Special ILLiad meeting - an informal discussion group

Great discussion, about 25 people participated in an informal afternoon group meeting designed to discuss ILL’s several key issues about the future of resource sharing; pay-per-view articles, direct request for articles, and lending e-books.

What makes these issues key?

Pay-per-view

Cyril opened the discussion with asking attendees who buys articles directly from publisher websites – almost everyone raised their hands, none seemed happy with their workflow; it’s obvious that ILL workflow is changing rapidly as emergent sources mature; purchasing prices are at times better than borrowing and/or copyright royalty, color PDFs, etc.

Lars Leon shared a model they are piloting; they are utilizing RapidILL: http://rapidill.org/ to route requests for articles they want to purchase from Elsevier online using institutional pricing (in the low $20s, while the royalty fees for an ILL that exceed 5 of 5 is $30+). They do this by simply exporting their list of 5 of 5 titles to RapidILL and making them appear as local only and local holdings – so their borrowing requests are kicked back as locally owned, but also shows obvious link to Science Direct. This saved considerable money, but the speed of service may have also increased the use to eat up any cost-savings.

Cyril shared that years ago he set up the Interlibrary Loan delicious website to include pay-per-view article suppliers, but in order to really integrate and streamline the workflow; a registry for pay-per-view websites is needed. As a group we discussed the criteria and workflow elements for integrating these sources, including the need for data such as price, delivery format, etc. An interesting issue came up that publisher idiosyncrasies exist – Wiley will subscribe you to the journal if you purchase a set number of articles online; other issues include challenges of registry and account management.

OCLC Direct Request for Articles

Great news from Katie Birch, OCLC – OCLC’s team is about to start beta testing their unmediated article request system that uses a knowledge base that works similar to IDS Project’s ALIAS http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/200929.htm; it will incorporate intelligent detect electronic holdings with ILL rights, and print holdings, and develop lender strings like direct request for loans; it will also allow libraries to load ERM data; ILL OK, ILL NO, and Silent (for local interpretation). Phase 1 testing is set for May, with Phase 2 testing in August; and this service will be offered at no additional cost (cool!). OCLC is attempting to work with SFX and Serials Solutions to make it easier to ingest journal article data for libraries to use this service. Hope everyone works well together, because we need all these projects to run smoothly to smooth out our workflow; and unmediated requesting of articles is GREAT!

Ebook lending

Perhaps one of the most uncertain ILL workflow is lending ebooks. Cyril led a discussion of the topic and shared screenshots of an evolving process developed to handle Springer ebooks that have ILL rights, as well as, workflow details used by Colorado Alliance, and Oregon State University. It was obvious that the attendees all feel challenged by ebook lending, and that no one had a best practice; similar to electronic journals – attendees stated the importance of securing ILL rights with ebooks – even though the process to lend them seems clunky, although not compared to paging, mailing and receiving returns. Attendees recommended talking with everyone; acquisitions and electronic resource librarians, publishers, etc. to work on this. The reason this is important, most packages, and Google Books subscription, do not allow ILL Rights – so more and more monographs are locked out from resource sharing. It seems obvious the problem is growing; more libraries are deflecting these, some books are ebook only, and the question is how to handle the workflow.

Question: Direct Request normalizes to print not the electronic book record? Because it is ISBN normalized to LC record, normalizing doesn’t always direct ILL requests to print record.

Consensus recommendation: educate ourselves with ILL rights on ebook packages.

Meeting open forum discussions:

• Serial cut impact on ILL
• Big packages are next to cut, this is problematic for ILL; we need to talk with vendors and make titles a la carte in packages.
• Assessment of increases and decreases in ILL – what is causing trends that libraries are seeing?
• Question: Should we continue to use the print record and not utilize the electronic holdings record in OCLC? Answer depends – check the cancellation reasons for requests placed on electronic holdings – are they being deflected by your partners? Highly likely, so depends on the data.
• Some libraries are adding text to make users place requests thoughtfully / judiciously: “ILL requests generally cost between $5 to $50 / item, and is paid for your research and educational purposes by your library.” Discussion revolved around the desire for education and transparency, versus the need to not deter researchers.

For more information about the special ILLiad meeting - just send cyril@geneseo.edu an email for the brief minutes and handouts.

To share your ideas for less clunky workflow for pay-per-view articles and lending ebooks - please add your comments - thanks.