MiLE Use Soars

[August 25, 2002]
MiLE use continues to expand, July saw a whopping 27% increase in MiLE transactions, breaking the 3000 mark for the first time with 3350 requests. Among DALNET members, Wayne State University remains the highest net-lender with 427 items loaned last month. They were followed by Eastern Michigan who lent 330 items. Wayne State University is also the largest borrower in DALNET, borrowing 58 items in July.

Currently there are 9 DALNET members participating in MiLE. In addition to Wayne State, those include all of the DMC libraries, Botsford General Hospital, John D. Dingell VA Medical Center, Marygrove College, Macomb Community College, Oakland Community College, Walsh College, and the University of Detroit Mercy. Beaumont Hospital and The Henry Ford are preparing to go live and Rochester College and Mt Clemens General Hospital also plan to participate in the near future.

In the 4th quarter of this year, Dynix plans to replace URSA (the software that drives MiLE) with HILL (Horizon Interlibrary Loan). Once the MiLE Resource Sharing Committee decides to implement HILL, we expect many operational improvements including:

• If a step is missed in the processing it is assumed by the next step
• Support for multiple volumes
• Support for renewals
• Ability to create sequential search tiers of libraries, limit of 20 libraries is gone
• Ability to print wrappers
• Better support for journal titles and article requests, but no journal holdings yet
• Will work with link resolvers

There are still some limitations in the patron front-end for HILL

• No deduping (expected in a later release)
• Reciprocal borrowing piece has many caveats and may not be robust enough
• Boolean searching has some bugs

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