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.