Gee Library Implements Relais ILL System

The James Gee Library at Texas A&M University-Commerce, Commerce, TX, an Amigos Member, recently upgraded its interlibrary loan capabilities with the addition of Relais ILL, an automated interlibrary loan system from Relais™ International, Inc. Relais has been producing automated systems to support interlibrary loan and document delivery services since 1996. Amigos Member Discount Services offers three Relais products: Relais Express for document delivery, Relais ILL, and Relais D2D, which integrates end-user discovery experience with request management.

¿Que Pasa? recently sought out Jacob Pichnarcik, ILL Specialist at the Gee Library, to learn why the library chose the Relais ILL system.

"In the last 10 years that I have been in this ILL office, first as a student worker, then as the assistant, and now as a supervisor, none of our processing or delivery programs had ever been updated," Pichnarcik said. "We used Ariel to send and receive from other libraries, and Prospero to deliver electronic documents to our patrons. The Prospero program has been unsupported for nearly eight years now, becoming increasingly unreliable, and Ariel is rapidly being replaced by Odyssey. Relais offers universally communicating software. That is, it can send and receive to and from Ariel and Odyssey as well as deliver documents to email via attachment or a link to an outside server. In addition, we can process received documents from Ariel and Odyssey from any workstation in our ILL office and process them while simultaneously scanning and sending from our scanners. This universal capability was the biggest reason we went with Relais."

"Additionally," Pichnarcik noted, "we liked the fact that Relais can communicate seamlessly with Innovative Interface's Millennium integrated library system. This eliminates the necessity for us to add received books manually as on-the-fly records prior to checkout. Patrons also have complete access to all their interlibrary loan records via a secure log-in system. Once they log in, they can see what they have ordered, what has arrived, and also get real-time updates for the status of their orders that have not yet been received, all without ILL staff intervention."

Pichnarcik also described a feature the library loves about Relais. "When requests for materials come in," he says, "the Relais software reads our public access catalog (PAC) and begins processing the request. If an exact match is found, a pick slip is printed without ILL staff needing to review the request. If an exact match isn't found, the request is sent to a queue for staff review. Likewise, when I am ordering items, the Relais software reads the PACs of potential lending libraries and displays the status – available, on loan, etc. – before I add those lenders to a string. This will cut down on unfilled requests and should speed successful acquisition of materials for our patrons."

Since the library is still in its initial testing of the Relais ILL system, Pichnarcik says it's too soon to offer an evaluation, but he's encouraged. "We aren't fully implemented yet," he says. "We're hoping to go fully live within the next two weeks or so. I can tell you that everything so far is working as advertised."

Amigos will visit with Pichnarcik again in the coming months for an update on the library's Relais ILL experience that will appear in the spring 2012 issue of ¿Que Pasa?. For more information on the Relais products offered by Amigos Member Discount Services, contact Rita Patrick at 1-800-843-8482, ext. 2850, or patrick@amigos.org.