Ahh, wouldn't that be wonderful -- big huge corporations paying attention to little ol' librarians with their unusual, unique needs. In the meantime, most of us are just trying to cope with the technologies available to us. Our Ariel process is pretty efficient and works for us better than faxing, but I would love to replace Ariel with something that works better, particularly given its proclivities for not playing well with scanners.
One thing we do is to have Ariel send received ILL documents to our ILL email account where we forward them on to our students. We do this to keep the documents for more of an extended period of time since we have students don't get the emails, delete the emails not knowing their importance, and/or who lose them later and want us to send them again. A little time doing this upfront saves lots of time later researching them all over again. It also keeps Ariel cleaned out and efficient. Last weekend, however, the ILL email account reached its maximum storage limit and we had to delete a good number of emails with pdf attachments to get it working again. Our IT network administrator was also in over the weekend to do emergency work on email performance issues and expressed concern about our saving so many one to three MB email document attachments. We may be exploring the posting of ILL pdfs on a web server soon if this continues to be a problem. Word 2007 files, by the way, are much smaller and compact than Word 2003 files. And the newer pdfs we're sending via Ariel are much smaller than the old tifs we used to send around. Craighton Hippenhammer Associate Professor Informatics Librarian Olivet Nazarene University Bourbonnais, IL 60914 >>> "Greer, Wally D." <[email protected]> 2/27/2009 8:36 AM >>> Wait until Google discovers a "cloud" app. With all of your statutory requirements satisfied. What you're doing with Ariel could easily be replaced with a third party site. Ariel is just The Fax Machine Of The Darned Librarians. You wait all day for Inter Library Loans to come out of the Fax Machine Of The Darned. There's no reason why this could not be handled (from a functional, not legal) standpoint by making it a Library Of Congress shared document center, or even e-mailed requests through Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc. Then local mail server limits can be ignored. Our Mad Scientist Exchange administrator is thinking of limiting us to 2048 bytes each. Yes, bytes, singular. OK. That was a slight exaggeration. But with average file sizes going up, and the mail system being the default filing-system-of-record, ordinary staff are getting throttled back to trivial box sizes. Something has to give. Wally Greer Senior PC Tech St. Louis Community College, Cosand Center 300 South Broadway St. Louis MO 63102-2810 (314) 539-5104 [email protected] Archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ _______________________________________________ ARIE-L mailing list Mail the list at [email protected] Unsubscribe at http://www.arie-l.org#subscribers Archive at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
