With very little notice, libraries around the world began closing their doors in early 2020 to protect users and staff from COVID-19.

This unprecedented decision left some libraries scrambling to find ways to continue library services with staff working from home. Library staff already committed to cloud-based systems had the easiest time shifting to working from home. Several resource sharing librarians spoke to us about how Tipasa helped them maintain ILL services during this period, ensuring their users never lost access to the information they need.

The Assistant Director at Daemen College’s library, Kara McGuire, knows how much students value the library. “It’s the place they always want to go to study,” she said. “Even on snow days!” Closing the library because of COVID-19 has been difficult for the campus community. But Kara continued to provide students with needed resources through Tipasa. She has maintained her ILL fulfillment rate and turnaround times by supplying e-resources and scans. Tipasa lets her do most of her work from home, so she only comes into the library a few hours a week. “This would have been impossible with our previous system,” she said.

When Northeastern State University’s library closed just after spring break, Resource Sharing Coordinator Brandon Martin disabled ILL pick-up notifications and the physical book request form by simply unchecking boxes in Tipasa’s configuration model. Beyond a shift to only digital lending, his staff’s workflows barely changed. They now use new COVID-19 cancellation and quarantine tags, which make it easy for Brandon to track items through the process with a quick list view. The staff has worked well from home, even keeping requests moving when their laptops or internet connections went down by logging in to Tipasa from their phones. “This experience has been seamless and flexible, and I don’t know what we would have done without Tipasa.”

Despite library closure due to COVID-19, ILL requests at the University of East Anglia library continued with no noticeable decline. The library decided to only allow requests for e-resources, although they’d consider purchasing e-books to replace physical items as needed. Before moving to web-based Tipasa, library staff would not have been able to support this level of service and fulfillment for such a high volume of requests. Tipasa also makes it easy for them to source items from outside the UK, which has been very valuable as many libraries had to shut down ILL services entirely.

The library at Loras College may have closed due to COVID-19, but the ILL services continued with barely an interruption. ILL staff adapted easily to working mostly from home. “Tipasa is web-based, so we don’t need a VPN. Plus, Tipasa is so easy to use,” said Access Service & Special Collections Librarian Heidi Pettitt. ILL Coordinator Lisa Finnegan explained, “We had to extend our timeline on loans, but that’s really the only change.” She continues to go in once a week to handle physical items and make scans of books chapters, which make up a lot of their ILL requests. When Lisa was briefly furloughed, Heidi quickly trained remaining staff on Tipasa over a video call. “From a management perspective, ILL was probably the easiest thing to transition to working from home.”

Wageningen University & Research - Library was closed for a couple months due to the COVID-19 crisis. During this time, there was a small decrease in ILL requests from students, staff, and researchers. However, with the help of Tipasa, ILL staff were able to provide sufficient options for fulfilling most of the ILL requests they received. “At the beginning of the crisis, a lot of information was shared by OCLC about how to make adjustments in the system due to the situation, and that was really helpful,” said WMS System Manager Petra Otten. “As we were not loaning books, we were able to set up a deflection policy for them without any major problems.” The library has recently re-opened to offer a study place for a limited number of students.

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