ILL fixes and enhancements Tue 10/15

The NHAIS ILL System will be offline briefly tonight (Tuesday, Oct. 15) starting at 10 o'clock. Software updates will address the following issues:

-Lender participation information in the “Where to Find it” box on the full record display has not been populating recently. This has been corrected so you should once again see a "Yes" in the "ILL Lender?" column for participating libraries.

-For Shipping Labels, lines that include symbols have not been wrapping correctly when printed. This has been corrected.

-The Borrowing Activity, Lending Activity, and Net Activity reports will now include the Consortium Code as a prefix to the Library Code. For example, the Lilac Public Library will display as “NHAIS: NHTLIL.” The Consortium Code is already included in the Request Records and Lender Response Records reports.

-A new beta report called Filled Borrowing Requests will include the number of borrowing requests filled by lenders within the selected date range as well as a table listing the lending libraries that filled their requests during the selected time period and the number each location filled. Columns for "ISSI" and "Non SHAREit" lenders are present but irrelevant in our system.

650 - Topical Subject Heading

The 650 tag is where you will find subject access points (from various thesauri as identified in the 2nd indicator) that are topics. This can include:

• A general subject term -- Chemistry
• The name of an event -- Anglo-Egyptian War, 1882
• Names or terms applied to individual objects or classes of objects -- JavaScript (Computer program language)
• Systematic names of chemical compounds -- Dihydrogen monoxide
• Systematic names of families, genera, species in botany and zoology -- Sepiolidae  
• A geographic name included in a phrase subject heading -- Iran in the Qur'an

The Library of Congress maintains an Alphabetical List of Ambiguous Headings which tells a cataloger what tag a particular kind of topic belongs in. For example, Celestial bodies (like Halley's comet) belong in an X51 tag because they are considered geographic headings rather than topical ones.

The subject heading will be found in subfield a. There are several additional subfields where you will find information that further specifies the topic:

• Subfield v contains form subdivisions (Statistics, Maps, etc.) -- identifies the kind of information the item contains
  
  
• Subfield x contains general subdivisions -- this is a more specific aspect of the topic in subfield a
  ( ǂa Automobiles ǂx Motors ǂx Cylinders ǂx Fluid dynamics, or ǂa Zombies ǂx Religious aspects ǂx Buddhism)
  
  
• Subfield y contains chronological subdivisions -- what year or time period the work is covering (1971-1980, or 20th century, or Edo period, 1600-1868)
  
  
• Subfield z contains geographic subdivisions -- where the thing in subfield a is located (ǂa Libraries ǂz New Hampshire)

If the work as a whole is about a place (like New Hampshire) rather than being about a specific topic (like libraries) in that place, it should have a 651 tag to represent that geographic topic. Next week I will talk about that tag.

Counting ILL requests

This week's post about the NHAIS ILL System's 5th birthday mentioned that "nearly three-quarters of a MILLION requests have been placed in the system" since October 8, 2019. By this time next week, the count will almost certainly be MORE than three quarters of a million.

If you take 750,000 and divide it by 60 months (5 years), you get an average of 12,500 requests in the system per month. But wait! Interlibrary lending screeched to a halt in March 2020, courtesy of COVID-19. Six months passed before ILL activity resumed. If you exclude those months, you get an average of nearly 14,000 requests a month.

For just the first 9 months of this year, the count is closer to 15,000 a month--roughly 500 a day. Can you imagine if we didn't have the NHAIS ILL System routing all those requests to holding libraries and, instead, you received 500 e-mails each day asking if you have this or that title available? Yikes!

Celebrating 5-Years!

Five years ago yesterday (that is, on Tuesday, 10/8/2019 at 8am) we launched the current version of the NHAIS Interlibrary Loan system.

Since then, nearly three-quarters of a MILLION requests have been placed in the system by New Hampshire libraries. 

We did know this yesterday, but there was a Tuesday Tags post and an Auto-Graphics  update to announce yesterday so we decided to save this news for today.

Fix for ILL non-returnable request form

The NHAIS ILL System will be offline briefly tonight (Tuesday, Oct. 8) starting at 10 o'clock. Program updates being installed tonight include a fix for non-returnable request forms. Lately, these forms have not shown the Article Title, Article Author, Article Date, or Article Information (Volume, Issue, Pages) fields. That prevented users from filling that important information in when placing a request. This has been corrected.

If you'd like to know more about placing requests for non-returnables (typically for copies of journal articles), there's an 18-minute video available on the subject. So far this year, only 20 non-returnable requests have been created in our ILL system while there have been 140,000 returnable requests.

Also part of tonight's update is a change of location for lender list information. Up to now, you could see your Preferred Lender List and System Wide list at Staff Dashboard > ILL Admin > Participant Record. With tonight's changes, those lists will be visible at Staff Dashboard > ILL Admin > Configuration > Configure Lender Lists. You still won't be able to edit the lists. If you'd like to know more about how your Preferred Lender List is organized, see this post from 2019. If you'd like to know more about all those other things you see in your Participant Record, check out this post from 2022.

If you still have questions, contact the NHAIS Help Desk via e-mail or phone 603-271-2141.

6XX - Subject Access Points

"Use 6xx fields to provide subject access points. Most 6xx fields contain subject access points based on the thesaurus or subject heading system identified in the 2nd indicator or in subfield ǂ2. Subject access points are assigned to a bibliographic record to provide access according to established subject cataloging principles and guidelines. Use to describe the content of the cataloged resource. Genre/form terms describe what a cataloged resource is, not what it is about." -- BF&S

There is a lot involved in Subject Access -- entire courses in Library School are devoted to it. During October I am going to cover some basics to help you understand what is contained in various 6XX tags, but I want you to be aware that I am only scratching the surface of this huge topic.  

Subject headings come from specific schemes or thesauri. The second indicator of a 6XX tag tells you what scheme was used to create the heading in that tag:

2nd Indicator  Thesaurus
0	Library of Congress Subject Headings
1	LC subject headings for children's literature
2	Medical Subject Headings
3	National Agricultural Library subject authority file
4	Source not specified
5	Canadian Subject Headings
6	Répertoire de vedettes-matière
7	Source specified (with defined terms) in subfield ǂ2

The first indicator of 6XX tags is generally defined to specify how important the subject is in the work being cataloged (is it mostly about the specified subject, or only partly about it?). A blank in this indicator means "no information provided" and is the most common coding you will see.  

In the same way that 5XX tags are defined to contain specific kinds of notes, 6XX tags are defined to contain specific kinds of subject access points. Here are some examples:

• 600, 610, 611 tags contain various kinds of names (following the same structure as the corresponding 1XX tags) and are used when the work being cataloged is ABOUT those people, organizations, or meetings. 
• 630 tags contain uniform titles when the work being cataloged is ABOUT that title. 
• 653 tags are for "index term - uncontrolled"--these are terms that are not derived from a controlled thesaurus or subject heading system but which the cataloger felt would be of value to people beyond their own library. The 2nd indicator in this case tells you what kind of heading it is (name, subject, etc.)
• 69X these are subject headings for local use that are not thought to be of value to anyone beyond the library that created them.
   

Next week's post will focus on Topical subject headings (650 tags) and the following week we will look at Geographic subject headings (651 tags).

No SE-A van Mon 10/7

Due to staffing shortages, we have to cancel the SE-A van route today (Monday, Oct. 7).

The affected libraries are:

Northwood
Rochester
Somersworth
Dover
Lee
Portsmouth
Rye
North Hampton

I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely,
Jill Witham
Van Service Coordinator
New Hampshire State Library

More on cybersecurity update for ILL

To clarify a message posted on Friday, if you go to https://sectest-rsdemo.agshareit.com and see the following page, you're all set.

This is a test page and you won't be able to log in although there's a familiar login button in the upper right. If you're unable to load the "Welcome to SHAREit" page, please contact the NHAIS Help Desk via e-mail or phone 603-271-2141.

Cybersecurity change for ILL

Is your browser TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2-compliant? It very likely is--this Internet encryption protocol has been around for 16 years and you'd probably have run into trouble with several websites by now if you didn't have it. The NHAIS ILL System will require TLS version 1.2 or greater starting November 5. If you can load the following site, you're good to go:

https://sectest-rsdemo.agshareit.com

If you can't connect to that site, please contact the NHAIS Help Desk (nhu-pac@dncr.nh.gov or 603-271-2141) as soon as possible.