Editorial

Article Type:

Editorial

From:

Interlending & Document Supply, Volume 41, Issue 4

This issue shines a spotlight on several of the more pressing trends affecting academic ILL departments today – the drive for adequate assessment tools to help us design and measure the effectiveness of the services we offer, our increasing reliance upon ebooks and the challenges imposed by these new resources, and the effects of unmediated ILL requesting on the relationship between collection development and interlibrary loan.

Mak, Ellingson and Lancaster, in an elaboration of their joint panel presentation at the 2013 American Library Association Annual Conference, demonstrate the various ways in which data can be used to help design, implement, and measure the effectiveness of ILL and document delivery in academic libraries. The University of Notre Dame’s Resource Access and Delivery (RAD) Team relied upon historic data to demonstrate how their users’ overwhelming embrace of self-checkout made it a good option for a newly created campus document delivery service, and led to a decrease in demand at the circulation desk which freed up staff time for other duties such as checking out ILL materials to users. Historic data also proved useful in analyzing circulation trends by both day of the week and hour of the day and weekend use of ILL services by graduate students, allowing for further refinements of both services. Qualitative data performs a different role entirely. Where historic data provides a reliable summary of actual transactions, qualitative data can be used to characterize or describe information using open-ended questions and “free-form text boxes in which a respondent can enter anything using his or her own words.” While it can provide a more nuanced picture than historic data, qualitative data does create challenges in coding and accurately reporting survey results. Emory used yet another approach to analyze their ILL data, relying on a “deep dive” to uncover why ILL borrowing levels were lower than expected and even decreasing despite the fact that fill rates and turnaround times were high. The authors go into detail about the statistical tools they used, how these were applied at their respective institutions, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Readers interested in assessment of their ILL operations will find this article especially useful.

A different approach to assessment is the subject of Lars Leon and Carol Kochan’s paper on best practices. In 2002 the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) instituted its Group Interlibrary Loan Best Practices Framework. Ten years later, the authors review this framework to determine which practices – conceptual, structural, and procedural – are still valid and assess their impact, real or potential, on the consortium’s goal of providing fast and efficient services to their shared collections. The largest impact, by far, was the establishment of turnaround time benchmarks and a semi-annual report that listed all member libraries’ turnaround times. Monitoring each member library’s performance afforded ILL managers the opportunity to see how well their lending services performed in relation to minimum expectations and to their partner libraries’ performance. Expanding the types of materials eligible for interlibrary lending (e.g. media formats), improved technology such as unmediated request systems, and a commitment to adequate levels of staffing were all practices that contributed to the improvement of ILL services throughout the consortium, thus ensuring the Best Practices Framework’s success. Leon and Kochan’s work provides a unique contribution to the discussion of best practices, and demonstrates clearly the aggregate benefit to be gained when all members of a consortium apply the same best practices in an agreed-upon manner instead of limiting their application to a single institution.

Ryan Litsey and Kenny Ketner address head on the challenges of lending ebooks through traditional ILL channels. While ebooks have proven themselves popular in academic libraries and afford our users many advantages, they also present ILL staff with numerous technological and legal challenges that, if not resolved, threaten to undermine the long-standing tradition of interlibrary loan. Ketner and Litsey propose a model for interlibrary lending of ebooks that would locate titles within a lending library’s ebook collection, package the title for electronic delivery, upload it to a central server, send a link to the requesting library or the end user, and then delete the file at the end of the loan period, thus ensuring compliance with the lending library’s license agreement. To date, technical barriers have precluded ILL systems from introducing such functionality. As veteran ILL librarians ourselves, we long for the day when ebooks can be readily shared with our ILL borrowing and lending partners and requests filled with the click of a mouse.

When libraries in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalian region introduced unmediated ILL requesting they severed the relationship between ILL and collection development librarians. EVA is their attempt to strike an appropriate balance between unmediated ILL requesting and reviewing those requests to identify suitable items for purchase and addition to the local collection. López and Mayr describe EVA’s underlying concepts and processes for patron-driven acquisition of print materials requested through interlibrary loan. In production since October 2011, EVA compares ILL requests against library profiles and specific criteria such as language or date of publication to determine whether they should be diverted to collection development or sent on to ILL. Requests for titles that might be considered for acquisition are presented to the respective subject librarian who then decides if the request should go through ILL or if a purchase is the better option.

This issue closes, as always, with the incomparable Mike McGrath’s quarterly literature review. This issue’s lit review highlights the issues of document supply, Big Deals, and open access as well as other topics of interest. We recommend giving Mike’s article a close read – you’re bound to end up with a very lengthy must-read list by the time you’re done.

We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed working with the authors to put it together. Our next several issues will highlight papers from the recent IFLA World Library and Information Congress in Singapore as well as the 13th Interlending and Document Supply Conference in Beijing, so read this issue cover to cover – and be on the lookout for the next one!

Mary Hollerich

Co-Editor