ILL forms on Web

[Jerilyn Veldof]

On Tue, 13 Feb 1996, William Oldfield wrote:

> The security offered by the .htaccess file stops the world from using our
> ILL service.
> 
> If a person comes into the Library and uses our Electronic form (which we
> prefer) or fills out a paper ILL request, they must be valid users or our
> ILL departemnt does not fill the order.  I am sure that any ILL department
> checks to see if a borrower is a valid user before working on the order and
> the electronic submission method is no different.
> I believe our ILL Department checks the email address, does a finger on the
> student or checks our patron database to verify the borrower information.
 
Who has time to do this?  We recieve at least 100 requests a day and do 
not check to see if they're all "valid" users. We are too backlogged 
(with the addition of our online indexes and cancellations of journals 
and no increase in ILL budget for staff).  Of course, if 
they request a book loan they won't be able to check the item out of the 
Library - but as of now all a person has to do is check the "student" box 
and the request goes through.  This is somewhat acceptable in an offline 
environment when a patron has to come into the library and ask about ILL. 
We can then tell them about our policy and tell non-affiliated people to
go to the public library.
But in an electronic environment when they only need to sit down at the 
computer and find "Interlibrary Loan" as an option on our OPAC a patron can 
order away.  Because of this a requester must first enter their name and 
then their ID barcode number which is checked against the system.  
Jerilyn Veldof 
University of Arizona

> 
> At 1:19 PM 2/13/96, Jerilyn Veldof wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, 13 Feb 1996, William Oldfield wrote:
> >
> >> Helen...
> >>
> >> At UW we simply restrict access to the form and the cgi script to computers
> >> in the UW domain.  Using the .htaccess file for this purpose means that
> >> only users within your institution can submit ILL requests.
> >>
> >> It sure beats setting up individual user authentication.
> >
> >If I'm interpreting this right this means that non-affiliated
> >users from the community need only come into the library to order ILL
> >materials - as long as they are using a machine with the UW domain.  Is
> >this correct?  Do you feel that this is not much of a "problem" and that
> >it's cheaper or more efficient in the long run than is setting up user
> >authentication?
> >
> >Jerilyn Veldof
> >University of Arizona Library
> >
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> William Oldfield (Networked Information Research Associate)
> University of Waterloo Library            Phone: (519) 888-4567 Ext. 2461
> Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1         Email: wroldfie at library.uwaterloo.ca
> UWELib:   http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/
> Homepage: http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/~wroldfie/home.html
> 
> 
> 
>