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WorldShare ILL release notes, March 2023

 

Release Date: March 19, 2023

Introduction

This release of WorldShare ILL provides new features and enhancements in addition to bug fixes. These features will help you manage more complex workflows, including:

Many of these enhancements are the direct result of your feedback.

Recommended actions

For this release, we recommend that you review the following checklists and complete the relevant tasks so that you can adjust your policies and workflows and train your staff. These checklists identify updates that we have determined as significant for most institutions. We encourage you to review all of the items in the release notes to determine whether there are other items that might require additional action or follow up by your institution.

Administrative actions

These items require immediate action or decisions.

Action

For best performance, it's very important to clear your browser's cache before starting to work with WorldShare ILL!

Be sure to utilize Smart fulfillment functionality, including:

Have your contact information or lending policies changed? If so, please make the appropriate updates in the OCLC Policies Directory.

Follow-up actions

In an effort to keep your staff informed of new features and changes, you may also want to consider these items.

Action

Share these release notes with your colleagues.

Have you signed up for email alerts for News in the OCLC Community Center? This ensures that Tipasa release notes and events come straight to your inbox.

New features and enhancements

See dates adjusted for your library's time zone and locale 

Until now, the OCLC interlibrary loan network has been very US Eastern Time centric. Regardless of where you are located in the world, dates and times have displayed in Eastern Time and US style for date and time stamps.

With this release, values are now stored with full UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) date and time stamps. This enables display of dates to you and your users in your institution's time zone and region's preferred format, which eliminates the need to convert date and times to your local time zone. These are derived from the following values the WorldCat Registry:

  • Open Hours (for time zone)
  • Currency and Locale (for preferred format)

Your time zone and preferred format are displayed in the following places:

  • OCLC Policies Directory: Schedule tab (Open Hours, Closure Dates)
  • Tipasa staff interface: Request history, all date fields (i.e., need by date, request date, shipped date, due date, received date, returned date)

Example 1: Closure Dates. If you are in Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC +11:00 hours) and set a closure for March 20-27:

closure1.PNG

Users in US Central Time (UTC –6:00 hours) will see the closure as March 19-26:

closure2.PNG

Example 2: Due Date. The value saved is the UTC equivalent of 23:59:59 in the lender's time zone on the date entered as the due date. 

Lender's time zone Borrower's time zone Lender's due date String stored in the database What the borrower sees
US Pacific Time (UTC ​–8:00 hours) Australian EDT (UTC +11 hours) 3/11/2023​ 2023-03-12T07:59:59Z[UTC] 12/03/2023 

(because this is March 12 at 18:59 in their time zone)

Notes

  • For circulation integration with WMS, Alma, Sierra, or Millennium, the full date and time in UTC will be sent.
  • Printouts were not updated with this release, but they will be with an upcoming release. In the meantime, we recommend that you do not include due dates on book straps.
  • Notifications likewise were not updated with this release, but they will be with an upcoming release.
  • Requests that were in-flight before this install will not be updated retroactively.

For more information, or questions about specific date and time changes, please feel free to contact OCLC Support.

Utilize enhancements to off-system requesting 

Improved performance for retrieving the list of partner records 

Previously, loading of a large list of partner records took time and could result in a system timeout. New limits of 3000 total partner records and 500 active partners have been added to eliminate these timeouts. A spinner now also displays while the list is being retrieved.

Sort requests by partner names 

Although most columns in the Off-System Borrowing queue were sortable previously, the Off-System Lender column was not. With this release, the list of requests is now sortable by lending partner name.

sort by partner name.PNG

Email the document to the library user 

From the Request Details for an off-system borrowing request, you are now able to email the document by using the new “Email doc to patron” button.

email doc to patron button.PNG

Additional fixes and changes 

  • Partner symbols can no longer include spaces. If you previously created a symbol that included a space, the space has been replaced with a hyphen.
  • The Requester Reference ID was previously not being retained when an the off-system request was created. This has been fixed, and the ID is now saved with the request as expected.
  • Using the Next Request option to navigate through a list of off-system requests would sometimes invoke an error. The Next Request and Previous Request options now behave as expected, letting you move forward and back among the list of requests.
  • In the Change Status menu, the list of reasons-for-no only displayed correctly in English. The reasons-for-no now display correctly for all languages. Each reason-for-no is now preceded by three hyphens to “indent” the list within the Unfilled section of the menu.

For more information, see Off-System Requesting.

Improve fill rates and speed in-group fulfillment with enhanced requestability 

For libraries that have subscribed to OCLC Resource Sharing for Groups

By leveraging the Automated Request Manager, enhanced requestability provides a more accurate lender assignment for a group than is possible today. And, enhanced requestability groups (ERGs) are profiled groups with an improved requestability response for participating group members.

To improve fill rates and speed in-group fulfillment for group members, when the ERG group symbol is used to identify lenders, the resulting lender string is informed by the following:

  • Real-time item availability
  • Collection profiling (which includes shelving location)
  • Lender to borrower turnaround time
  • The group's custom load balancing

ERGs will appear in the profiled group lists in both OCLC Service Configuration and the OCLC Policies Directory.

For more information, see Custom Holdings Paths.

Note 

Allow patrons to place requests via OpenURL 

The pilot feature is available for allowing patrons to place requests via the new WorldShare ILL request form. For information on how to configure the form, see the WorldShare ILL release notes, December 2022.

Bug fixes and known issues

For a list of current and recently fixed issues, see Known issues.

Important links 

Product Insights: Resource Sharing 

To help you become familiar with the enhancements and fixes, please attend the upcoming webinar Product Insights: Resource Sharing (date to be determined). 

OCLC Resource Sharing Conference web series 

OCLC invites you to view the recordings from past presentations in the 2022 OCLC Resource Sharing Conference (RSC22) web series. This year’s series of free, virtual sessions featured ILL 101 sessions, automation, controlled digital lending, and moving resource sharing forward during this challenging time. Recordings and slides are available in the community center. 

RSC22 included these sessions:

  • Working smarter not harder: How to automate your holdings and configure policies to expedite fulfillment | Recording
  • Lightning sessions: Resource sharing at the Internet Archive and E-book lending/borrowing demystified | Recording
  • The persistence of CONTU: The results of two surveys | Recording
  • Controlled digital lending for resource sharing: Law and policy since 2018 | Recording
  • A look into the future of ILL services | Recording
  • Controlled digital lending during global COVID-19 and beyond | Recording

In partnership with IDS Project, recordings of pre-conference ILL 101 sessions are also available at the Online Learning Institute.

Information for the upcoming 2023 OCLC Resource Sharing Conference (RSC23) is available at oc.lc/rsc23.

Virtual Workshop Series: Learn how to fine-tune your ILL setup

Were you able to join us for all of our Virtual Workshops where we showed how you can optimize your library’s ILL setup and workflows, and save time?

The series included the following topics: 

Support websites 

Support information for this product and related products can be found at:

 
https://help.oclc.org/Resource_Sharing/WorldShare_Interlibrary_Loan/Release_notes_and_known_issues/2023_WorldShare_Interlibrary_Loan_release_notes/100WorldShare_ILL_release_notes_March_2023
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