Unmediated Borrowing from Outside Institutions (URSA)
Background
For a number of years the MIT Libraries have wanted to participate in a cooperative borrowing agreement that enables appropriate members of the MIT community to borrow from the book collections of partnering institutions directly, without staff mediation. This has not been possible to date because the Aleph system used by MIT has been incompatible with the URSA (Universal Resource Sharing Application) software from Dynix. URSA serves as the middle-ware application that creates a virtual catalog of shared resources, and interacts with library circulation systems to enable user-initiated, unmediated borrowing of physical materials from the collections of other institutions. With the upcoming Aleph upgrade we believe the technical obstacles to providing this service will be removed.
Justification
Implementing unmediated borrowing from outside institutions will provide many benefits:
- Create a richer universe of print resources available to MIT community.
- Increase user self-sufficiency.
- Improve access to print resources.
- Provide alternate options to recall/hold for obtaining high-demand library-owned resources
- Improve speed of delivery of non-MIT materials.
- Enable inter-institutional resource sharing with reduced per-item transaction costs.
Charge
- Provide an analysis to inform the decision on whom to partner with:
a) Evaluate potential partners
b) Gather data about current activity, performance, and policies of existing cooperative agreements
c) Describe costs and benefits associated with partnership options - Provide an analysis of the policies and procedures that are affected
by the project and recommend changes where appropriate.
a) Coordinate efforts of appropriate PS groups to identify internal policy issues, and recommend necessary changes to enable and allow participation.
b) Coordinate efforts of appropriate PS groups to identify workflow issues, and recommend necessary changes to enable and allow participation.
- Identify the technical, logistical, and cost challenges to be overcome,
and the required steps necessary to resolve them.
a) Identify and work with appropriate staff to analyze, recommend, test, and resolve the following issues: - Assuming positive outcomes of the above analyses, implement unmediated
borrowing from outside institutions based on approved recommendations.
a) Determine if existing project team needs to be amended and make appropriate recommendations if so
b) Develop project plan and timeline for implementation
i) URSA and Aleph interoperability
ii) Authentication and Login
iii) User interface
b) Investigate URSA interoperability with both Illiad and SFX
c) Identify costs related to:
i) Software acquisition and maintenance
ii) Network participation costs
iii) Delivery and shipping costs
iv) Staffing
A project timeline for the analysis and recommendations will be developed and presented to PSLG for review by September 30, 2006.
Membership & Reporting Lines
Members: Christine Quirion (chair), Howard Silver, Pat Page, Lacy Crews, Rich Wenger.
Group reports to PSLG.