GENESEO, N.Y. -- Founded in 2004, the Information Delivery Services (IDS) Project was created to share materials among members’ libraries that no longer had the funding to purchase all of the materials their students needed.
“By sharing materials as well as expertise,” said IDS Executive Director Mark Sullivan, “IDS has grown over the years to become a diverse, national resource sharing collective of 100 academic and non-academic libraries in and beyond New York.”
Known for its community as much as for its technology, two additional staff members and more than two-dozen trained volunteers support the project. Joining Sullivan on the staff and Creative Technologist Bill Jones and IDS Secretary Cathy Taylor. IDS volunteers support the project as mentors for other libraries and coordinators for IDS Project initiatives, and work on special projects, such as conference planning and other special tasks. The IDS mentors are well known for their expertise and are often approached by members, as well as non-members, for help with solving problems and developing efficient solutions.
The IDS Project has won multiple national awards for innovations in staff development, including recognition by the IDS Project Regional User Groups, which are bi-annual meetings for interlibrary loan staff to participate in hands-on workshops, to learn about best practices, and to develop new ideas that best suit the resource sharing cooperative. In addition, the project received the Rethinking Resource Sharing Innovation Award for the Online Learning Institute. The institute provides an online environment for new members of the interlibrary loan community to learn new skills to offer better services to library users. These courses are taught by leaders in the resource sharing field from many different institutions across the nation.
IDS Project also works heavily with developing new technologies. “We have created a new software platform called IDS Logic, which helps libraries become more efficient by allowing for the automation of processes and communication between library systems,” said Sullivan. “This software has been installed at over 120 institutions across the nation and has become a vital part of processing interlibrary loan requests of faculty, staff, and students.”
Services provided by IDS Logic range from automatically sending important messages to users to leveraging inventory control systems and increasing the speed of delivery for patron requests. Sullivan said IDS now licenses its software to institutions such as Yale, MIT, Brown, Princeton, and Cornell, among others.
More recently, IDS Project has developed a solution to automate the delivery and processing of research articles at the lowest cost, thereby saving time and money. The Article Gateway, a cutting edge initiative, is available only to IDS members and dynamically gathers licensing and cost information for research articles, which is a major expense for higher education institutions.
While the IDS Project is based at SUNY Geneseo, it is a nationally recognized model for institutional collaboration and innovation in higher education, and has wide-reaching effects for libraries and universities across the United States.
“Most importantly, the IDS Project saves time by reducing or eliminating labor-intensive tasks that can be allocated to intelligent, computer-driven decision making processes,” said Sullivan.
Photo (above): IDS Project staff members have helped make the initiative a national resource. From left to right are Cathy Taylor, Mark Sullivan, and Bill Jones.
Media Contact:
David Irwin
College Communications
(585) 245-5529
Irwin@geneseo.edu