A young reader recently got a gaming device for his birthday and was excited to tell one of his favorite librarians about his new gift. His mom mentioned that he had two video games, but was quickly becoming tired of those same two games. The library employee reminded her that although the Pekin Public Library doesn’t loan out video games, there are other libraries that do! The young child jumped on a computer and did a quick search, and found several games he could borrow from another library through our Interlibrary Loan system!

Interlibrary loan (ILL) is a service that allows library users to borrow books, articles, or other items (like video games, cake pans, puzzles, games and even a fishing pole!) from libraries outside their own. It is one of Pekin Public Library’s most successful and popular services. In Illinois last year, 11,551,005 items were delivered between libraries. Each day, U.S. libraries circulate over five times as many items as Amazon ships! We can even get items from Chicago and out of state! 

Who makes the service so successful? That would be Sarah Neumann, who joined the Pekin Public Library back in 2015 as a library page, but was promoted to the library’s Interlibrary Loan Specialist. To get a pulse on the operation of interlibrary loan, here is a look at her typical day.

Outside of Neumann’s office in the library’s mail room sits a stack of large bright blue totes. They arrive every morning via a delivery truck from RSA (the Resource Sharing Alliance that lending libraries are members of). On a busy day, there may be five or six blue totes — each large enough to hold about 30 books. Weighing about fifty pounds each, they require a cart to move into Sarah’s office, where she begins to process the materials from other libraries for our patrons to pick up at our library. 

Neumann’s office has two desks for stacking and scanning items. She begins by scanning the item from another library into the system, automatically notifying the borrower that the item has arrived. She then prints out a slip to place on the item with the borrower’s name. This process continues until all the items are checked in; then the items are moved to the library shelves in the lobby for the borrower to check out!

But the Pekin Public Library doesn’t just borrow materials from other libraries…we loan out our materials to other libraries too! Each morning the library staff print out a list of the items requested by other libraries, and then they head out on a treasure hunt to find all the materials throughout our library. Those materials are brought back to Sarah’s office, where she scans the materials, which produces a slip that says what library is requesting the item that she needs to send to. She then packs the items up in those same blue bins for the RSA van to pick up!

While this sounds like a lengthy process, Sarah does so much more for the library. “While I specialize in resource sharing, and my days are consumed by that, I also have a working knowledge of all of the service desks and fill-in,” she notes. “I have to be able to jump in whenever needed.” In addition, Sarah is a Passport Manager and schedules and processes passport applications for the public.

Little complications every day keep Sarah on her toes. First, a library submitted a request for a DVD owned by Pekin Public Library. The DVD couldn’t be found in its home on the shelf, so Neumann had to search to find it — it was hiding on the repair shelf. Then came troubleshooting when a cancellation request came in from another library for an item already packed up in the blue bin for delivery. Thankfully, the bin hadn’t gone out for delivery just yet, giving Neumann a small window of time to retrieve the canceled book. If she missed it, though, that library would get a package they didn’t want anymore. 

After a long day of processing ILL requests and troubleshooting problems, Neumann is happy that she can help our customers find the books and other items that they are looking for, while at the same time, sharing our items with other libraries who just might not have as large of a collection as we do. Overall, interlibrary loan is a great way to access a wider range of materials that may not be available at your local library!