Lending not made easy
Many publishers and related organizations are feeling their way through the question of Interlibrary Loan (ILL), and replicating the invaluable service of lending print content to other libraries. In the days where print was the predominant format for monographs, lending was relatively simple, although time-consuming. Funds were allocated for the core collection of each library, which invariably have individual focus, and where there was a deficit in the supply required to meet the demand of its patrons, they would borrow the missing resources from the next library. Surely this would be even simpler in the days of electronic content where logistical boundaries are theoretically shattered?
No. It’s even more difficult than before to execute thanks to complex licensing, DRM and a lot of uncertainty between the libraries and publishers (we outlined some of the main issues in a previous SwetsBlog post). Publishers are very keen to be able to offer as much functionality as possible when it comes to the provision of resources to end-users, including ILL, but at the same time are being cautious to not cannibalize title revenue sales. For the libraries, extra negotiations on licenses are required as well as additional technical expertise that may not already be available (source: CILIP, Ebook Acquisition and Lending Briefing). So what stage are we really at?
The playing field
A major player in the eBook aggregator world, MyiLibrary (owned by Ingram), announced a partnership with OCLC in 2011. They had approved a selection of eBook titles that would be available for short term loan access at a lending library. This currently consists of around 30,000 titles across some of the major STM publishers. This is a great start, but the overall size of MyiLibrary, with 500k eBook records, overshadows these initial efforts. It’s clear to see that publishers are in the driving seat in this situation, as they try hard to preserve their intellectual property while trying to maximize sales.
But this was not the first time. All the way back in 2003, Ebook Library (EBL) launched a set of short-term licensing options for libraries (reference taken from “The Evolution of eBooks and Interlibrary loan in academic libraries”). Later, in 2007, CISTI (Canadian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) partnered with MyiLibrary to develop a customized lending system called “eBook Loans”. The project is outlined in the following article from the journal, Interlending & Document Supply: “eBook Loans: an e-twist on a classic interlending service”.
Why is ILL important?
There are really three reasons ILL has perpetuated in the Academic library world:
- Supplemental component of a library collection to meet niche needs of few (whose needs are often not cost-effective to accommodate internally)
- Meet the content expectations of greater percentage of library patrons, especially where they use non-centralized discovery tools (e.g. Google)
- Institutional collaboration on a great scale across many boundaries
What are the current solutions?
Well, this is where it is tricky. As noted above, there are some vendors who have released certain content for short term loan. But this probably doesn’t cover the entire holdings of any given library. Where the user needs and wants are at stake, it’s difficult to see this as a solution, yet.
Other reports (such as this from CERN from 2003 in the earlier days of electronic content) state that a work around is to print the e-version of a particular requested piece of content and ship it physically as a non-return loan. The workload in managing this process is unsustainable for most libraries, and it is unclear if this practice is still continued by academic libraries.
Peer-to-peer document sharing? Piracy in the academic world has not been a major concern with electronic journal content, but for monographs it is a potential revenue threat.
Where the big solution lies
Well, not surprisingly it seems to lie with the publishers. In an editorial by the thoughtful Levine-Clark in the publication Collaborative Librarianship (Whither ILL? Wither ILL: The Changing Nature of Resource Sharing for E-Books), he discusses the confusion caused by a failure to adapt to new concepts that must be applied to electronic content; namely that ILL cannot exist for eBooks. Instead, he suggests, another license type should be standardized over publishers to allow short term (and suitably low cost) access to a particular eBook resource, without having lengthy contracts and agreements. Ultimately the objective of ILL as he puts it is, “getting a book to the user who needs it as quickly and cheaply as possible”.
"ILL cannot exist for eBooks"
This raises a couple of issues, however. Firstly, if the need to ‘borrow’ from another library is removed, is their catalogue still searchable to find content they may have access to? If the original library does not contain the full-text, or the MARC records for the desired title, then how will it be discovered? Web-scale discovery tools may have a part to play here, and are another topic of hot debate.
The second issue is related to the first – if the basis for eBook ILL is a license with the vendor, not a manual supply by the library, who is going to coordinate the negotiation of licenses to ensure that the end user is furnished with the right content when they want it, which is the expected outcome for almost anything connected to the internet?
Cost is the third issue – where is the bar set? In the case of those organizations already offering the short term loan option, it is usually set as a percentage of the full book purchase price, to make it comparable with the traditional ILL costs associated with print material.
Finally, if we are focusing on the provision of eBook titles from another library, by a mechanism such as MyiLibrary’s, there will always be titles that are not available from any lenders, and so the vendor will need to be contacted in any case to fulfill the request.
"ILL for eBooks must become patron-driven acquisition (PDA)"
ILL as PDA
Actually, what Levine-Clark is actually pointing to is that ILL for eBooks must become patron-drive acquisition (PDA), where users decide what is most appropriate for their studies and are the initiators of the request. The way it differs from standard PDA is that the license will be shorter.
In fact, this kind of micro-PDA may be beneficial for the library in several ways:
- Staff/time resources for ILL of physical material will be alleviated
- Potentially lower cost than traditional ILL (predominantly staff processing times)
- Provide real-time indicators to missing areas of the collection
- Possibly boost collaboration with publishers to reach mutually-beneficial solutions
There are side effects though. There would be a need to have a database of all eBooks available, so instead of knocking on your neighboring library door, you are actually able to search across all eBooks, and therefore all libraries.
The real question with this kind of service is the timely supply of good metadata from the originating publishers. With this, there might be an option to fulfill traditional ILL requests, but with a modern and electronic supply chain.
Q: Have you implemented ILL in your library for eBooks?
Q: Are you a publisher who provides this service for your eBooks?
A: We welcome ideas from our customers, clients and partners – please leave your comments below.
Need a solution? Find out what we can do with eBooks.
Interlibrary loans in an eBook world
17 dec 2012 Filed under: eBooksLending not made easy
Many publishers and related organizations are feeling their way through the question of Interlibrary Loan (ILL), and replicating the invaluable service of lending print content to other libraries. In the days where print was the predominant format for monographs, lending was relatively simple, although time-consuming. Funds were allocated for the core collection of each library, which invariably have individual focus, and where there was a deficit in the supply required to meet the demand of its patrons, they would borrow the missing resources from the next library. Surely this would be even simpler in the days of electronic content where logistical boundaries are theoretically shattered?
No. It’s even more difficult than before to execute thanks to complex licensing, DRM and a lot of uncertainty between the libraries and publishers (we outlined some of the main issues in a previous SwetsBlog post). Publishers are very keen to be able to offer as much functionality as possible when it comes to the provision of resources to end-users, including ILL, but at the same time are being cautious to not cannibalize title revenue sales. For the libraries, extra negotiations on licenses are required as well as additional technical expertise that may not already be available (source: CILIP, Ebook Acquisition and Lending Briefing). So what stage are we really at?
The playing field
A major player in the eBook aggregator world, MyiLibrary (owned by Ingram), announced a partnership with OCLC in 2011. They had approved a selection of eBook titles that would be available for short term loan access at a lending library. This currently consists of around 30,000 titles across some of the major STM publishers. This is a great start, but the overall size of MyiLibrary, with 500k eBook records, overshadows these initial efforts. It’s clear to see that publishers are in the driving seat in this situation, as they try hard to preserve their intellectual property while trying to maximize sales.
But this was not the first time. All the way back in 2003, Ebook Library (EBL) launched a set of short-term licensing options for libraries (reference taken from “The Evolution of eBooks and Interlibrary loan in academic libraries”). Later, in 2007, CISTI (Canadian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) partnered with MyiLibrary to develop a customized lending system called “eBook Loans”. The project is outlined in the following article from the journal, Interlending & Document Supply: “eBook Loans: an e-twist on a classic interlending service”.
Why is ILL important?
There are really three reasons ILL has perpetuated in the Academic library world:
What are the current solutions?
Well, this is where it is tricky. As noted above, there are some vendors who have released certain content for short term loan. But this probably doesn’t cover the entire holdings of any given library. Where the user needs and wants are at stake, it’s difficult to see this as a solution, yet.
Other reports (such as this from CERN from 2003 in the earlier days of electronic content) state that a work around is to print the e-version of a particular requested piece of content and ship it physically as a non-return loan. The workload in managing this process is unsustainable for most libraries, and it is unclear if this practice is still continued by academic libraries.
Peer-to-peer document sharing? Piracy in the academic world has not been a major concern with electronic journal content, but for monographs it is a potential revenue threat.
Where the big solution lies
Well, not surprisingly it seems to lie with the publishers. In an editorial by the thoughtful Levine-Clark in the publication Collaborative Librarianship (Whither ILL? Wither ILL: The Changing Nature of Resource Sharing for E-Books), he discusses the confusion caused by a failure to adapt to new concepts that must be applied to electronic content; namely that ILL cannot exist for eBooks. Instead, he suggests, another license type should be standardized over publishers to allow short term (and suitably low cost) access to a particular eBook resource, without having lengthy contracts and agreements. Ultimately the objective of ILL as he puts it is, “getting a book to the user who needs it as quickly and cheaply as possible”.
This raises a couple of issues, however. Firstly, if the need to ‘borrow’ from another library is removed, is their catalogue still searchable to find content they may have access to? If the original library does not contain the full-text, or the MARC records for the desired title, then how will it be discovered? Web-scale discovery tools may have a part to play here, and are another topic of hot debate.
The second issue is related to the first – if the basis for eBook ILL is a license with the vendor, not a manual supply by the library, who is going to coordinate the negotiation of licenses to ensure that the end user is furnished with the right content when they want it, which is the expected outcome for almost anything connected to the internet?
Cost is the third issue – where is the bar set? In the case of those organizations already offering the short term loan option, it is usually set as a percentage of the full book purchase price, to make it comparable with the traditional ILL costs associated with print material.
Finally, if we are focusing on the provision of eBook titles from another library, by a mechanism such as MyiLibrary’s, there will always be titles that are not available from any lenders, and so the vendor will need to be contacted in any case to fulfill the request.
ILL as PDA
Actually, what Levine-Clark is actually pointing to is that ILL for eBooks must become patron-drive acquisition (PDA), where users decide what is most appropriate for their studies and are the initiators of the request. The way it differs from standard PDA is that the license will be shorter.
In fact, this kind of micro-PDA may be beneficial for the library in several ways:
There are side effects though. There would be a need to have a database of all eBooks available, so instead of knocking on your neighboring library door, you are actually able to search across all eBooks, and therefore all libraries.
The real question with this kind of service is the timely supply of good metadata from the originating publishers. With this, there might be an option to fulfill traditional ILL requests, but with a modern and electronic supply chain.
Q: Have you implemented ILL in your library for eBooks?
Q: Are you a publisher who provides this service for your eBooks?
A: We welcome ideas from our customers, clients and partners – please leave your comments below.
Need a solution? Find out what we can do with eBooks.
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