ILLiad Wishlist
Are there any features that you’d love the fine folks at Atlas Systems to include in future versions of ILLiad? Then throw your penny into the wishing well by leaving your comments on this page. If it so happens that the feature you want is actually already included in ILLiad, then we can help you find out how to use it. This is a community page, so feel free to be chatty. Also don’t hesitate to post your thoughts on the WorkflowToolkit-L listserv, as well.
How to send enhancement requests to Atlas Systems
Do you and all of your friends think that your idea for ILLiad is the next best thing since addons? Then don’t hesitate to submit your enhancement request directly to Atlas Systems by emailing service@atlas-sys.com. This will put your suggestion into their service tracker for consideration in future versions of ILLiad.
January 8, 2010 at 2:32 pm |
1. PDF import for Odyssey
2. Popup search from ILLiad to your Internet browser – carrying citation to your favorite search engine; options Google, Bing, Amazon, etc.
3. More fields passing through the web dll
4. More data passing through to the dbf/csv print files
5. Free ILLiad fields to play with for local activities
January 8, 2010 at 2:46 pm |
1 – Option for Odyssey to send to an email address, keeping the workflow within ILLiad
2 – Option to import from specified email address/folder in Borrowing.
February 19, 2010 at 10:48 am |
Sedning an e-mail through Odyssey and keeping everything in ILLiad would save so much time.
January 8, 2010 at 3:01 pm |
Web based editing of all ILLiad server files. It is very tedious to ftp back and forth when html needs updating.
January 8, 2010 at 3:03 pm |
Hooks directly from ALEPH into ILLiad so I do not have to pass requests for books through Serial Solutions.
January 8, 2010 at 3:29 pm |
Ability to quickly run a report tracking the average turnaround time (time from request sent to item received from first lender in lending string) for all lenders/suppliers of ILL materials to one’s institution. One could then take this info and “tweak” one’s custom holdings periodically.
July 14, 2010 at 3:22 pm |
or even be able to compare one week’s turnaround average with another week’s in order to compare procedures’ efficiency.
January 8, 2010 at 3:32 pm |
Move ILLiad to a more robust environment away from being primarily an Access database (at least it looks like one). Maybe Oracle?
January 8, 2010 at 3:37 pm |
Move to web based clients and do away with desk top clients.
January 8, 2010 at 4:12 pm |
1.) PDF import for Odyssey
2.) Make the field for Library name seperate from Address. Many libraries have ILL first and you have to spend time changing the library name and address.
January 9, 2010 at 2:11 pm |
ditto on PDF – brought it up at the ILLiad conference last year during a session & know there are a *ton* of libs who all want this since it was a loud & unanamous YES when John of Atlas asked if this was something everyone there wanted/needed.
January 11, 2010 at 3:01 pm |
Separate fields for all address elements (ideal) or at least separate elements for city/state or province/postal code/country. I periodically break these out into separate tables for my own statistical use (e.g., a 3-field table, with field one as lender code, field 2 as state abbreviation, field 3 as country abbreviation), since there’s no good way to get stats on usage by state or country with the current address format. This might require changes to the OCLC address format, but that wouldn’t be a bad thing, either. More standardization in OCLC ship to addresses would, in fact, be useful.
January 26, 2010 at 10:15 am |
Checkbox so you can tell ILLiad to skip sending a patron an overdue notice.
January 29, 2010 at 9:18 am |
Piggybacking on what Jennifer said.
It would be nice to have some way to mark both Borrowing and Lending requests that you want to keep an eye on AND it would be wonderful if an alert was triggered when/if the items showed up. Such as in Lending- requests that are in invoice stage for so long you’ve blocked the borrower. Getting an alert would be helpful to have an alert if the items showed up letting me know I can unblock them.
January 29, 2010 at 9:12 am |
For WebCirc- I would like the ability to reset a customer’s password to the default password. This would help front desk staff serve the customer when ILL staff are not available.
February 19, 2010 at 10:59 am |
I think the Due Date feature needs to be refined. System could flag patrons whose expiration has expired like uncleared patrons.
April 15, 2010 at 1:07 pm |
Update Billing Manager to be contained within the ILLiad main app, instead of a separate module. And get rid of the outdated Rave reports in favor of standard ILLiad merge file format.
April 20, 2010 at 3:43 pm |
Here is something that’s been on my ILLiad wishlist for a long time: when a user requests an item they’ve ordered before (since ILLiad keeps a 2 yr history) could ILLiad detect that it’s a duplicate and ask the user “You’ve ordered this before, are you sure you want to request again?”
Recently, this happened to my husband on Amazon. He requested something and Amazon pointed out he’d ordered it 3 yrs earlier. He checked and he had! If ILLiad had this feature, it would (or could) save enormous amounts of staff time cancelling requests that users have already received.
Thanks for asking!
May 6, 2010 at 3:48 pm |
If ILLiad could also check a patron’s request history for duplicate articles (via first few article title words), this would be very helpful. Otherwise, it is easy for a patron to request duplicates several days (or even hours) apart.
May 10, 2010 at 10:53 am |
To have fields in the address book for lending and borrowing contact information.
May 27, 2010 at 11:47 am |
As a Borrower (currently 7.4) and for DocDel, I’d like:
1. Better ctrl-p quick printing features from the request. “Loan Information” section not printed on article requests, etc. or simply headers for empty fields not printed. Field wrapping, so notes are not cut off. Make it more useful for a quick print and dash to the stacks when I’m on the phone. I like this feature over the Word template for a single request, but it could be better.
2. Two Notes fields for correspondence between us/patron, and us/lender. I would like to be able to document things on a library/library level that the patron doesn’t need to see.
3. E-mail link from the patron (sorry, customer) record. After doing a search and finding the patron’s e-mail address, I’d like to be able to click and pull up an e-mail template, like I can on an individual request, and not have to copy/paste their address into another system.
4. Hey, here’s pie in the sky… a VoIP connection of some kind by clicking on a button next to the patron phone number.
5. Ok… being able to specify our local users as “patrons” and not “customers” in the Customization Manager or initial setup file.
6. A way of standardizing how ILLiad e-mails could work with texting. Or allow patron to “also receive text”. E-mails should always go out, but allow the patron to also receive a text message on their transactions, drawn from a separate template.
May 27, 2010 at 12:07 pm |
On WebCirc- I would like a way for the Circ staff to be able reset an ILL password to the default password. Not all of our customers have an e-mail address to use with the Forgot Password feature.
June 11, 2010 at 9:49 am |
It would be useful if the Add address form that opens when a request comes in from a new borrowing institution included the default shipping field, allowing us to set that as we add them to our list of borrowers. Having the notes field available there would be handy as well. Finally, it would also be useful to have a named field for Fedex/UPS account numbers. I currently add them to the end of the address, but this of course means deleting them whenever other paperwork (book bands & mailing labels in particular) is generated. None of these fields would require availability in OCLC to appear in the ILLiad address file, since the information in them is either something that would be generated locally (default shipping, notes), or could be entered in the borrowing notes field in the request (account number).
November 1, 2010 at 3:19 pm |
Billing–I’d love to see a way to add an invoice for a lost book billing on the lending side. I’ve developed a kludge, but it ends up recording a credit in the billing manager rather than showing a paid invoice.
November 2, 2010 at 7:19 am |
I agree with Joe. What I needed is a way to get an invoice on demand for those times when the customer of a borrowing library wants an invoice for one of our books that the dog tore up, the patron dunked in the bathwater, aliens spirited away, et al when the due date hasn’t come and gone. We don’t use the Billing Manager because we don’t bill monthly; we bill as needed. Our Third Overdue notice was template-tweaked as an invoice/notice. What my clerk had been doing is changing the due date on the loan to throw it into the third notice queue so she can print out an invoice. Problem is that there’s wordage on thrid notice that just doesn’t apply in invoice-on-demand situations and we generally suspend lending until month+ overdue items are returned or paid for. My kluge (Thanks for that term, Joe! It sometimes feels like my life is a series of kluges.) was to tweak the Third Notice template to make a print on demand invoice. Problem is that it’s like going back to previous versions where we had to click on the template and mail merge to get overdue notice printouts. I’d like to have a Print Icon and be able the option of using different print templates the way we have the option of developing and adding different e-mail templates for the E-Mail icon.
I’d also like to be able to have the lender’s e-mail address automatically fill in Borrowing e-mails the way the borrower’s e-mail address automatically fills in Lending e-mails.
November 22, 2010 at 2:47 pm |
Yet another wish–I’d like to see call numbers pass from lending to WRS, and from WRS to borrowing. It’s occasionally useful to be able to search by call number in WRS, and I’d definitely find it useful to have the lender’s call number show up automatically in Borrowing.
October 25, 2011 at 12:49 pm |
This may not be an enhancement request, but rather a question. One library faculty member has been asking for several semesters if we can pre-load patron data, as is done for circulation data. We don’t necessarily believe that it takes long for patrons to register, but if this is possible, we may do it.
December 8, 2011 at 11:00 am |
Give ILLiad the ability to recognize a duplicate request from a user. Since it keeps all the requests made by the user in their history, it seems like this would be very feasible.
This would save a LOT of time, energy and $$!
(I know that Amazon has the capability.)
December 8, 2011 at 11:01 am |
Would it be possible to have this list of suggestions posted in reverse order so that the most recent suggestions are at the top? It would certainly help as the list gets longer and longer.
December 8, 2011 at 1:12 pm |
Do you use Direct Request? We set it up so if the ISBN is the same it will not process the request for the second book. The system puts a note and even gives me an ILL number if the first book was processed through Direct Request. Not a perfect solution but would help! If you would like to talk more about Direct Request e-mail me at ill@hvcc.edu.
March 16, 2012 at 9:39 am |
As I sit here editing addresses in my borrowing constant data records (thank you, OCLC, for parsed address fields!), I wish ILLiad had the capability to 1) associate constant data with institutions via the Groups table and 2) use multiple lending constant data records. In the pre-ILLiad days I developed a number of different cd records for use depending on our relationship with the borrower, now I’m forced into a one-size-fits-none single record.