The life cycle of an Interlibrary Loan:
Let’s follow an Interlibrary loan book on a typical trip through the network.

Patron, Charlie Happy is at home looking through the online catalog  at www.robbinslibrary.org, and He is desperately seeking reading material for his trip to Bermuda.
He types in “Bermuda” on the catalogs search and reserves an item. 
He enters his fourteen digit library card number and his pin.
He adds his pickup library and submits and then happily goes about his business.
( if he had wanted to he could have used an “alias” which he could set up instead of his library card number.  But that’s for another story)

A little later that day, Charlie looked at his library card under Hold and saw that his hold
was showing but there was no status for it yet.

The next day...
Behind the scenes; at another Minuteman  library,  Sandy Sue Prints out a Paging List.

This is a list of all the items that are requested the day before up until midnight. Each library prints at least one of these Paging Lists up, daily.. The library also prints up an Item Paging list which includes any items that has a specific volume or part. Once the Paging List is printed, in the Robbins Library, a Circulation staff member brings the list to the stacks and starts to pull the items. This takes from four to seven hours depending on the total. We average 150-200 on the page list daily and 10-15 on the Item page list. 

Once the items are pulled from the shelves, the staff member checks them in, to start their trek to whichever library the patrons have chosen as their pick up location.  Some are placed on the Arlington Hold shelves.  We call these the “Shoppers” The rest are checked in and placed in a grey bin. These grey bins are then picked up by a delivery driver, usually in the morning and after the delivery driver finishes his route, sometimes between 10-12 libraries, he returns to a main facility where the items are sorted according to a   “sort to light” procedure.

Previous to the “sort to light” process, the sorting was done by way of routing slips which had to be placed inside the items at check in.  But with the Optima system, all the sorting depends on the library barcode; a fourteen digit number which is placed on the top left quadrant of the items.  The “sort to light” is a small scanner which  is placed on the wrist of a worker at the main Optima facility .  This scans the barcode and a colored light appears in the new bins which are separated by libraries. This eliminates human error and moves the process a lot faster than having to read all the library names on the labels, especially handwritten ones.

At some point in the future, all the Minuteman libraries will have the barcodes on the front.  If barcodes are not on front they need to be sorted separately with a slip denoting the Region and the name of the library.  These can be printed from the receipt printers at most libraries.. 
Once the bins at the main facility are filled, they are placed in order for the routes that have been set up to be delivered the next day.  And the process begins again.

This is why on your record you will see your items as:

AVAILABLE  - (in the owning library) If an item is AVAILABLE in your library, Call the owning library and have them hold it for you.  This will be faster. As you can see, just because an item is AVAILABLE in your owning library does not mean that that is the item you will receive.

IN TRANSIT – somewhere in a bin, waiting to be placed on a truck to be delivered or on a truck to be delivered,or in bins waiting to be checked in.

READY FOR PICKUP - Once the item is checked in at the pickup location an email goes automatically out and you are notified.  These emails go out once a day and if there is no email on your account then, in Arlington , a phone call is made. 

Fini