Electronic article supply – making life EASY‐er for all Available to Purchase

This paper examines EASY, a two‐year document delivery pilot project run jointly by Ingenta and Lancaster University. The main aim of the project is to test the feasibility of satisfying inter‐library loan (ILL) requests directly from publishers’ digital files. These requests would otherwise have been satisfied by either photocopying or scanning by the supplying library and sent either to the requesting library or directly to the end‐user. The service is not a separate ILL service; using the OpenURL standard it is designed to be integrated with and complement existing ILL services. The concept is being tested with ILLOS, Lancaster’s widely implemented inter‐library loan management system, working alongside Ingenta’s electronic full‐text document supply service. The second phase of the project will consider extending the service beyond ILLOS and Ingenta to other suppliers and other interlending document request management systems.