Not Your Mother's ILL: Rethinking Resource Sharing

Who's rethinking resource sharing?

Barbara Preece, Executive Director, Boston Consortium, Inc.
bpreece@blc.org

Michael Colford
mcolford@bpl.org

Evan D. Simpson
esimpson@brandeis.edu

Susan Applegate
sapplegate@bpl.org

and others...

Current trends in Interlibrary Loan:
World Cat Local replacing InReach

• ILLIAD being used
• Instead of Interlibrary Loan, vendor to supply what patrons want
• Digital Library Federation (diglib.org)
• Vendors are supporting this sharing circulation code to increase Interlibrary Loan
• New applications are being added (Patron holds; Patron self check-out)
  
  FULL TEXT DIGITIZATION
  Google Scholar and others
  
  FOUR SUBGROUPS
  Policies and Cultural Issues
  User Need
  Delivery
  Interoperability
  

POLICIES
Let my materials go!
Still discussions going on about whether materials should circulate beyond the owning library. Access vs. Ownership issues still cropping up but people need to let it go.

RADICAL POLICY IDEAS
Floating collections
Purchase on demad & give to requester; Bookswim.com
Direct delivery to patrons from lending library
No due dates, no overdues
etc.



INTEROPERABILITY ISSUES
Issues need to be listed and categorized to deal with some typical resistance:
"That's just the way we have done it!"
'How does that effect my workflow?"

DELIVERY
Statewide study of delivery is beginning
New ways to delivery
Using the postal service
Scan-on-Demand - items out of copyright and "orphaned works" -> scan -> send
(orphaned works are still in copyright, but out of print, and released from publisher)
Send patrons the link to already scanned books (American Libraries)
Offer patron option to purchase
etc.

Boston hopes to expand beyond the OCLC requests.
Local patrons are not served by these services

Other issues:
Electronic Resource Management
How do we tap into the resources?
How do we resist creating silos?
How can we find out what has been digitized?
How can we bring all the people who are involved in these systems (vendor databases, libraries, other collections) together?
Patrons are using new things to bring them to resources


Rethinking Resource Sharing, Northeast Chapter being formed!
This ILL, New England Chapter, hopes to serve as a "think tank" for service
-Small working group to plan (10 to 12 people) - BLC Initiative
-A day long symposium on resource sharing in the fall, perhaps at NELA
-Who should attend:
-Reference
-ILL
- Collection Development


-Policies need to be developed


"Your patrons are Our patrons" - "Interlibrary Loan is a popular library service, so we (librarians) should make it less restrictive to keep libraries more relevant.

Be sure to find out more about:
Scanning Center at BPL
10 cents a page and archive
Adept scribers that will scan


http://www.blc.org/news/blc_oca_release.html