A MULTI‐USER INTER‐LIBRARY LOANS SYSTEM FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF LANCASTER LIBRARY

Abstract

The flavour of the moment seems to be Inter‐Library Loans, with a spate of packages reaching the market place. Some of these are from commercial turnkey suppliers (e.g. AIM from Dawsons and TINLink from IME) others are the result of in‐house developments such as EXILE (described in the previous issue of VINE) and the package described here from University of Lancaster Library Computing. The University of Lancaster Library has had a computer‐based inter‐library loans operation since October 1985. The first system was based on an IBM PC/XT and was single‐user written in dBase III. However, in a department dealing with about 12,000 applications per year, it was found that the work flow was hindered because of congestion at the single keyboard. Therefore, in November 1986, the dBase III system was replaced with the current system, a multi‐user one, running under the PICK operating system. The system is one which handles the administration or housekeeping routines involved in the requests of loans from other organisations; it does not, so far, handle the lending of items from Lancaster, or whichever library is running the system, to other libraries. The early version, too, was tailored to handle the initial requests to BLDSC only, though the system does now include a menu option for requests to other locations (currently under development).