New Procedures for Submitting Interlibrary Loan Requests

From memo# 2010-145:
Due to budget reductions, the Maryland State Department of Education Division of Library Development and Services is no longer able to fund the MPowerCat project.

This brings about two changes for BCPL staff and customers:

1. BCPL holdings will no longer appear in OCLC’s WorldCat. Customers who search worldcat.org or who see a “find in a library” result in Google or Yahoo will not be directed to BCPL’s catalog even if we own the item.

2. We will no longer have access to FirstSearch. BCPL had paid for FirstSearch access before the MPowerCat project was put into place in 2006. Unfortunately, the price is substantially higher now than it had been at that time. We have chosen not to re-subscribe to the service. We will still be able to request items through OCLC but we will not be able to use FirstSearch to do it.

The procedure for submitting an interlibrary loan request is very similar to our current process. The search options are slightly less powerful than were available through FirstSearch but should be sufficient in most cases to find the requested title.

The ILL link on the information desk computers has been updated.