Create time for new initiatives

The librarians at Saddleback College have recently increased their interlibrary loan activities, begun improving the quality of the physical collection and conducted their first full inventory. The library hasn't hired more staff or cut user services to do this. Instead, the staff has found more time in the day by streamlining their workflows with WorldShare Management Services.

For example, the librarians now manage their e-book collections through the WorldCat^® knowledge base, which automatically updates changing metadata. "We don’t have to deal with those MARC records at all," explained Lydia Welhan, Technical Services Librarian, "which saves us a whole lot of time." In addition, "We don't have to export records from Connexion and upload them to our own server," she said.

The process improvements have helped the students as well. "The [public] catalog we have today is much more intuitive," explained Jenny Langrell, Library Department Chair and Systems Librarian. "As a direct result of that, we see more and more students actually using it." In fact, Jenny continued, "We know that our students are actually looking at material that they probably wouldn't have looked at just a year ago."

Not only are students finding more resources, but also they have better access to them. "We've really seen a huge increase in [ILL] requests, which is kind of exciting for us," Jenny said, because students can place requests online instead of filling out a paper form in the library.

"With all of these efficiencies," Lydia continued, "we've been able to put staff time toward some new initiatives that we're excited about. The biggest one is a full systematic inventory of our entire collection." In its more than 40-year history, Saddleback College library had never completed a full inventory. "That's a little embarrassing to admit," Lydia said, "but we're very excited to get started with that."

The library staff also has time to proactively improve the collection by "going out into the stacks and seeking out items that need to be mended … instead of only repairing the items that return to us damaged." These and other new projects have been "really exciting for us," Lydia said. Jenny added, "We think it's going to help our students in the long run."

Library at a glance

• Supports approximately 40,000 students and 1,200 faculty members
• Collection includes 35,000 print books and 82,000 e-books
• Supported by the Friends of the Library nonprofit of the Saddleback College Foundation