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My first one was within six months of my starting this job, it went to Thailand! While I wanted to keep that envelope as a trophy, sadly, it was thrown away when the library was deep-cleaned when the plague hit. It wasn't truly remarkable, though the stamps and cancellation was cool. But it was special to me!
Honestly, I think I could have ordered this book used from an English book store and mailed it to the library for less than it'll cost to send it there and back! It's going to a public library in Welwyn Garden City, which I'd never heard of. It's about an hour north of London by car, which I assume is being optimistic for traffic. For all I know, it's considered a suburb of London.
ILL is interesting. If you participate, your entire library's database is uploaded to a data center in Ohio. So this library in England was looking for a collection of short stories by a particular author, and they enter the book into whichever ILL program that they use. It hits the data center in Ohio and that database (built on top of Microsoft SQL Server, literally my former job!) returns a list of the libraries that have that book. You can filter it for libraries in your consortium, courier group, state, region, country, or for the entire world. This builds what is known as a Lending String, or the libraries that are theoretically capable of lending that book.
My library as at the head of that lending string!
Now, you can manually build the lending string and put preferred libraries that you'd like to borrow from towards the front, but usually you use the one generated by the system. I'm not quite sure why a British library would have a New Mexico library - how many thousands of miles away? - as the FIRST library in the lending string?!!!
One other thing to note. Libraries don't pay full postage when mailing things to other libraries via USPS. We pay Library Rate, which I think is cheaper than Bulk, but delivered with First Class. But this is going International, and I have no idea what that will entail! I went ahead and extended the due date on this from 5/8 to the end of May to accommodate longer mail times, make things a little less stressed for them.
Honestly, I think I could have ordered this book used from an English book store and mailed it to the library for less than it'll cost to send it there and back! It's going to a public library in Welwyn Garden City, which I'd never heard of. It's about an hour north of London by car, which I assume is being optimistic for traffic. For all I know, it's considered a suburb of London.
ILL is interesting. If you participate, your entire library's database is uploaded to a data center in Ohio. So this library in England was looking for a collection of short stories by a particular author, and they enter the book into whichever ILL program that they use. It hits the data center in Ohio and that database (built on top of Microsoft SQL Server, literally my former job!) returns a list of the libraries that have that book. You can filter it for libraries in your consortium, courier group, state, region, country, or for the entire world. This builds what is known as a Lending String, or the libraries that are theoretically capable of lending that book.
My library as at the head of that lending string!
Now, you can manually build the lending string and put preferred libraries that you'd like to borrow from towards the front, but usually you use the one generated by the system. I'm not quite sure why a British library would have a New Mexico library - how many thousands of miles away? - as the FIRST library in the lending string?!!!
One other thing to note. Libraries don't pay full postage when mailing things to other libraries via USPS. We pay Library Rate, which I think is cheaper than Bulk, but delivered with First Class. But this is going International, and I have no idea what that will entail! I went ahead and extended the due date on this from 5/8 to the end of May to accommodate longer mail times, make things a little less stressed for them.
