[Wactclc-alma] Thursday call follow-up - Circulation for non-library materials / collections

[Guidry, Wade]

On the Thursday call yesterday (Aug 5), we had a good discussion about requests to library from other departments to circulate materials, such as laptops, tutoring center materials, etc.

This seems to be a growing theme across institutions, with various approaches being employed.

A lot of you use Alma for circulating laptops, for example, which makes a lot of sense. And Alma offers a lot of functionality (libraries, circ desk) to support a variety of lending use cases.

For requests that start getting further afield, from departments that may be in a different division than the library, there might also be other options. If the library cannot support those requests because of staffing or resources.

Some simple cloud-based platforms that can support basic lending use-cases include libib, librarika, and tinycat:

https://www.libib.com/
https://librarika.com/
https://www.librarycat.org/ (associated with LibraryThing)

I don't have experience with any of these, and I'm not making any recommendations here. And I'm sure there are others.

And obviously, how the library organizes around supporting lending of materials for other departments is very much a local discussion.

I just wanted to offer some awareness that these kinds of tools exist, that allow lending tracking in a simplified way, but one that probably works a lot better than using a spreadsheet.





Wade Guidry
Library Consortium Services Manager, WACTCLC
wadeg at bigbend.edu<mailto:wadeg at bigbend.edu>
(509) 760-4474
http://www.wactclc.org<http://www.wactclc.org/>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ctc.edu/pipermail/wactclc-alma_lists.ctc.edu/attachments/20210806/742486d7/attachment.html>