At the beginning of April, with only a little over a month left in the semester, some of you may be wondering why the library unveiled a new EZ Borrow interface. Well, let’s just say it wasn’t our choice.

It all started, believe it or not, a year ago back in April 2010. EZ Borrow is composed of a consortium of colleges and universities. Together, we all chip in part of our library budget funds to run EZ Borrow as an interlibrary loan system. The costs of that system were becoming too high, and it was decided by the consortium to upgrade and change the service provider. The original “go live” date for the new system was September 2010.

Needless to say, there were many setbacks along the way with the “go live” date getting pushed back farther and farther until April 2011, when the new company running the EZ Borrow software told use to go live with it. There were outcries over the timing of this, but they were ignored and all the EZ Borrow participating schools went live with it.

Like with many new systems, there have been a lot of bugs that need fixing (still). Fortunately, Warner Library hasn’t had nearly the amount of difficulties with this switch over as some of the other schools. Hopefully by the upcoming school year (September 2011), the bugs will be completely worked out and the new EZ Borrow will run as it should. We have been very grateful for the Eastern community’s understanding. In the meantime, here are some tips on how to use the new EZ Borrow interfaces as well as some of the known bugs we are trying to work around.

First, some tips…

• When logging in, make sure to enter your Eastern ID number, including the zeros that precede it
  ex. 000123456
  
• The default search is a “keyword” search. To search for a specific title, click on the “Advanced Search” link
  

  Basic "keyword" Search screen

  

  Advanced Search screen

• You can click on “My Account” to view the progress of your request(s)
  

  My Account link

  

  "My Account" screen

Current known issues…

• Use Internet Explorer 8 when making a request. We’ve found that FireFox sometimes works, but IE 8 seems to consistently work, so we recommend you submit your requests using this browser. If you do use FireFox you may end up getting this message-
  
• If you receive the above error message and you are using IE 8, try your request in 10 minutes. It may be that the system is too overloaded to process it at that time. If it still does not go through, contact the Reference Desk.
• Some patrons are NOT receiving emails when their item arrives in the library. We recommend stopping by the Reference Desk 2-3 days after you make your request to see if the item’s arrived.

To download and print out a one page guide on How to Use EZ Borrow, click here.