The BUS: An ILL request tracking system for PRISM and the micro‐enhancer

The Borrowing Update System (BUS) is a customized application for tracking and reporting on current and past Interlibrary Loan requests processed using OCLC′s PRISM and Micro‐Enhancer. Developed in the ILL department at Virginia Tech′s Newman Library over the past two years, the BUS automates many of the common, previously manual, ILL tasks. Here, in this first of a two‐part article on the BUS, I will discuss the steps taken in planning the BUS and give a general overview of the BUS. In the next article, I′ll examine the problems and limitations, the future of the BUS, and explore the technical elements of the program, including the table structure of and some code examples from the BUS.