It would seem from this quick survey that having an internet site does not lead to lots of enquiries from the world and his wife, some of the comments follow:
We have had our own library Internet site up & running for about 2 weeks and haven't noticed any increase in "external people" contacting us. The site was set up to be suppressed from web searches and is only "findable" by its URL or links to it.
We currently have a website which is of course available to anyone anywhere in the world, and we have had requests from Minnesota asking for book loans (which part of 'East London' don't they understand??), ahem, anyway, these are a relatively small amount, and usually via e-mail so we can quickly delete/send out a standard e-mail politely referring them to an appropriate local agency. this is despite our home page and order forms on the website stipulating that certain services - leaflets, loans etc, are for professionals in east London only. However, we are about to launch a new version of our website, which means that visitors will have to select from a drop-down menu the first time they visit the site (whether directly, or via a search engine - they won't be able to go straight into a page on our site, if they haven't visited before, without going past this 'gateway' page), and specify where they are based (east London, or outside). of course, they can still lie at this point, as we can't tell where they are accessing us from, but hopefully, they won't. if they do, we are back to the 'polite e-mail referral' process above, if they try and order anything.
Very occasional queries from students, certainly not a major problem. Services such as ILL requests require a library card number as password.
No major problems with the world and his wife trying to use us. Our CAS service gets to Istanbul and Sydney though as a result. But it’s that rare an occurrence that we find it kind of fun. More regular is use by other parts of the patch where local library’s don’t deliver the same level of service we do. Again we work on the basis that this isn’t a problem because it is unusual enough to be remarked on and is not a regular thing.
Our library website is on the Internet (except for the library catalogue which is only on NHSnet.) We get perhaps two requests a week from people outwith NHS Scotland wanting to register as members. (Some of these are from abroad, others more local but just not NHS) We have a standard email response that we send back thanking them for filling in the online registration form but explaining that as it says on the website the Library is only open to employees of the NHS in Scotland. We also say that they are welcome to continue to access the site if they find it useful (ie if they want to download reading lists, use the links pages etc) So I wouldn't say we have a real problem - but using a standard email means that everyone gets the same message and we also ensure that the email is sent from one of the Librarians.
We have an internet site and do receive some requests for books/articles/searches/membership etc from all over the world! We don't get many perhaps 5 - 10 since we launched our internet site in the summer last year. We routinely check if enquiries come from our readers anyway, so this hasn't caused much extra work. Everyone who we've had to decline to help has been understanding and it hasn't caused us any problems. We haven't actively tried to discourage these requests as they are not causing us a problem at the moment. We have benefited from launching our site on the internet as our readers have been very impressed and glad to be able to access library resources without coming into the library and from home.
Hope this is of use/interest to someone somewhere ...
Rowena Perry
Library Manager
Health Informatics Shared Services
Did you know that your local health library offers
Help and advice from skilled staff
Journal and book collections – electronic as well as traditional
Study space and internet access
Training courses and current awareness services
Search services and document delivery
Check out our intranet site: http://nww.berkshire.nhs.uk/library - to find out more about our services and to check our catalogue.
Healthcare Library
Prospect Park Hospital
Honey End Lane
Reading RG30 4EJ
Tel: 0118 960 5020
Fax: 0118 960 5014