Changes, op. V

 Hey all, Daniel here.

I've been at my "new" job for about a year. I'm the lead ILL Clerk at Montgomery County-Norristown Public Library. It's a quiet hump day morning; not much in the pipeline as far as fulfilling or finishing requests. My big thrill for the day is the arrival of my "date-received" rubber stamp, which keeps me from having to hand write that information 20-30 times daily. (It was actually supposed to be "date-returned" but I'm not going to quibble.)

The job entails receiving and shipping library items to various points on the globe. Not everything is eligible for InterLibrary Loan; reference books, historical items that don't circulate, older items that have grown brittle (or as I like to say, "crispy", new items--although I will confess that our policy on new items is more generous than other institutions. For example, the Free Library of Philadelphia won't ship anything within 12 months of publication. If everything is kosher, than we ship it for six weeks as a rule; exceptions are made for libraries using items for book discussion groups. 

I continue to get a geography lesson just about every day I report for work. I've lived in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for over 30 years, but I still get requests from places of which I haven't heard. We get requests from small rural libraries all over the country; the other "usual suspects" include the many K-12 and higher education libraries, governmental and military libraries--there are several in Pennsylvania, including the War College in Carlisle--even military intelligence units scattered across the US. Doin' my bit for Uncle Sam... 😏

Our biggest client libraries are, as you might expect, in Pennsylvania--

Adams County (Gettysburg)

Bucks County (Doylestown)

Chester County (Exton)--the ILL Librarian is my old boss from Spring City PL.

Carnegie Library (Pittsburgh)--arguably our #1 client in terms of volume shipped and received.

Dauphin County (Harrisburg)

Delaware County (Media)--our branches do more business with them than we do, but we get to distribute them when they ship a box of returned items.

Free Library of Philadelphia--I know their ILL Librarian, having worked with him a few years ago.

University of Pennsylvania--always asking for new items, almost always being told "no"

Paterno Library (Penn State University)

--but we do receive items from just about any library who will ship and not charge us. We charge $10 per item when they're headed to libraries out of state, except for the hodgepodge of public and university libraries with which we share reciprocity agreements--selected institutions in New Jersey, Michigan, Oregon, Washington state, and South Carolina, among others.

More to follow, but lunch is coming soon.

Onward.