Advancements in Real-Time Availability in Interlibrary Loan

Abstract

Determining if items are available is a major part of Interlibrary Loan work. Many libraries try to minimize staff time spent on determining availability by investing in circulation based resource sharing systems that require a major investment in time and funds, and then work only for the libraries within the circulation based system. The IDS Project created a new solution, Lending Availability Service, to automatically determine availability through software that is integrated within the resource sharing software, ILLiad. The Lending Availability Service determines availability for any requests a library receives, and can automate portions of the ILL workflow that require determining whether an item is on the shelf or in a collection that can be lent. The Lending Availability Service is highly configurable and was designed with ILL workflows in mind, and overcomes problematic areas in workflows to allow for highly optimized resource sharing through automatic lookups of availability. ADVANCEMENTS IN REAL-TIME AVAILABILITY IN INTERLIBRARY LOAN 3 Advancements in Real-Time Availability in Interlibrary Loan Although there has been a large amount of technological development in libraries over the past decade, especially in the area of resource sharing, basic issues such as determining the availability of items for loan via Interlibrary Loan still present significant problems for most libraries. Existing availability software usually exists as a closed system, and will only work with other libraries using the same system, or requires availability to be checked at the point of request by the patron. As availability checking is often the one area of resource sharing that is not consistently automated, availability leads to higher costs in Interlibrary Loan. With the ability to automate availability checking for ILL requests regardless of what library they came from, libraries can decrease ILL costs. To meet the needs of reliable and comprehensive availability checking, and fill the gap in software that can work with a variety of systems and can focus on automating availability when the library is a lender, the IDS Project created the Lending Availability Service application. Literature Review Though library consortia partner together to ensure that resource sharing is most effective among its members, according to Thomas Bruno (2013), "they still suffer from the same basic problems that libraries using Worldcat Resource Sharing experience, such as lack of real-time availability" (p.47). Bruno goes on to chronicle how many consortia have addressed the issue of real-time availability: shared or union catalogs (2013, p. 47). Real-time availability and the ability to offer unmediated access to collections is crucial to extending access to the collections of other libraries, and there are multiple programs such as Borrow Direct and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation libraries that utilize Circulation standards such as the National Circulation Interoperability Standards (NCIP) (Bruno, 2013, p. 48). Bruno identifies one

Just-In-Time: the value of online integrated interlibrary loans to broaden access to information resources

“…This preference has made timeliness a primary goal of interlibrary loan services. Resource sharing and library collaboration has increased as the economic reality of libraries has changed, and the demand in services has coincided with an expectation of instant delivery (Pritting & Jones, 2015). To satisfy these demands many libraries have adopted collaborative agreements to reduce costs.…”