Library Notes

As of January 1, 2006, the Galter Health Sciences Library is no longer charging faculty, staff or students for interlibrary loan (ILL) requests. These users need not conserve their 20 free requests per year. Library staff decided to make this change based upon feedback in the LibQUAL+ survey conducted last year when users indicated they were unhappy with the charges. We have also dropped our fees for literature searches for the above mentioned groups.

Since the library is no longer changing for ILLs, we will no longer offer the option of only getting an item from Evanston. If an item is not available in Evanston we will route the request to another library outside the Northwestern University system.

The library is also implementing a new ILL management system. Previously the library used a homegrown system developed over five years ago. Staff faced the choice of going with a commercially available system or rewriting the code for our local system. A commercial product was selected and the staff are transitioning to this system while trying to preserve the functionality that our old system provided our users. ILL requests may be a bit slower for the next few months as the bugs are worked out of the new system, so please bear with us as we make the transition.