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ISO ILL : Using

What you need to know about using ISO ILL

Not all ISO ILL system vendors have completed testing with the OCLC ILL service. Refer to the Interoperability testing page for a list of vendors and their testing status.

Not all OCLC ILL service features are supported by all ISOILL systems. Contact your vendor to determine whether their system supports:

  • ILL Fee Management (IFM) for borrowing and lending fees
  • ILL Direct Request

After you are profiled as an ISO ILL site, only new OCLC ILL activity will show in your ISO ILL system. You will need to continue checking and updating your OCLC ILL Message File on a regular basis until all previous requests are completed. This will require you to run 2 ILL systems for a period of time. As a visual reminder, when you are viewing one of your ISOILL system requests in OCLC through Passport, there will be a message at the top of the screen saying you must update this record using your ISOILL system.

General:
You may continue to use all OCLC ILL service features in Passport or the OCLC ILL Web interface as before: searching and viewing ILL, NAD, and bibliographic records; creating and editing Custom Holdings and Constant Data records; and viewing the Request History for an ILL record for Reasons for No and Direct Request profile information. You are only blocked from updating requests. You may also use the ILL MicroEnhancer to download your Message File, you will receive errors messages for any Review, Pending, Cond/Pend, and Retry/Pend records due to the In Process updating command that is issued during the download process.

Lending:
As soon as OCLC installs the ISOILL profile for your OCLC symbol, all new Pending requests to you as a lender will be sent to your ISOILL system and will need to be handled in your ISOILL system. Some ISO ILL systems may send requests from 'unknown' or new borrowers to a different processing queue. Check with your system vendor to verify how these 'unknown requestor' records are handled. Anything for which you are the OCLC lender prior to the profile install will need to be updated in OCLC. This includes requests created with you in the lender string before you were profiled. These requests will continue to show up in your Pending file on OCLC and will need to be updated on OCLC.

Borrowing:
All new requests to OCLC lenders will need to be created in your ISOILL system and managed in your ISOILL system. Any borrowing requests created in OCLC prior to your profile install will need to be updated in OCLC. You may continue to create requests in OCLC using the Passport software or the OCLC ILL Web Interface, those requests will not appear in your ISOILL system and must be updated directly in OCLC.

Using your system with the OCLC ILL service

Lending:
Do not use the status Will Send or Will Supply when responding to OCLC Borrowing requests through your ISOILL system. This status is not accepted by the OCLC ILL service. Use Shipped when responding to requests you fill.

Do not use Conditional Reply if a borrower's request bibliographic data is wrong or incomplete. When the borrower responds Yes and edits the appropriate bib field, the changed data is not sent with the 'Conditional Reply Yes' ISO ILL message. Just answer No and give the Unfilled reason "Not found as cited."

Borrowing:
When requesting items from your ISOILL system to the OCLC ILL service, you must include one of the following data elements: Service level, NeedBefore or Expiry date value. You must also fill out the Title, Verified (sometimes called Source), and Ship To fields for your request to be accepted by the OCLC ILL service.

Changing your Server address

OCLC uses TCP/IP to communicate the ISOILL messages to your system. When your system is profiled, the domain and port of your ISO ILL server is coded to your symbol. If you change your server address, messages will be mis-routed. You will need to notify OCLC before you change your server address. Contact ISOILL_Interop@oclc.org to change the profiling for your system. For a period of time, messages will be sent to both addresses so you will need to maintain the former address until all current requests are updated.