Let Me Check My Messages: One Academic Library's Story of ILLiad and Text Message Notifications

Walking through the halls of the Central Academic Building at Texas A&M–San Antonio University, you can’t help but notice the ubiquity of cell phones.Whether using them to talk, text, listen to music, or connect through social media, cell phones have become a virtual lifeline formany, providing not just ameans of communication but a gateway to information. WhenA&M–SanAntonio welcomed its first class of freshmen in the fall of 2016, the campus was forced to rethinkmany of its practices for this younger generation of students who seem to be on their cell phones constantly. Prior to that time, A&M–San Antonio was a university made up of transfer students attending junior-, senior-, and master’s-level courses only. As such, the student population was not your typical demographic. Many of our students were older with families of their own and full-time jobs. Student comfort level with technology was also very different prior to the arrival of the freshmen, both in terms of computers and cellular devices. While many of our students had smart phones, some had older model flip phones, and even still, others did not have a cell phone at all. It was also not uncommon for library staff at the information desk to receive lots of general word-processing questions. With the arrival of the freshmen, the A&M–San Antonio University Library decided it was time to reach out to these students, and our other patrons, via ameans we knew they couldn’t ignore: the text message. The A&M–San Antonio University Library has been in existence since October of 2009 and has a collection that is still growing as the campus grows. Because of this, our interlibrary loan (ILL) staff processes more borrowing requests than lending requests. For example, during the most recent fiscal year, the ILL staff borrowed 920 items but only loaned 186. It is worth mentioning that the University Library uses ILLiad to process interlibrary loan requests and is currently running version 8.7. A&M–San Antonio faculty, staff, and students can all request materials through interlibrary loan, and all three of those groups have a university-issued email address. Our university’s policy is to communicate official business through university-issued emails. As such, we have locked down our ILLiad forms to only allow users to enter their official university e-mail addresses. Faculty and staff are generally reliable when it comes to checking their university e-mail; however, students are a different story! This can be problematic given that the default notification method for our patrons is set to electronic, meaning they receive an e-mail at their university address when there are updates about their ILL requests. Many ILL staffmembers can probably relate to the frustration of working hard to borrow an item only to see it sit on the shelf waiting to be picked up by a patron who mysteriously never stops by. To hopefully lessen the occurrence of this and to meet our patrons where they’re at, so to speak, the public services manager and the digital resources manager began to have a conversation about setting up text message notifications within ILLiad.