By Anne Cheadle
Director, Latah County Library District
5/7/08

WIN-Borrow from a wider collection @ your library

When the Latah County Library District joined the VALNet consortium in 2006, a big part of its purpose was to expand resources for patrons.  We wanted to bring people more books and movies, and it worked.  Our library patrons went from access to 110,000 items owned by the District to being able to place holds on over 750,000 items that were owned by different libraries in the consortium.  A daily courier moved these materials and holds were filled quickly.  Latah patrons seemed to appreciate all this—the library’s already healthy circulation went up 8% in 2006-2007.

In November 2007 the pool of available books got even bigger.  Thanks to a grant to the Washington-Idaho Network of Libraries (WIN), Latah patrons are now able to place electronic holds on library materials at North Idaho College, the University of Idaho, the Coeur d’Alene public library, Kootenai-Shoshone Area libraries and more.  Basically, all the libraries operating under the WIN umbrella.

(For those who like the facts, WIN is a cooperative multi-type library consortium serving academic, public, school, and special libraries in the states of Washington and Idaho.  See the WIN website at www.wash-id.net.)

A system of courier services ensures that the books move between WIN libraries as quickly as possible.  The so-named WIN-Borrow service has survived a few months of testing and appears stable enough now for widespread use.

You may not think this service is revolutionary.  Books have always been available through a more elaborate and time-consuming interlibrary loan request process and they still are.  But for many people—especially those who like their independence online and feel confident about managing their due dates—this new service is a genuine, down-to-the-ground thrill.  Count me as one of them.  It’s like stretching an arm hundreds of miles to pull a book right off the shelf.

So how does the service work?  A combination of software, people and vans is the short answer.  All you need to know as our library patron is that it happens from within the current online catalog available at www.latahlibrary.org.

First look for the book you want in the VALNet catalog.  No point shipping things hundreds of miles if it’s on our own shelves.  However, if you can’t find it in VALNet, WIN-Borrow starts with just one small sideways step into someone else’s catalog.  Look at the bottom of your search screen for the phrase “Win Libraries”.  Click on the link and then pick from the drop down list of other WIN catalogs.

Pick the Northern Idaho Academic Library (NIAL) catalog and search several academic libraries, including those at the U of I, Lewis Clark State College and North Idaho College.  Or pick the public libraries of the Cooperative Information Network.

You can even—and this is truly great—search all the WIN catalogs at once.  Just hold down your shift key as you select the different catalogs.  Pick the catalog or combination of them you want, then follow essentially the same search and request process you use within the regular VALNet catalog.

And then, voila!—you’ve made a WIN-Borrow request.  Now you just wait for the book to arrive at your chosen pickup library.  If you change your mind, you have the same options for canceling your hold online as you do for your regular holds.

So what’s the bad news?  Well, it’s not so much bad as sobering.  You may have only three WIN-Borrow requests active at one time, nothing near the 25 item limit on VALNet materials.  Currently only books—no movies or audiobooks—are available through WIN-Borrow, and libraries may have restrictions on new books or special collections.

Here’s probably the most important caution though.  Don’t expect your friendly local librarian to alert you to due dates.  The way this software works causes the book to be invisible to your local librarian once you check it out.  It’s as if you got a card from the other library and checked their book out yourself—completely independent in many respects from your regular Latah or VALNet checkouts until something becomes delinquent.

The other thing that goes along with this software’s focus on privacy is that you need to initiate the WIN-Borrow requests yourself.  WIN-Borrow really hinges on patrons managing their library checkouts and holds online.

I hope WIN-Borrow sounds like something you’re interested in.  It took a lot of planning and negotiation to get libraries with different rules and service missions to agree on sharing their books and the WIN leaders deserve a huge round of applause.  They did it because communities and individuals are demonstrating an information hunger that is fueled as much as satisfied by the Internet.  Our library, like other WIN members, is committed to broadening its reach in order to satisfy that hunger.

For more information about WIN-Borrow, please visit the library’s website at www.latahlibrary.org.