Quarantine Requirement for ILL Materials Lifted

On June 1, 2021 State Librarian Michael York issued this statement:

It seems clear that with the dramatic decrease in deaths from Covid19 and the sharp drop in infections and perhaps most importantly the large percentage of New Hampshire citizens who are now vaccinated against Covid19, the need to quarantine interlibrary loan materials waiting to be shipped or returned from a borrowing library is no longer necessary. We instituted the quarantine to protect the state library staff; whether this precaution had any effect on our staff I do not know. I do know however that we were not affected by the virus. This will serve as notice that the quarantining of materials in interlibrary loan from this point on will be at the discretion of the lending and borrowing libraries.

When the quarantine requirement was set we made several adjustments to the number of days allowed in the NHAIS ILL System for various things. We are now in the process of returning those settings to their original values. This will be completed by the end of today (Thursday, June 3). The banner on the main ILL System page (linking to the Quarantine document) will also be updated as soon as Auto-Graphics can distribute the revised page to all ILL user pages.

Here is what is being changed:

• Due dates will be calculated as 42  days from the date shipped (it was 60). If you check ILL materials out to borrowing libraries in your local circulation system you will want to adjust your settings there so that the due dates match the NHAIS ILL System due dates.
  
• The default "need by date" on requests will be set 30 days from when it is placed (it has been 45)
  
• The days to supply value (counting from "shipped" by lender to "received" by borrower) will be set to 21 days (it has been 28).

The days to respond (how long a request will sit in a library's request manager unanswered before moving on to the next potential lender) remains 3 days (the system setting is 4 because of how the system counts time for this value, but it is functionally 3 days). This was never changed.

For those libraries that had specified Lending Policy Exceptions some adjustments were needed as well. Most of the libraries who had these exceptions set up (check out Seeing Your Lending Policy Exceptions to figure out what is set for you) were using the default setting (previously 42) for calculating due dates but had specified some formats of material that they would not lend. We changed these to 60, and kept the non-loaned formats as non-loaned. Since the system was launched in Fall 2019 there have been some additional options added to the lending policy exception functionality, so taking a look at your policy and making sure it is as you want it is probably a good idea.