Gave a few presentations recently on the topic of Interlibrary Loan and Acquisitions, or rather, Get It - What increasingly makes sense is to change the operational assumptions we make about how library's process ILL requests. While resource sharing continues to be a very cost effective way to handle requests for materials not owned by the local library, the real costs of borrowing sometimes exceeds the cost of acquiring. This is especially evident when real costs are applied, i.e. lending charges, copyright royalty fees, this makes purchasing alternatives such as books (from Internet book markets) or articles (from publishers) a great strategy. This graph shows some real cost of ILL for book titles borrowed by Geneseo, where lending libraries charged fees (rent) for books, juxtaposed with Amazon prices and sorted by the number of libraries (in green) holding the title. These are just three important variables within the design requirements needed for a Get It system, a next generation ILL/Acquisition system.
For anyone curious about some of the titles in the graph, here are a few examples that may be of interest...
So, what I am sharing is a bit of the fun realities that happen when processing requests to borrow items users ask for.
I could also show how many articles that are borrowed, which may cost $10-15 because of lending charges, plus the cost of paying royalty fees of about $30 per article, exceed the cost to buy the article directly from the publisher... but for this post, I want to stick with books...
When the price of new and used books is lower than the cost to borrow, it makes sense to buy the item - depending on the strategies that makes sense to your library, i.e., I may want to buy books that are under $30 and held at fewer than 10 libraries in Worldcat, etc. In fact, we can all think of lots of strategies that would make sense for this design; Desirable LC#, Publisher, all the fun knowns - please post replies with your favorites.
To make these variables useful and valuable, the Get It System could learn from a useful tool called Book Burro: http://www.bookburro.org/
Example of how it searches a highlighted ISBN on any website in Firefox and provides an elegant and useful result set.
While these are a few thoughts about the future of a Get It System, the design requirement phase is underway, so any suggestions are very welcome.
Why is this so important?
One reason: What is increasingly evident is that library monograph budgets are in steep decline, which leads borrowing activities to increasingly request materials outside their cool and free friendly library groups, to libraries that charge lending, I mean rental fees. By getting it if it costs (and makes sense), the cost-benefit is that you fulfill the user's request and diversify your library groups holdings. I promise to fill in lots of blanks here, but that is the short answer to what the heck is a Get It System, much more later - comments and suggestions are very welcome. Best wishes.
For anyone curious about some of the titles in the graph, here are a few examples that may be of interest...
1 comment:
Cyril--I agree it's wise to separate loans from articles as we rethink the possible options for "getting". The "costs" are not just the fees and return postage, but the costs/work on the lending side as well.
I'm not sure I understand your chart however. What should I be seeing as the relationships? You have 3 pieces of data for each of the books? How many requests did you analyze here? I want to see if the data was sorted by Amazon price rather than WC holders.
These days, whether a library would want to retain a requested book they purchased is less certain too, as we consider the costs of adding to and storing a collection.
We'll talk at Midwinter! Keep posting.
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