10th ILDS Conference Singapore

10th IFLA Interlending and Document Supply Conference:

Singapore National Library, 29th – 31st October 2007


Resource Sharing for the Future – Building Blocks to Success



The Conference covered many papers, ranging from discussions about how various libraries have handled the automation of requests for documents, the continual decline in requests being placed in many library systems to the increase in requests in other library systems plus the dreaded copyright.


I will, however, only cover information from a few of the papers presented, not because the others weren’t of interest just that the major theme/s running through them are picked up by the papers I have selected.


Keynote 1:
Our World and Its Impact on Document Supply
Mike McGrath

The rise and decline of ILDS statistics is one point mentioned by Mike Mcgrath, editor of Interlending and Document Supply journal, and the first keynote speaker of the conference.

In his paper McGrath postulates that the times they are a changing, but questions ‘why’ is it changing and ‘why’ so fast. It basically comes down to economic imperative comes the quick reply. Whose economic imperative, the Publishers of course. He goes on to state, as was recently espoused by our LCA manager, that libraries are being tied into ‘Big deals’ to obtain additional titles which are a marginal cost to the publisher but also enable the publisher to continue increasing prices well above inflation.

In fact, the price increase for journal titles, and the ‘big deals’, has for many years outstripped the inflation rate of the major countries including Australia. Unfortunately research has shown that the additional titles in a package aren’t necessarily needed. An Analysis of OhioLink’s 6000 Big Deal titles showed that half of all journals account for about 93% of usage – in other words 3000 titles account for only 7% of usage and are therefore good candidates for document supply.

McGrath suggested that the assumption was that librarians would have struck a new balance betweens journals they want, journals the publisher wants them to have and document supply. This has not happened.

Open Access is being pushed in many quarters, and may contribute to the further decline in document supply requests, however in the interim this may lead to librarians spending more time sourcing OA documents freely from repositories with which end users are not familiar.

One issue that may increase the movement to OA is restrictive DRM technologies. In itself DRM can increase the use of paid-for document supply as subscriber libraries find it less easy to share with colleagues in other libraries. As some publishers start to provide a pay per view option other document suppliers may be threatened, the one positive for other suppliers at present is the economic imperative is still alive in that the publishers are currently charging very high fees. The dilemma for them is price too cheaply and it erodes the attractiveness of Big Deals and even individual subscriptions, but price too high and no-one willingly would use the service.

RD 3.1:
ractice and Development of Document Supply Service in Shanghai Library
Zhou Chenyao

The paper presented by Zhou Chenyao, although in the main talked about the historical background to the setting up of various document supply services there were 2 interesting points made.

Firstly, since 1998 the Shanghai Library now participates in the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Service. In addition, in 1994, they have also started an experimental Pay-Per-View system for Chinese technological periodicals. Payment for this second service can be made using a mobile phone messaging service.

A second point of interest, also touched on by McGrath, is that although document supply in many countries is declining, in others document supply is either peaked as in America, or is increasing as in such Denmark, Italy, India and China.


Shanghai Library

TE 2.1:
Developing a New Generation Tool for Document Delivery
Silvana Mangiaracina et al

The usage in America is attributed to the money available to US institutions to pay for document supply. This isn’t necessarily a factor for the other countries that have shown an increase though, but one thing can be said to be the same across all countries, and that is the access to tools to locate the information is increasing. This includes, as mentioned in the papers for Denmark, the introduction of a national catalogue such as bibliotek.dk in Denmark and the continuing collaboration within countries to provide that seamless access to collections as in the case of Italy and the NILDE system.



NILDE, Network Interlibrary Document Exchange, is a cooperative document delivery system, and as can be seen from the diagram above the uptake by libraries has been considerable as has the increase in the exchange of documents.

At present there are about 600 libraries, but only 20% of those have started to implement end-user functionalities. The system does support this, with a single authentication process after the adoption of Shibboleth. The end-user module now supports article, book and extract transactions, and interacts with any OpenURL compliant bibliographic database. NILDE anticipates an increase in end-user registrations.

Keynote 3:
Rights and Distribution: Legal problems of document delivery by libraries

Dr Harald Muller, Library Director at the Max Plank Institute for Comparative Public and International Law, Germany, gave a paper many people and several of the other presenters had been interested in attending.

Although Dr Muller is an expert in his field his paper was dry as the topic he was trying to elucidate. Bottom line ended up being that Contract law/licences takes precedence over National Statutory law.

Dr Muller presented the cases from several countries, including Canada, Germany, USA, Australia and United Kingdom. As we maybe aware the copyright law in each country differs, however in general the copyright law of the country receiving a article, whether in print or digitally, takes precedence over the law of the country supplying the article. However the Australian copyright law does allow digital copying and transmission of an article whereas many others, such as Canada, do not. Unfortunately it is usual for a vendor to ensure the licence for a ‘package’ is governed by the law of the country most favourable to the publisher, rather than the law of the country such as Australia in which the library is situated, and hence becomes the binding agreement on what is allowable in relation to document supply from those journals.


TE 2.5:
Unlimited Requesting through Automation: Leveraging technology to improve ILL service

Gary N. Johnson the resource Sharing Librarian at University of California. Santa Barbara, was a very engaging speaker and a personally interesting individual who liked to walk everywhere.

His topic revolved around the implementation of VDX software to the UCL campuses and the increased efficiencies from reviewing ILL policies, practices, and workflows as they became skilled using the software and the system expanded across the 10 campuses.

Prior to VDX requesters were limited to 20 books and 20 articles per day. After July 2003 all user categories, which included undergraduates, were allowed unlimited requesting. This did result in higher rates of requesting, though their relative proportions were comparable with a suggestion that undergraduate requests were of a simpler nature, and faulty staff and graduate students having more complicated requests. The number of requests increased for graduate students from just under 10,000 pa in 2002/03 to just under 25,000 in 2006/07. Interestingly the number of staff FTE in the ILL area dropped from 9.0 to 8.0, arguably reflecting the increased efficiencies shown in the system through automating several steps in the ILL process.

TE 2.7:
eBook Loans – An e-twist on a classic interlending service

Michael Ireland, from the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) presented a paper outlining an e-book service provided in collaboration with Ingram’s MyiLibrary division.

The switch to electronic journals and their presentation to end- users has been underway for many years, and is fairly well established as a service, although the process is itself also undergoing review as mentioned earlier with the fight from publishers to leverage the most dollar from titles, plus the Open Access lobby on the other front.

The idea behind this ILL of books service was hampered by cumbersome and costly processing, and delivery issues to remote users. Hence with the implementation of a full e-book loan model many of the inherent processing, delivery and storage issues of the physical book are overcome.

Traditionally there have been obstacles to libraries providing e-book loans to other libraries including; technology protection measures that curtail how the e-book is used; the fact that libraries typically licence e-books and do not own them. The second point does not preserve the traditional interlending model, which ultimately defeats the purpose of resource sharing for occasional needs when ownership or licensing is prohibitive for the borrower.

Whilst others such as the Ebook Library Inc. (EBL) has offered a short term loan to subscribers of their platform, including ECU, this solution meets some of the need for interlibrary lending. However it requires the EBL platform to participate and therefore Ireland believes is closer to a circulation model than ILL or DD.

The CISTI/MyiLibrary service has signed up, amongst others, Elsevier, Springer and Taylor & Francis. They have implemented a single username/password authentication after receipt of the e-book is received, streamlining the customer experience. End-users, either an ILL librarian or library patron, pays by credit card for the time limited access to the e-book


FD 4.2:
Global Library Service: A vision of building a new interlibrary loan and document delivery framework that explores successful service and workflow strategies, emergent technologies and more

This paper, with the long title, was presented by Cyril Oberlander, Director of Interlibrary Services, and University of Virginia Library.

Cyril was postulating the need for future library services to be based on the current networked resource sharing models.

This would include various strategies to help fulfil the end-users needs based upon their emerging belief in information abundance and information immediacy. To do this library services will need to embrace the emergent technologies and web services.

Examples include the practice of purchasing books that are requested, this however replicates the acquisition process, but can utilise the automated loan request system to search internet book sellers to compare costs for borrowing versus acquisition. This is no more useful than in the audio/visual interlibrary loan and distance education loan processes.

The challenge of borrowing a dvd or video can be daunting. A comparison done by University of Virginia in 2006/07 found that of over 60% could be purchased for less than the ILL cost. In addition, the purchase on demand of second hand materials also significantly satisfied end-users.

Pay-per-use and Open Access full-test options are also significant alternatives to the purchase on demand and traditional ILL process. However Pay-per-use costs can vary considerably and this is a potential leverage for librarians in using their expertise to locate the best, cost effective source. Pay-per-view could be considered for rush requests where turn-around time is critical, the need for colour copies or high quality images not handled adequately through normal ILL channels, and where the items may be limited in source, pre-prints etc.

In addition there is a continual need to review our ILL practices. Many stores are providing direct to door delivery of services, including groceries, dvd’s, liquor etc. So if our end-user wishes delivery to the door, why not? In fact “Books to your doorstep” is a co-operative Library strategy to improve user access to information by enabling homed delivery as an option in the co-operative Library catalogue operated by Denmark’s Electronic Research Library. Ost of the service varies between free and US$9. http://katalog.deff.dk/about/?lang=en

Also “Worldcat Delivery” is a co-operative direct delivery strategy and system currently under pilot at the “Montana Library Card Pilot”, giving an option of either pickup at a designated library or “mail to address”.

Basically what Oberlander is campaigning for is a move to a more open consortial, even global, catalogue with document delivery and direct delivery an option across this wider catalogue. Here we could think of possibly a single WAGUL catalogue, with the inherent possibilities that opens up.

Sabbath works

Ok, I could have gone into the last post and edit some text into it, but since I seem to actually have got a video embedded, and its working, I wasn't game to stuff it up yet again. So, see my previous post for the conclusion to this part of the exercises. Sorry, no rage against the machine type writings about this kind of fluffy time intensive social networking.

However, I can see some interesting videos being made, with a reasonably amusing script, outlining how to get out of paying libary fines; what to do in an emergency when you need to recall a book; or a spoof on the student who needs something NOW for the assignment due tomorrow, and how they should have planned/researched ealier; or how do you reference that online article which is quoting someone else on a website that doesn't have an author!!!

Embedding - a nightmare

Will it work this time, it seems to be ok in preview but doesn't show up after its posted...

Yahoo Video

Yes, anyong seems to be able to post a video or music or whatever onto You Tube or yahoo video. There are some safe guards in the form of the copyright police though.

Searching for a particular band on Yahoo Video can be disappointing, couldn't find what I wanted, but its is available via other video sites. Anyway I did discover a little gem, a great little up and coming guitarist who just needs some refining but awesome anyway, but I lost the page and I've had great difficulty finding it again.

In its place I'll go for another favourite of mine, although the quality is lacking, like it does appear to be on many of the entries on these various sites, it does provide a service showing historical (or hysterical) images from many years back. This link http://au.video.yahoo.com/video/play?ei=UTF-8&gid=2126265&vid=1209522&b=1 might appeal to those with a darker musical interest, showing a younger Ozzy when he didn't slur his speech as much, or try the version 10 years later at http://au.video.yahoo.com/video/play?ei=UTF-8&gid=2126265&vid=1209327&b=2
A contemporary band of Sabbaths can be seen at http://au.video.yahoo.com/video/play?ei=UTF-8&gid=2126265&vid=1257613&b=1 playing also near their peak, and near to disbanding.

Catching up a little with 23 Things

I've been away, now I'm madly trying to catch up in the exercises.

I've had a quick look at Del.icio.us and Technorati, and the ideas behind them seem useful on a personal level but I'm still trying to get a handle on the usefullness for the wider library connectivity to patron issues.

Yes, having one place to access your bookmarked internet favourites is handy, but I'm not sure how this helps the library advertise or provide the enduser relevant information. Its an organisational tool, and if the enduser doesn't decide your site is of use to them they won't bookmark it.

As for tagging, yes now this is an old library trick of providing descriptors for an item ranging from the old Library of Congress headings we all love (not) through to those we make up on the fly for the newspapers cuttings we used to put in the vertical file drawers.

And my last point about making up tags is possibly the current downfall of Technorati, and anything else of a similar nature, it relies in a social networking kind of way, and we are talking social networking aren't we, in what you as an individual believe you and others will find the tagged item with best. This is the very argument as to why structured languages or thesauri for libraries were created, so we all had a standard way of identifying a similar item. I do understand that in recent literature this very issue has been mentioned, and ways of creating that identifiable set of strings is being looked at. Does this mean we will be going back to the creation of a thesaurus for social networking tagged items? I don;t think so, as of course you can argue that the very nature of these things being online means any term can be used as they are all searchable, and as many tags are being used to describe one entry it wil lead to other tagged entries with other different tags, and so on.

This then leads to the discovery, the serendipity aspect of social networking, or put another way the loss of time in your life aspect.

Late entry

Well, its coming up to Melbourne Cup time, and juts like that I've got a late entry to my Blog. hopefully people won't scratch it, only themselves.

Just came across another article about social networking, on the web that is, in the newspaper The West Australian. Find it at http://www.thewest.com.au/aapstory.aspx?StoryName=429863

Seems to mention that in the second half of 2007 we Australians have increased our social networking and chat site usage by 37% over the first half, and that Faceboook is getting increased traffic and may overtake MySpace. However MySpace controllers claim the stats can be misleading, with Facebook traffic being only short timespan stuff.

Things rings bells, I think I've seen/heard an argument like this before. Yes! On the 4 corners programme about 2nd Life, detractors claim that although there are huge numbers of registered users of Second Life, the number of active users is actually only a small percentage of those.

So statistics can be manilpulated, but social networking has certainly got the companies behind the Faces ( pun intended) trying to protect their patches.

Not about Mashups

O.k., I'm diverting again off the scheduled part of the 23 things programme, and going backwards slightly.

I was checking out an article from the 'LibraryLink of the Day' I subscribe to via email, http://www.cio.com/article/141650 and came across a link to a very good article about Wikis and Blogs, http://www.cio.com/article/122701/ABC_An_Introduction_to_Blogs_and_Wikis_in_the_Business_World/1

It covers qute well topics such as what are Wikis and Blogs, what benefits they have for businesses, and the types of techology and terminology used. Check it out, as it also gives some ideas of how some businesses have used these particular communication tools.

I'm back onto the normal 23 Things trail. So you might have noticed that I have a nice new picture on my page, courtesy of the late and very great Charles M Schulz.
Its using the blogger add a page element functionality to add a picture. A bit basic as resizing the picture option would have been really handy. Someone let me know if it is, as I couldn't see anything other than shrink to fit, which was useless.

I'll go away and have another look at Flickr and Mashups next...

A breather from Wiki's

Well, while I build up my stamina to attack those Wiki's again let me present a picture to you all from a library colleague. Many of us may have encountered a similar start to the day.

Picture this. You wake in the morning, its slightly dark in the bedroom. After your morning ablutions you stumble back to the wardrobe to get dressed. Groping in the semi darkness you feel for your shoes, or in this case you knee length boots. Your put them on, thankful that the hard part of the morning is over, make sure the dog,cat,budgie whatever is out for the day then head off to work to your nice cosy academic library.

Tottering up the ramp to the library door you feel a little off balance, is the day going to be as good as you thought it was or is it some inner ear affliction you think affecting your demeanour.

Once inside it hits you, and all your library colleagues, that although you have a similar pair of boots at home to the ones you are currently wearing, its only because you are wearing noticeably odd boots. O.k., time to go home and start the day again with matching boots.

Thanks Julie for starting our day off so well. LOL.

Flickr - the sharing site not the dolphin

Well, my first tentative forey into the Flickr world. Looks a good way of avaoding those embarrasing hard drive failures and subsequent loss of your precious family photos. Also lets me see some of my old memroies thought other peoples eyes, without having to go there in person.

Take this photo for instance, http://www.flickr.com/photos/brinkstock/1319999103/in/set-72157600951138233/ its fro my old homoe town in England. It shows the old Saxon Crosses, purported to have been erected in 653AD, and now surrounded by some loveley old drinking holes. Of course its a nice sunny day, but my memory is a bit vague on how many sunny days we used to get.

I'll check out some more of this Flickr business shortly, with its boiled potato Mashups etc.

Wiki mania???

So I had to follow instructions to get into the ECU Library Learnig 2.0 wiki thingy so I could post a comment, or even edit a wiki page.
Firstly let me say the instructions were not self evident, and a little hard to follow with a couple of steps left out. For instance putting in the search terms into the search box, but there were 3 search boxes on the page in close proximity to each other, so which one???

I tried, and actually had enrolled but didn't even realise I was, until a helpful librarian showed me that I actually was. Maybe its because I had the Sampson and Delilah syndrome today, a haircut that is.

I can see that a wiki can be a useful tool both for providing information to students, and for them to easily respond to that information or post suggestions back concerning library issues. Yes, it still does rely upon the student going to the page, but it will hang off the library webpages so could be easily accessible whilst they do other library related stuff.

RSS feeds yet again

well, having now setup the RSS feed from a database, a particular journal title, I can see that this can be useful for a researcher or someone interested in a particular topic or magaxine, or anything for that matter that will allow this feed to occur.

My biggest concern would be the need to login to somwhere, in this case Bloglines or my Blog itself, to look at these feeds. also, I have to setup the feed for those things I wish to receive. Would a student actually do this, if we wished to set up something whereby we post information of relevance, or at least what WE thought was of relevance, and wanted the student to take notice of.

If there was one single portal to receive all these disparate collections of information, library notices, feeds from databases, email from lecturers...oh, am I talking about Blackboard. Its just what as student said to me yesterday, they wanted their University email account to be more readily accessible, with their other information currently on Blackboard, without needing to navagate into one are of Blackboard then backout to then navigate into another area.

Can I see RSS feeds engaging students? Well yes, I do, but only if the techo's can give them one unified, easily navigated portal. How hard can that be, we seem to be throwing all these supposed great web2.0 functions at people, but we have to zip here and zip there to use them, and creat mutliple passwords and usernames that we end up forgetting who we really are!

RSS Feeds continued

Well, I've now added an RSS Feed from a library comic strip. This sholuld be at the top right of my blog, so go in an check it out.
I hope to see if this can be added to, so eventually doing away with my bloglines setup.

Fingers crossed.

RSS Feeds and music

Hi again, so i've gone and done the RSS feeds setup as per the instructions for week 3. Have to admit it was a little more complicated than setting up the original Blog, and having all these different places to log onto is starting to do my head in, and I'm sure there's more to come...oh my god!

Anyway, following on from my previous post, and the music angle, I found this little ditty on one of the RSS feeds I have setup. I came over from 'The Shifted Librarian' site, and I'm sure you'll all love it. Its a short song billed as A Musical Tribute to the Modern Librarian. Go to http://www.sendspace.com/file/urzye3 and have a listen, it does take a little time to download.

Music and Libraries

Well although this post doesn't relate to libraries, I was actually asked this question in a library, "who the heck is Budgie".

So I thought I'd follow something I was shown by a fellow ECU Blogger and post a link to a web page, in this instance the official MySpace page for Budgie, http://www.myspace.com/budgieofficialmyspace
So go and listen to a track or 2, and in particular one of my favourites 'BreadFan 2003', a live version of one of their earlier tracks.

I promise I'll get back to the reality of Learning 2.0 next post, but really isn't this what blogging is all about, putting things out their for others to look at and if they want, to comment on!

Remember that if you entered things under Interests on your personal blog profile, the links go through to other people with blogs that have listed similar interests.

Week 2&3

well, I've watched the video on Second Life and I must say that its like everything else we create, its made for profit. It has some interest on a basic, know how to meander in a virtual world kind of level, and if lucky interact with some like minded souls, but really, if you want anything extra you need to pay for it.

Why not just spend you money in the real world, even better go help some disadvantaged person.

As for this blog business, I wish it auto corrected my spelling. Blogs seem to be relatively one dimensional and in some ways a form of spam without people seeing it unless they wish to. Although it can be an avenue for people to vent their opinions and gain feedback which can be constructive. Possibly a step up from having an email list you send questions to, and then await a response. Or is it better???

Ramblings

well, here 'tis, the start of the ramblings from a slighlty deranged librarian. Slightly? Some may question this description, but wait awhile and I'm sure as I progress with this blog business, and the Library 2.0 project we at ECU are embarking upon, I will become ever more 'slightly' deranged.

Here's to week 3...