One of the things that has emerged from a number of Process Reviews that we have done in the last year is that the ILL module in Talis Alto is frequently under-used. It actually has a lot of depth and sophistication (for examples in the way that it handles interaction with the British Library Document Supply Centre – BLDSC). In particular there are options for separating initial requests for ILLs from back office processing without having to ship paper forms or request cards about the place.

Whilst Interloans are a declining proportion of library activity, some users tell us that they represent a disproportionate amount of effort, so we are offering an updated one-day course on Interloans: the next one at the time of writing is 3rd March. This will be aimed largely at end-users i.e. library rather than technical staff who are looking to make the best use of the capabilities of the Talis Alto Interloan module.

With thanks to our partner BDS a new database has been added to Talis Base containing MARC records from BDS for items published in Wales. BDS receives data from the Welsh Book Council for trade distribution and has kindly converted them to MARC and allowed us to make the records available to Talis customers at no charge. These records have been converted to MARC from the source data and as such do not adhere to BDS’s usual library quality standards.

The name of the database is BDSWelshM21. Currently it has 12,766 records. It will be updated weekly. It is not included in BDSAllM21 because it is not a normal BDS offering. You can configure access to BDSWelshM21 in Talis Alto Configuration Setup under the Target/Attributes tab. The simplest way to do it is to copy an existing Talis Base target and fill in the Name, the Sort code, and the Description, and change the database name part of the Connection.

If you have any problems please raise a support case.