRLC scholarship to attend the Association of Research Librarians Leaderships Institute.

This $1,000 scholarship is to be used to attend the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Library Management Skills Institute I: The Manager. The ARL Library Management Institute is held each summer at SUNY Albany. During three intensive days, participants in this basic Association of Research Libraries core-learning event explore essential aspects of effective leadership and management.

Congratulations, Kate!

E-merging blog tagged as "unavoidable"

Kim Davies Hoffman recently began writing her own blog, E-merging, to chronicle activities and their resulting positive benefits related to librarian-faculty collaboration. The blog is meant to inspire even greater conversation and partnership between librarians and content specialists, including college professors, K-12 teachers, and other instructors. As of May 25, E-merging has been tagged as "the best of the blogosphere" by blog bookmarker.

Feel free to join in the conversation and ask yourself if you are "e-merging."