User initiated interlibrary loan Available to Purchase

Technology can enable users to place their own ILL orders. Should libraries make this available? What are the financial and organisational consequences if they do, and what do they risk if they do not? Since September 1996 Aalborg University Library has offered subsidised unmediated ordering to faculty and employees of Aalborg University via UnCover. The paper discusses the results to date of this experiment (the first of its kind in Denmark), its costs and its effect on the Library’s ILL patterns, and what the immediate future holds.