Allen Jones, Director of Digital Libraries & Technical Services, The New School Libraries
WASHINGTON, DC, June 21, 2019 —The Rethinking Resource Sharing (RRS) Initiative has announced the winner of the 2019 Rethinking Resource Sharing Innovation Award. The winner is Allen Jones, Director of Digital Libraries & Technical Services at The New School Libraries for developing request service functionality creating a completely streamlined, user-centric approach to resource sharing.
The Innovation Award comes with a $500 stipend and honors individuals and/or institutions for improving access to information through resource sharing in their library, consortium, state and/or country. The purpose of the award is to showcase innovation in resource sharing and to encourage other librarians and libraries to make changes in their resource sharing operations to improve information delivery to library users. This year’s award winner was recognized for his innovative contributions to resource sharing at the American Library Association’s 2019 Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
Allen Jones developed request service functionality within the Primo discovery layer that folds results from ILLiad and other catalogs, such as WorldShare Local and Relais D2D into a single search tool, creating a completely streamlined, user-centric approach to resource sharing. The request services allows users to view items accessible to them, while pushing the processing steps to a scripted backend. The service is designed to seamlessly fulfill a request without forceing the user to take additional steps. The service integrates discover, access, delivery, fulfillment, reference support, and preferences into one action by the user. Allen’s code is open source, and he is willing to share all his efforts with institutions that want to replicate the service. The code has been built to interface with similar systems and standards, and is not proprietary to any institution.
Funding for the 2018 Innovation Award is generously provided by Atlas Systems, developers of software solutions for libraries, including ILLiad for managing interlibrary loan and document delivery services, Ares for course reserves, and Aeon for special collections.
The Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative is an international ad hoc group that advocates for a complete rethink of the way libraries conduct resource sharing in the context of the global internet revolution and related developments.