The 2016 Northwest ILL Conference will be held September 8-9, 2016 in Portland, OR.  Kerry Keegan, Atlas Systems’ Training & Library Solutions Consultant, is on the program! Kerry serves as the implementation leader for ILLiad licensees, providing training and support for new and existing sites.

When You’ve Got It, Flaunt It: Visualizing Interlibrary Loan Data
Thurs Sept 8, 3:00pm - 3:45pm | Kerry Keegan | PAC Auditorium

Description: "People tell you modesty’s a virtue, but in the library modesty can hurt you." Take your data to the next level and show the whole world what you’re about. We’ll discuss gathering and exporting important data, how to query results and upload them into a variety of free and paid programs that can be used to illustrate resource sharing goals and accomplishments.

The Ares Virtual Conference will be held Wednesday and Thursday, November 9-10, 2016, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. EST each day. We are actively seeking user presentations to be delivered online (no travel required!). The time allotted for each presentation is 45 minutes.
Here are some suggested topics to get your creative juices flowing:

• Ares integration with course management, OPAC, or other systems
• Implementing Ares
• Marketing reserves services to faculty and students
• Using Ares data for planning, decision-making, and custom reporting
• New services or other innovative uses through Ares
• Streamlining workflows with Ares
• Designing and editing Ares web pages
• Best practices for reserves services
• Training student workers in Ares Workflows
• Training faculty and students to use Ares

Presentation proposals should include your contact information (name, title, institution name, email, and phone number), contact information for any co-presenters, presentation title, and a brief abstract of the proposed presentation.

Deadline for submissions is September 15th, 2016.  Session proposals will be reviewed by the program committee and those presenters who are selected will be notified by September 30, 2016.

Please direct presentation proposals and any questions to Angela Mott, amott@atlas-sys.com.

As announced at the ALA Annual Conference, the ILLiad Conference is expanding its focus to encompass more aspects of resource sharing. To reflect this broader focus, the conference is now called the OCLC Resource Sharing Conference.

We’re pleased to announce that the 2017 event will still be held in March in Virginia Beach. More details will be available over the coming months, but for now be sure to mark your calendar and plan to attend.

Our Atlas staff loves the quality time we get to spend with our users at major conferences like ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual. We continue to look at the best way to enjoy those interactions so that we really get to hear from you…and you really get to talk with us. And let’s face it, interactions on the exhibit floor—while nice for hugs and handshakes—don’t necessarily allow for good exchanges of information.

That’s why we’ve decided to try something new at ALA Midwinter. Instead of a booth, we’ll be arranging multiple events and individual appointments. We’re working out the details, but we know for sure we’ll be relying heavily on social media to connect with customers who are at the conference. So now’s a good time to sign up to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be sure you don’t miss out on joining up with us. You know if it’s Atlas, there’s sure to be food and beverages involved, so you don’t want to miss a post or a tweet!

We know there’s never enough time to get all the projects done that you have on your list. That’s why increasingly more institutions are signing up for our Concierge Services. Currently more than twenty-five libraries are using this service that includes a Tune-up every other year and a variety of custom services.

With an annual subscription to Concierge you have extra experienced hands to get the work done when it needs to be done. Concierge is designed to help you derive the maximum value from using Atlas software—without adding and training new library staff. For more information, email concierge@atlas-sys.com.

Since 2006, Atlas Systems has sponsored the STARS-Atlas Systems Mentoring Award that offers $1,250 to fund travel expenses associated with attending ALA’s annual conference. The chosen recipient is a library practitioner who is new to the field of interlibrary loan/document delivery or electronic reserves, and who has daily, hands-on involvement in the areas of borrowing, lending, document delivery, electronic reserves, material delivery, or resource sharing.

Atlas is pleased to announce that we will now sponsor a second award of equal value, enabling another library practitioner to attend ALA. Learn more at http://www.ala.org/rusa/awards/mentoring.

The Training and Library solutions team often gets asked about addons to enhance productivity. The range of requests we get for addons is very broad. Here are just some of the projects our Development staff have created:

• NCIP addons to handle circulation processing in the OPAC to reduce manual updates.
• Export transaction data for import into external systems such as remote storage, accounting, or  ILS. For example, one addon customer exports Ares reserve item information to Alma to create reading lists.
• Patron reminder emails for loan or e-delivery pickup.
• Search via external APIs to retrieve data such as call number, availability, or location information and import into ILLiad for automated processing.  For example, one Atlas created addon searches for item availability and auto cancels requests on OCLC as needed.
• OPAC addons for more flexible searching and importing than is available with Z39.50

What type of addon do you need? Chances are good, we can do the work for you. Email us at training@atlas-sys.com and let’s talk!

Atlas receives great questions from customers! We’ve featured several in the Video Training Library’s Ask Atlas video series. Take a look at our collection and let us know if you have a question to add to our series by emailing our Ask Atlas host, John Brunswick at askatlas@atlas-sys.com.