Managing Interlibrary Loan Returns During COVID-19

 OCLC, an international library services cooperative, runs a number of blogs, one of them called Hanging Together.

Earlier this week, it published an article entitled Managing interlibrary loan returns and overdues during the pandemic: emerging consensus from the SHARES resource sharing consortium:

"After months of working at home, staff are now returning to their libraries, implementing safety protocols, ramping up services, and in some cases welcoming library users back into the building. Physical collections are back in play. One consequence of libraries closing suddenly and staying shut down for several months is that there is now quite a large backlog of interlibrary loan books that were caught in limbo when a state of emergency was declared back in March."

"There are many aspects of this challenge that deserve attention, and more than one way to go about solving the problem of getting tens of thousands of stranded books back to the lending libraries where they belong. SHARES members spent a recent town hall discussing the most constructive point of view to have about the return process in the time of COVID, as both a borrower and a lender, and were able to reach a consensus on the 'best' philosophy for managing overdue notices and recalls during a pandemic — at least the best philosophy for the SHARES consortium. (SHARES is a mix of small, medium and large academic libraries, special libraries focusing on law and art, and one major public library — about 100 libraries in all, at 70+ institutions, spread across 5 countries. What works best for your library or consortium may well differ from SHARES solutions, but we hope the questions we’re asking and approaches we’re taking will contribute to conversations happening across the global resource sharing system.)"