Mark Allcock

I will be giving a brief overview of OpenRS, the coalition of principles and platform. Donna Bacon from Mobius will be talking about their original goals, outcomes, and the current status, and then we'll get into the demos.

Tim Auger from EBSCO will talk about the patron facing features. Casey Henderson from knowledge integration will talk about DCB admin, the staff facing features. And then Richard Staunton-Mann, also from integrate knowledge integration, will talk about the OpenRS ILL application in FOLIO. And that, I do hope, will give us around maybe slightly less than ten to fifteen minutes of q and a, so I apologize for that.

Again, those of you here at the beginning will have seen this foundational principles. Key thing is that we are open to all types of libraries and all systems, and that is what you're going to see later on in this session.

I think I was just on this slide. Hopefully, this explained pretty much what I was saying anyway. These are the founder members and the founders council. We're very grateful to them for their sustained commitment for three and a half, maybe four years now, and it is their efforts and support that have got us to this place. And we're very proud to say that we will very soon be a full member of the Open Library Foundation and an SM LLC.

So that is good news.

So new stuff, what we haven't seen. So why don't we say OpenRS supports all types of resource sharing for all kinds of libraries? What does that really mean? Well, we talk here about DCB or direct consortial borrowing. You'll hear that term a lot, of course. It's what you might call wide area circulation or big circulation, and it really means that a patron from any kind of library in a consortia, an academic library, large academic or a small public, can borrow from anybody else in that consortium.

And so as we say, we're agnostic not agnostic of your system and agnostic of your type of library. Interlibrary loan allows for a looser connection between libraries, but it does essentially the same thing. Again, we're agnostic of what kind of library you are and agnostic of what kind of system you have as well. So that's the key takeaway from this slide.

And then document delivery, just to note here that we are working on DocDel at the moment in ILL. That's in beta with a commitment for current customers going live this year, and it's on the road map for direct or social borrowing as well. And I think I should have said, yes. This recording will be remain made available at the end of the session. I see three participants have raised their hands. If anybody can let me know if anything is wrong, please let me know.

And then just finally from me before I hand over to Donna, so what are we going to show you today? So on this slide, DCB locate second item on the left-hand side. That's what Tim is going to be looking at after Donna has finished speaking. And then DCB admin and admin for libraries is where Casey is going to spend his time. You can't see the DCB service, sadly, but you have views onto it from those applications.

And we'll also be referring to the ILS connectors, and it's those connectors for Alma, Polaris, Sierra, and FOLIO that allow libraries to stay in their native systems, a key part of what we're offering here.

Just to note at the bottom that cohort and a universal connector on the road map.

And, also, just to note in the bottom left-hand corner that there are services wrapped around OpenRS's DCB admin OpenRS's DCB, I should say.

Products, you know, product support, maintenance, hosting, and those things available from knowledge integration. We won't be talking about those today. We're just going to focus on the platform. But should you be wondering, just be aware that they are available.

So with that, I am now going to hand over to Donna from Mobius. Thank you.

Donna Bacon

Thank you, Mark.

I wanted to start off by just saying a little bit about who Mobius is.

We're a nonprofit library consortium based in Columbia, Missouri. We manage a FOLIO shared ILS with sixty-two academic libraries.

We have an additional nine standalone libraries, and by stand alone, I mean, they manage their own ILS.

We have Sierra, Polaris, our FOLIO libraries, and we soon will have an all in the library this summer. We have academic, public, and special libraries as well.

And we use OpenRS for resource sharing with all of our seventy-one libraries who are in Missouri, Kansas, Texas, Iowa, and Arkansas. So we are a regional multi type library consortium.

Whoops. You went too fast, Mark.

Why we chose why we chose OpenRS?

In 2022, we did an RFP for a new ILS and chose FOLIO, but we were also looking for a new resource sharing system.

And, we needed to find an open source system that was patron initiated and fully integrated into multiple ILSs. And EBSCO and Knowledge Integration's RFP response showed us a clear technical path to accomplishing the necessary enhancements to OpenRS and gave us confidence it could be achieved, which it was. OpenRS's architecture is based on a microservices approach, creating a more modern method to quickly add new capabilities.

Next slide. Our consortium is no longer tied to one vendor who controls the resource sharing software, its features, what ILSs it can connect to. EBSCO and knowledge integration committed to develop OpenRS to be fully integrated with disparate ILSs with the features that we required. We had a feature list that we asked them to adhere to, and they and they did and did a lot more than that, actually. They made a financial and development commitment to meet our time frame to go live with OpenRS by spring of 24, and this was in twenty twenty-two, which they did. Mobius believes that OpenRS offers more flexible opportunities to include a wider variety of ILX platform as the consortium continues to grow and evolve.

We're no longer, tied to that one vendor with just those that ILS system.

Where are we now? Well, we went live on June twelfth of 2024, so our anniversary is coming up very soon. We have seventy-one libraries, five public libraries, three special libraries, and sixty-three academic libraries.

At right now, we have nineteen million contributed bibs from all of our Mobius libraries. We have three Polaris, four Sierra, sixty-three Alma, and one soon to be on Alma sixty three FOLIO and one soon to be on Alma.

This was a necessary step forward, and, yes, we went through a lot of development, and that was a risky thing for us to do, but something that we felt was responsible and forward looking option that was available for us.

This decision was never about short term metrics or about statistics. It was about a long term stability, autonomy, and relevance. Our direction was clear. We were building a strong multi type library consortium that delivers seamless patron driven access to a shared catalog while using our collective scale to strengthen technology support, expand purchasing power, and operate more effectively as a unified organization.

That's not a step backward. It's a necessary step forward.

So we made a deliberate choice. We chose to put the consortium on a sustainable financial footing.

We chose platform independence so libraries can participate in a shared catalog without being locked into a proprietary system. We chose to invest in modern, flexible, and viable technology.

So now we're looking for new OpenRS partners, which we already have coming on board soon, and we're thinking of new enhancements for OpenRS instead of looking at development.

Mark Allcock

Thank you, Donna.

And now we will get into the demo sessions, and I'm going to hand over to Tim.

These demo sessions, as I said, will start off with DCP supporting patrons seamlessly with minimal staff intervention. Then we're going to look at the admin services that make life easier for consortial staff and library staff, and then how the OpenRS ILO applications enable smaller libraries to engage in resource sharing with other libraries, large and small, and indeed other consortia.

So in that note, we will hand over to Tim.

And I think you want to then I'll stop sharing, Tim, and you can go to your demonstration.

Tim Auger

Thank you, Mark. Let me go ahead and share. Alright.

Okay. That's not the one I wanted to share. Let me get the other. Sorry about that. Seems like we're hitting every speed bump along the way. Alright. Okay. Let me try sharing again. There we go. Okay. Can everyone see my screen?

Mark Allcock

Yes.

Tim Auger

Alright. So just need to move the tools out of the way. Okay. Good. Okay. So, one of the major components of OpenRS DCB is a physical union catalog comprised of bibliographic records sourced from the member library systems.

The OpenRS unique catalog is fronted by EBSCO's LOCATE, the patron application for search and placing requests for consortial resources. There are, excuse me. There are a couple of different ways to access the union catalog, and the first one I'm going to show you is pass through. So, typically, when a patron is unable to, find a resource, the my apologies, the just lost my screen for a second. My apologies.

As I said, there's a couple of ways to access the union catalog. Typically, when a patron is unable to find it in their own library catalog, a pass through link is embedded within discovery results. This is true not just in not just in EBSCO's suite of, discovery and opaque, applications, but also pretty much across all ILSs. So I'm going to search for an item here.

Image. Excuse me. Do a search in a local catalog. We have a couple of different ways to pass through. One is if I don't find any results, that I'm looking for, then I can click on the Mobius link, and it'll take me directly to Mobius using this search term and keyword search. If it's if it's something that looks like something I might want, let's say that this item isn't available even though it says it does. You can click this at Mobius, and it'll re-execute the search and search for that particular title.

Let it go all the way through. Let's go with the first, which is really pass through, which is effectively equivalent to a direct search. So what's happening at the local library level is there's a search. And then, as I noted earlier, there's a pass through link. You click on the pass through link, and it uses the keyword index and the corresponding terms that you use to search.

Okay. Also, you can go directly. Many library catalogs have the Mobius Union catalog or that is, OpenRS Locate, embedded in, in their catalogs and also in library pages. So I searched for a title called the flower as image.

I'm going to click, on that, title because what I can from what I can see, this is the only one that that exists. And when I click through, I get to a detailed display screen, which has, of course, the type of format, the book title, the contributors published, and then you also find your way right down here next to the place hold button, how many copies are available. If you scroll down a little bit further, you get a list of availability and locations. As you can imagine, if this is a popular title or just a title that exists in multiple libraries, you're just going to see a line for each in a row for each one of those libraries, corresponding physical location, and the call number.

From here, it looks like this is the item that I want, so I'm going to place hold.

I will be if I have not already signed in, it's going to prompt me to select my institution. My institution for today is St. Louis County Library, and then I'm going to enter my credentials.

We support both SAML SSO and, patron account sorry. Also, credentials for patron accounts that are stored in the library's ILS, such as, using credentials such as barcode and PIN.

Here, I have the option to choose a pickup location I'm sorry, a pickup library and a pickup location. So you can see some of the member libraries in here that are open to having patrons pick up their material at their corresponding library and corresponding pickup locations. Today, for our purposes, I won't show that feature, but I will select the pickup location of my home library.

Alright. And hold has been placed. So from here, I'm going to take a look at the patron record.

And, if you give me just one second, we have the patron record. We have patron record already has a couple of items checked out.

And I believe let's just make sure it's refreshing the screen. I believe that we've confirmed oh, I got logged out.

And you can see that we have the request here, the flower as image.

Alright. So the next step in the process, besides checking the patron's account, is to move to, FOLIO where the item sorry. The request has been, made. I'm going to refresh this screen.

So this is FOLIO's request application where staff users view and manage requests, print pick slips, and more.

I won't be going through the pick slip printing today, but I do want to show you that here we have, the flowers image. And it might be a little bit small to see. Let me increase that. And then you can see on the right-hand side in FOLIO, requests.

You can see the title. You can see the item stage, the item status, which is paged, and that it's not yet open and filled. You also have some patron or requester information down here. That can be enabled or disabled by a consortium.

You can either push the, the patron's name and their corresponding barcode or for greater privacy, just the barcode itself.

Okay. So from here, oh, sorry. One more one more point. For in FOLIO, you can produce, an integrated paging list with both local and open RS requests or have them produce a separate list. So with the page in hand, a page slip in hand, the patron goes to the stacks and retrieves the item, and then it's brought here. I don't have the barcode. Just one second. Okay. Here we go. Going to enter the barcode. Going to check-in the item.

The check-in of the item puts this item into transit. You can print a transit slip.

And you can see that it's stated in transit and is going to, bit of encoding here, but, effectively, St. Louis County libraries at the Daniel Boone branch.

And that, requires a little work on the back end, meaning that, in the back end in the background, there is a polling system that's checking each of the libraries periodically and automatically, set about once per hour to check for the state of the item of, of each given request.

And what's what that's going to do is it's going to pick up that change in status and then synchronize it with the patrons or the borrower's library. So let's go ahead and take a look there and refresh the patron screen, and you can see that the item is now shipped. Alright.

So now we've had a little shipping time that's passed.

Maybe the next day or two, it arrives. I'm sorry. And I'm going to oh, sorry. This was not expected. I'm going to have to log back into Polaris.

Not sure why that is, but let me try again. Another speed bump. Just get into. Alright. Alright. There we go. Oh goodness. It keeps switching back, and I'm not sure why it does, but I think this will work. My apologies. Just going waiting for the alright. There we go. We're getting back into the system.

As I said, shipping time has passed. Not quite long enough. Okay. Good. We're into the training system.

Going to shout out to Saint Louis County Libraries for allowing us to use their training system throughout the entirety of the development and ongoing into production.

Okay. So let's move forward with the, the check-in at Polaris. So that'll be the next step. The item has arrived at its pickup location.

The item is going to be scanned in. It's going to fill a request, and I'm intentionally going through some of these a little more quickly because I realized I used up a bunch of time. And here we go. We've got the check-in completed.

Hooray. This means that, the item is now on the hold shelf.

And as soon as I synchronize, the back-end process, which again is happening automatically for our purposes, is being done manually today, these status will then be updated at the supply and library. So let me just quickly go back there, go into requests, and we're going to take a quick look at oops. Sorry. Need to okay. The flowers image, you can see that the item was paged and is now status awaiting request.

Okay. So we're going to flip back to the patron's library, and we're going to check out the item to the patron. Okay? And so employers asleep.

Checkout is really that straightforward and that simple. I'm going to check out the item to the patron, and you can see a message for the patron. And the checkout was successful, and you can go into Polaris' Leap and see the details of the item record, and you can also get into circulation information as well just like any other item that circulates from, your own collection.

And so let's see. I'm going to also manually do the polling. This is going to, I'm just going to show you on the patron side that, their corresponding item is now in hand, and it is checked out to them.

We also have an update for the I'll make this really quickly that has moved on to checked out. Let me just refresh the screen. So, again, back at the supplier library, we're keeping this, the status in sync. The item is now checked out.

Okay. Let's move on now, to, sort of the final couple of steps, which is going back to Polaris to check-in the item. So the patron, again, we've transcended some time here in quick order. We're going to check-in the item that the patron has returned, and it's now back in transit to the borrowing library.

And from here, it's just a matter of check-in. And, again, we're accelerating through time again. We're going to take this item, and we're going to check it in here.

And the item is now available. The patron is now free of the obligation, or they actually were once the item was checked in in the Polaris system, and that is it.

Thank you very There's one other sorry. There's one other slide. I'll stop sharing, and you can share. Yeah. Go ahead. Just quickly get through that.

I'm basically going to leave this as a takeaway, because we're low on time.

So this is a capabilities overview. I didn't hit on some of these topics. So just really quickly, we also support patron cancellations, renewals. You can pick up the member libraries I showed earlier.

You have walk up borrowing and staff requesting. I think Casey's going to show at least one of those. And then you also have the ability to re to have a request only library or borrow only library or both or neither. It just depends on the state That library, you have, conditions that happen every day, that may result, like, in a library closure and some or a branch closure.

We need to close that one down and not allow the not allow patrons to request from that library. We have full circulation integration as was mentioned earlier. There is ongoing harvest of library collection changes that happens every couple of minutes or to an hour. It depends on how busy the system is.

Automated dededuplication and instance clustering, we could spend an entire session on that. We won't today. We'll have real time availability checking for making sure that this item is actually representative of its inventory. Request routing is optimized really for speed of delivery. There's automated routing of unfilled requests, so you don't have to go back in and push a button to have the system go find another item. And then, also, what Casey's going to get into are administrative applications, both for the central office and also for the library. And with that, I'll turn it over.

Mark Allcock

Thank you, Tim. Casey, let me know if you want to go to another slide after this one, please.

Casey Henderson

Let's just see that first slide, please, Mark.

So what is DCB admin? We love talking about it. It's our staff application for the central office staff, the consortium staff. Also, is a modern web application that helps these folks manage their OpenRS experience all in one place.

It's built with accessibility in mind. It's built to be usable, albeit a more pleasant experience, and it provides lots of cool features, such as circuit porting and configuration management that save folks time and money. But we could talk about it all day, but let's show it. So I am going to share my screen now, and let's have a look at what that experience is like.

And here we go.

So I hope you're all seeing the lovely folks at Mobius' staging environment, DCB admin. So what we see first, as all folks do in DCB admin, is the patron request page, and this is a grid of every patron request that exists within the system. It's got lots of lovely filters as you can see here, and that list is going to get even bigger, I promise you, as we go further. And you can produce circulation reports that to pretty much anything you'd like. So let's have a look at a circulation report that will show us all of the requests that have been in a certain state for thirty days, which I think we can all agree is too long.

And here we go. So here's our circulation report after those filters. And what can we do with it? Well, we can export it, into a CSV file like so, and there's our CSV file. Now I could show you many, many combinations of such of such files, but I'm going to go because we're little bit stretched for time, I'm going to go to the next part of the OpenRS DCB admin experience.

And what we can do here is we can see, the request that Tim has just demonstrated. Thank you, Tim, for that lovely demonstration.

And we can see, I think it's over one hundred points of data just about this one page from request. So we can see where it's come from, and if the folks have opted in, you see some contact information in case anything is needs to be discussed. You can do a manual check for updates, which is what Tim was talking about when the automatic polling isn't quick enough for you. So if we do that now, you will see that this request will have reached its finalized state. There you go.

And you can also if the request were in trouble, you'd be able to clean it up, which would let you try again. So lots of lots of data points here, lots of options for troubleshooting.

And on the subject of troubleshooting, here is our DCB admin audit log. And this I'm going to go into all of this because it's pretty long, but you can see the exact cycle of the request. Everything that's happened, all of the check for updates that we've done, as well as all the changes in the system as you go throughout the system following this request's journey to a happy finalized state, which is here.

And one DCP admin isn't just about looking after your circulation activity. It's also about managing configuration for the libraries. So let's go and take a look at what a consortium administrator would see on the library management screen. What they see first is lots and lots of information about said library and what groups is it part of.

You can see this one is part of the Polaris group, which is useful if you have a multi type consortium. You can see the some of the settings that Tim mentioned earlier on this page, whether this can they can supply or borrow, how many loans their patients are allowed to have from OpenRS, and you can see a page that our friends at Mobius are very familiar with, which is, the mappings page. So from here, you can add new mappings. You can change mappings.

You can do pretty much whatever you want. So I'm going to add this new mapping very quickly.

It's a bit nonsensical. I'm going to say that my reason for adding it is the town hall. And there, you can see, oh, that didn't work. Should have done that. There's already one for it. Let's try that one again with six.

My apologies. You can see the path the process for creating a new mapping, say you have a new item type that needs the DCB needs to know about is relatively simple and still not working. Typical. And there's lots of other options for adding mappings and dealing with mappings that should go throughout the application.

And there's also the option if you need to do bulk imports, you can import them via a CSV file like so.

And the last thing I'm going to look at in DCP admin is the shared index view. This is like a little discovery system within the DCP admin application. And what it lets you do is place staff requests on behalf of patrons and also see everything that's in your index, is quite a lot in the case of Mobius. And what you can do from this page is see everything that's being clustered together. As Tim mentioned, some of the bib records have an explanation for the clustering that's taken place, which you can see here, lots which identifiers, which bib records have been matched and what identifiers, what level of confidence, etcetera, and lots more that we do not have time for today. So that is the DCB admin application for consortia, and now I'm going to quickly move over to the DCB admin for libraries application for our library staff. And hopefully folks can now see DCB admin for libraries for our friends at Saint Louis County Library.

Mark Allcock

Yes. We can.

Casey Henderson

Wonderful. So this application came about because Open Ice Libraries wanted to participate more in the resource sharing experience, and DCP admin had a lot of use from consortial staff, and we thought, well, can we provide a similar experience for our library staff, OpenRS libraries across the consortium? And what we decided was to produce a different version of DCP admin focused on the core tasks for library staff. So when they log in, they see some information about our library.

As you can see, this is Polaris library. They see some stats. They see these leaderboards, which are part of a new statistics module that's coming down the line, and they see the, the requests, but only for their consortium. So exactly the same as everybody else, in the sense that it's the same experience as consortia staff get, but it's limited just to Saint Louis County.

So all the circulation activity is there, the same patient request page, the same export options as you can see there, and the same filters, which You can see that's, again, a big list we're adding to all the time to help folks produce the circulation reports that matter the most to them. And what I wanted to do, as well as part of this demonstration is show a feature that we're really proud of, and that is the staff requesting process. So when placing a staff request, you have two options.

You can place a staff request on any available item within the consortium, or you could place a walk-up request, for an available item at your consortium. Not at your library, not consortium. I should I do apologize. So a walk-up request is special because in powers, patrons visiting patrons from other open ice libraries can walk into your library, take a book off the shelf, and the item can be checked out instantly, to that patron, all within DCB. So everyone in a way, everyone is a member of the consortium in a real true fashion. They can walk in, take those books off the shelf, and all the staff have to do is go to DCB Adventure Libraries to process that transaction.

And I am going to demonstrate exactly what I mean with a record that has a great name. I'm a big fan of this one. It's got a lot of use in the test record department, and you can see as well that we have lots more advanced options for filtering, etcetera. But I thought I'd just keep it simple in the interest of time. So let's say I am now a library staff member at St. Louis County and someone from a different library has come to me and said, okay.

I'd like to take out dog on a bike, and I have I could have processed that if they had given me the barcode with a quick walk-up request, but to show the filtering ex filtering options, let's take a look at the standard approach. So two options here. Right? First, I could have placed a staff request, but I don't need to do that because we have this at Saint Louis County, and we can get that to the person straight away. We don't need to worry about transit. We don't need to worry about all the other stages. Let's do it as a walk-up request.

So let's say that my visiting patron is from Calvary University, wherever they are, right at the top, of course, and I know their barcode, ease me, and I can then select which branch is processing this, and I can select which, edition of or which item for dog and a bike. There's quite a few actually. It's pretty cool. I can even add little notes.

So let's put hello, and then I can send my request away, and DCB will go away and place that request for me. It will then attempt to instantly check that item out. In practice, because of the systems involved, this will usually take about thirty seconds. So while we're waiting for this, the other things about DCP and Flabs, it's worth mentioning.

You have exactly the same audit log options, so libraries are now able to troubleshoot just like a consortium can. You have the same filter options. You also have the ability to see what records you're contributing to the consortium. And as you saw a little bit of earlier, you'll but where Ally was getting more and more statistics.

So they can really see the value they're getting from open eyes. They can participate, and they can enjoy a true open eyes experience on a new level. And we are fetching a due date now, and you can see the due date is Wednesday, June the third, and we can now go and have a look at said request for this fantastic test record. You can see my little request note down here, and you can see the order log.

But let's not go too much into that because it's time for me to hand over to my good friend, Richard. Thank you all for your time.

Mark Allcock

Thank you, Casey. That was great. Richard, do you want to look at some slides first before you get into the demo?

Richard Staunton-Mann

Yes, please. Yeah. If I can have the first slide, that'd be great.

Mark Allcock

Let's do that. And then we'll go past that. And this one, I think you want, isn't it?

Richard Staunton-Mann

Yes, please. Thank you.

Lovely. So thank you, Casey. And so we spoke about what DCP is. It's for learning items in a union catalog, free flowing requests where there's an understanding agreement between two libraries.

But not every request is between two libraries with a reciprocal agreement. Some require a bit more nuance or investigation from someone with domain knowledge. Some might be missing information altogether, and some could just be have special licenses or copyrights on them. So OpenRS wants to focus on not one size fits all approach, ensuring that any type of resource sharing can be supported.

And that's OpenRS ILL is a step towards that goal.

It's focus on a bit more freedom and flexibility to give other options of ways that you can borrow and lend items. A consortium is a master class of organizational skill, but not all libraries do have reciprocal agreements between each other. And so OpenRS ILL focuses on a standards driven communication approach. This helps build bridges a bit quicker because you're able to speak the same language.

Some of these the OpenRS ILL app is within the FOLIO ecosystem and runs alongside the other FOLIO apps, but it can also be run as a standalone.

And we're currently compatible with Sunflower FOLIO release the Sunflower release of FOLIO.

The standards we're compatible with as well are twenty seventeen and twenty-one ISO eighteen sixty-six for interlibrary loan messages, Open URL for accepting paid for request from a discovery service. Set thirty-nine fifty for searching external catalogs or availability in holdings, and n sit for updating your local LMS circulation.

Right. If you could please, Mark, let me share my screen.

Mark Allcock

Over to you.

Richard Staunton-Mann

Thank you. So hopefully, you should be able to see that now.

Mark Allcock

Yes.

Richard Staunton-Mann

So this is the ILL application.

It's made up of two main applications. So we'll start by discussing a little bit about how ILL works. Works on a more similar to a more fundamental interlibrary loan approach. So you are searching for live holdings availability.

You are then creating a rotor based on that any items that might be held in the those live items and holdings.

And then you are asking them one by one if they are able to supply using ISO eighteen sixty-six messaging.

Now when you're trying to search for the live holdings availability, there's two ways that you could search within ILL anyway. So you've got set thirty-nine fifty where you are searching a external libraries catalog server, or there's the union catalog which is created by DCB in this case but could be created by anyone.

So we'll go over to the directory app. Now this app is where you would store any pieces of information about any libraries that you want to request from and to.

So it's contact information, it's address information, what services they might offer. So this one, Kira is set up to offer ISO eighteen sixty-six twenty-one, and any lending preferences. So if there's a loan to borrow ratio that is particularly needed or if there's any lending types and if there's a lender of last resort tool.

Now what we do for z thirty-nine fifty is searching external databases.

And these this is the way it builds the router, but you don't want to bombard everyone in your resource sharing network with loads of requests all the all the time onto theirs at the in a fifty service. So you want to think about pockets of institutions to search first and then go through a queue of those pockets.

So one particular way that we've come up with this, thinking about this, and an example that works quite well is proximity.

So you could have a group within five miles, and you could have a group, say, within ten miles or whatever you want to put as your distinguishing factor. It's very broad and open, these groups.

What this allows you to do is second off groups into a particular category and then order those groups in a group queue. So I'll attempt to find the item in the first group and if it doesn't manage to find it in the first group, it'll go to the next one in the group queue.

And we can have a look. There's a nice search and sort here which allows you to go through any institutions that are in your directory and have a search for them. And you can do that via their name or, in fact, any of the lines on the address. So here, that's the postcode or the street address, and you're able to add those.

You can save and close.

Another way that you can search to find information, which I've alluded to, is the shared index. Now this one is pointing at the DCB shared index, and you can click here and you can see the life the bibliographic data.

And if we scroll down, we can see all the holdings, and we can see if they're unavailable or available.

Now when ILL is creating a rotor for items if it's using the shared index, it will look at the availability. We'll also look at any loan lending preferences that we took looked at in the directory's app. They'll look at if you have any relation to them, if it's managed you're managing the same managed by the same institution at all.

And it will build a router based on that those criteria.

So I can go from this page here, and I can click through to a new request. And it'll populate that new request with any pieces of information that were there in the bib record.

Just fill out the patron information, and we'll go save and place.

This takes me to the acromean action screen. So I can see here that, yes. I'm the borrower of the environmental science. It's going to the science library and the actions that are available and the details. So you've got the patron details that will be viewable on the requester side, but not the supplier side for obvious reasons.

Any information about requesting library, requesting user, citation information, and then the road to the it was created when trying to find this item. So we'll go through each of these items in this list, each of these libraries in this list and attempt to find the item. It will ask them if they want to supply it. If they won't, then it will move on to the next one.

And then the full audit log of everything, every status change, or anything that's happened within this this request. You can also see here, if you did want to get some more details from the other side, you can send, I say, six two six message between two sides, the borrowing and the lender.

And so we'll switch over.

Now as an set this account up as an administration user so I can switch between different institutions. So I know that that this request went to the science library. I'll move over to the supplying side, and we can see here the new request has come in with one notification to say that there's an unread message.

The unread messages myself. And I can see here that I will supply, cannot supply, or unconditional.

So the conditional could be all sorts of things, and this this is an adaptable list. But this is the list that we put together in for this demonstration.

Mark Allcock

Richard, sorry to interrupt.

We've about a minute left. We we're running relatively short of time.

Richard Staunton-Mann

That's fine.

So it will go through you can put your will supply. So I'll just fill out some details.

And you can print your pull slip. Now your pull slip is a amalgamation of all the slips that should be involved within resource sharing condensed down into one slip to try and save on as much printing as possible and try and make it as streamlined as possible.

And I'll also talk a bit about other requesting streams that we have.

So as well as ISO eighteen sixty-six messages, not everyone will be able to accept ISO eighteen sixty six.

And so we wanted to come up with email requesting. So this is a format that you can send an email over to a particular holder of item with various bits of information that might be needed, any contact information. It's wrapped in the patient that can be added, and then you're able to complete the steps within the request. So I have okay. Quickly back to environmental science.

So we have this request here at one nine seven. I have an email here which is of the same request that I sent earlier. I click this link.

It's showing that it's been successful. And then when I go back to here, it now says expects to supply. So on the borrowing side, it would appear as nothing has changed. We're on the requesting side, it would all be done through email.

The next one we want to do off the back of this is digital lending. So having your items go through that to your normal workflow would go through as a very similar process inside the ILL app, except when it came to shipping, it would instead ship it to our document delivery service where your patron or the requesting library would agree to the any terms that you've placed on the item, and then they'd be able to download that item. But this is very much in a sort of a beta prototyping stage. And I'll leave it there for now, give us plenty of time for questions.

Mark Allcock

That looked really good. I'll go back just to here.

I believe that there are a lot of questions, but I can't see them at the moment. So I don't know if Rachel or anyone who can see those questions can pull some out, and we'll do our best to answer them.

We will we are happy to go a bit longer if you are to try and address some of these. And as I said, we will get back to you if we're unable to do so in the session.

Rachel, what do we have?

Rachel Fadlon

Good questions. Let's see. Does the OpenRS app for FOLIO print address labels for shipping?

Tim Auger

OpenRS DCV leverages the circulation application of the library services platform to produce paging lists and any sort of shipping information.

Rachel Fadlon

Thank you.

So let's see. I'm trying to find some questions here. So the question is, does this just use regular check-in rather than ILL check-in in Polaris?

Tim Auger

Yes. Just regular check-in. What's happening in the back end is that we're creating temporary bibs and items, and those are then acted upon as if they're just any other circulation transaction, except the configuration is what supports the policies for OpenRS. But it follows the same workflow and leverages the existing circulation application capabilities to perform the core circulation functionality.

Rachel Fadlon

Excellent. And for Sierra libraries, does the RTAC remove the need for the traditional virtual record used by InReed?

Tim Auger

I saw that. I should have explained exactly what RTAC was. RTAC is what is used when, you're looking at a detailed display of the item and you have the items availability sorry, the availability and locations of items. That's when we pull the library systems that have corresponding items and pull that data back, in real time.

So that's what our tech is used for, and it does not obviate the need for the creation of temporary records in each of the systems.

Rachel Fadlon

Thanks, Tim. And, Mark, if you're sharing, if you might don't mind stop sharing so we can see all the panelists, that would be great.

Is it possible to add an option to pick up electronic item on the request form where you choose an option for delivery?

Richard Staunton-Mann

So that's the digital lending stream that we're looking to add for ILL. It's something that we want to do for DCB, but because of the sort of reciprocal lending and the free-flowing nature of DCB, it's a bit more of a head scratcher on how, best to implement it. But, yeah, in in ILL, there's going to be the option to select your service type to dictate, yeah, if you want it to be a copy nonreturnable.

Rachel Fadlon

Thank you. And we've got a question. Currently, at DPL, our consortium items are put in a separate tab in Polaris. Is there a way they're tagged when using OpenRS?

Tim Auger

It's not in a separate tab. It's treated, very similarly to just a standard inventory item in your Polaris library collection.

So it's not a separate tab. It's integrated within the standard circulation, request. And there are elements you might not have caught on to it. There are elements of the because we are moving so quickly. There are elements, within the record to distinguish it as an OpenRS item.

Rachel Fadlon

Thank you. With OpenRS, staff would not see what's paged in Polaris. Is that correct? Would they need to log in to OpenRS?

Tim Auger

Oh, that's a tough question. Because, logging in to OpenRS is really if we're talking about the patron signing in to the OpenRS locate, that really just gives the ability of the patron to make a request.

But if we're talking about, in the paging list in Polaris, it's going to go into that, into that same paging list that you, create for your local items.

Rachel Fadlon

Thanks, Tim.

We use Evergreen as a consortium with fifty-two different library systems. Each of those fifty-two systems currently manage their own ILL requests. Would they still be treated as fifty-two different systems even though they share an ILS?

Tim Auger

Well, we haven't developed an adapter for Evergreen, but we would treat each of the low I assume that going forward with development, we would treat each of the individual libraries as individual agencies within a group of libraries. So, yeah, that's, we would treat we would do the same that we do with Polaris and with Sierra and with FOLIO and Alma to treat the individual libraries as libraries.

Rachel Fadlon

Thank you. And we our panelists have agreed to stay on for just a few more minutes because we have so many questions. We're going to stay on for a few more minutes to try to get through some of these. Thank you all for submitting these.

FOLIO is very strict about creating features for pickup points. Will the checkout period default to the pickup point, or will it default to the Gwila reciprocal ILL agreement time frame?

Tim Auger

I don't know who that's for. Is that for me or for you, Richard? Is this for DCB or for ILL?

Richard Staunton-Mann

I think that's for DCB.

Tim Auger

Yeah. I think so too. Yeah. Okay. Can you repeat the question?

Rachel Fadlon

Absolutely. FOLIO is very strict about creating features for pickup points.

Tim Auger

Yeah.

Rachel Fadlon

Will the checkout period default to the pickup point, or will it default to the Gwila reciprocal ILL agreement time frame?

Tim Auger

The it's always going to be based on policy. So it is individually controlled by the circulation systems.

Well, in this case, with FOLIO, the service points that are set up. So there are separate, service points that are automatically generated when a request is placed for each pickup location. So that's, you know, when we looked at the check-in all the way back at the beginning of the process within FOLIO to trigger the hold, that's when you saw the virtual service point, listed just after the in-transit message, for, after check-in.

Rachel Fadlon

Thank you. Are there different levels of access for staff in OpenRS?

Casey Henderson

This is a great question. So my demonstration, if DCP having for libraries, I had to speed up a little bit. So the quick answer, yes.

Different levels of access for staff. One is requesting only mode for guest workers, student workers, etcetera. Those guys just process the staff request, the walk-up request. They don't see anything else.

And the other level is the one you saw today. That is for your library administrators who can have all the cool features at least we have in libraries has. But, yes, two key modes. Didn't get time to show up today.

We can absolutely talk more about that at some other time.

Rachel Fadlon

Okay. I'm going to try to get maybe two more questions in here. So are those temporary bib records cleaned up by OpenRS after they're returned, or does the ILL administrator need to do that separately?

Tim Auger

Yeah. That's a great question. I wish I'd mentioned at the end of the transaction. Yes. It these all get cleaned up automatically.

Rachel Fadlon

Well, that was easy. Okay. We're going to take one last question.

How does OpenRS handle libraries that have anonymized patron data like Alma, or will all libraries' patron data be available in this new connection regardless of what ILS a library is on?

Tim Auger

Yeah. There's it it is just the patron's record. And the depending on you know, it doesn't matter what kind of authentication you use, whether it's, like, pin a barcode or whether you're using it using a SAML based SSO, hitting the institution's, IDP.

Either way, it works, and it all refers back to the patron record in the library system. So whether it's anonymized or not, like, OpenRS doesn't really care. It's really just acted upon the transactions and assume that there is a way to well, we know there is a way to check out in in, Alma even with anonymized patrons.

Rachel Fadlon

Alright. And that was our last question. Mark, anything you'd like to do to conclude?

Mark Allcock

Yes. Other than just to say thank you to all the presenters, for doing what they did today. It was a fantastic demonstration. Apologies for any technical glitches at the beginning.

If we didn't get to your question, we will do our best to follow-up afterwards. Lots of really great questions that I could see actually in the end.

You will receive a recording of this video or a session in the next week or so and do have a look at our website that you can see the details there. There is new information there and updates that are available in the news, or do get in touch via info at open r s dot org. And thank you very much everyone for your attendance and have a great day.