PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the historical development of interlibrary loan, identify key milestones such as the codification of ILL practices and development of new technologies to facilitate those practices, and assess the impact that changes in technology and publishing are having upon resource sharing in the digital age.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conduct an extensive historical review of global developments in resource sharing and then conduct a PEST analysis of societal factors affecting present day resource sharing.FindingsResource sharing continues to grow but there is a need to work together to find solutions to problems of distributed knowledge bases, incompatible systems, and electronic formats which often prohibit sharing of materials between libraries. Librarians must work with publishers, politicians, and systems developers to ensure that there is the same or equivalent rights to electronic materials as there is to print publications and that resource sharing systems can support new models of sharing and acquiring materials in multiple formats.Originality/valueThis paper provides a global perspective on the challenges of library resource sharing in the digital age.
The Documents Direct project at the University of Leeds in the UK started in March 1999. Its aim was to investigate and evaluate new mechanisms for the discovery and delivery of full-text journal articles and similar material to academic staff and researchers of the University. More specifically, it intended to assess the costs and benefits of on-demand single article supply to the desktop at the point of need as an alternative to full subscriptions to journals. In short, offering unmediated document ordering and delivery to researchers and academics within the University.The University of Leeds has a large research library with a substantial periodical collection, which has developed over time to support the research needs of the University. The Library currently subscribes to and pays for approximately 6,000 titles. As with all libraries, it offers an inter-library loans (ILL) service (recently renamed Document Supply to reflect the changing focus of the service), which costs all its users £2 per request. The Library therefore combines both a traditional holdings policy and an access policy, in the form of inter-library loans. A number of issues have meant that this model needs to be reconsidered. In addition, the Library has undergone cultural change in recent years, which has seen the development of outreach activities and put an emphasis on its role in supporting the University's researchers, by providing high quality information, whether available locally or remotely. This approach to providing researchers with access to literature resources unavailable in the University is one currently being investigated by many academic organisations around the world.(For examples, see articles by Crowley (1999), Crowley and Hart (2000) and Houle (2000).The project's evaluation demonstrated that, for the user, ILL is deemed a slow process which is time-consuming and inefficient. It is an expensive service to operate and unlike other library services has not been developed alongside Web technology. The reasons given for this lack of development are twofold. UK Copyright Law demands a signed declaration from users for each article, in order to comply with fair dealing. In addition, many libraries make an administrative charge to their users for document delivery services and if the service was migrated to the Web then the primary issue to resolve would be how and when the user would pay.
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe Article Exchange – OCLC’s cloud-based document delivery service. Design/methodology/approach – In this study, Article Exchange is described in detail. Findings – Article Exchange has proved popular with OCLC users with more than 50,000 documents uploaded in January 2013 alone by more than 1,000 libraries. Practical implications – The new service facilitates improved delivery of documents electronically. Originality/value – This article is useful for all librarians who are concerned with delivering documents electronically in an increasingly complex technical and legal environment.
is an internally funded twelve-month project, involving four S chools within the University: Biology, Chemistry, Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Civil Engineering. The Library manages the project and has appointed a full-time project officer. The project's Steering Group meets quarterly and consists of the project officer, the Library's Director of Strategic Development (Chair), a systems librarian and a subject librarian, and one representative for each of the Schools involved in the project.
PurposeIn September 2011 the authors presented a paper at the IFLA Interlending & Document Supply Conference in Chicago, Illinois, USA, which focused on resource sharing in the digital age. Following that, the authors felt a need to further challenge and/or validate some of the conclusions drawn: the aim of this paper is to do that.Design/methodology/approachThe best way, in the authors' opinion, was to talk with thought leaders in resource sharing, interviewing each one to see what trends and concerns would emerge. The goal of the interviews was to ascertain: changes over the last five years; current trends and impacts; and future trends and possible effects.FindingsWhile the result of these interviews is anecdotal, it did allow the authors to draw some conclusions worthy of librarians’ consideration as to the current and future state of resource sharing.Originality/valueThis paper gives a good overview of key issues libraries are facing with resource sharing and document delivery services.
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