Editorial
It is nice to see that ILDS was one of the five journals chosen by CILIP members, (the UK professional body for librarians), to be part of a free-to-use membership benefit package. Document supply still has a vigorous tail to wag!
Volumes of paid for document supply as such may have declined in the last few years but the overall “consumption” of documents is ever increasing. Projects such as Google Scholar for articles and Google Book Search for books suggest that document supply volumes will increase again. If you wanted to actually read a book found on Google would you print it off or order a copy from your library? I know what I would do and it would not exercise my printer. Or if you want an article that is locked behind digital walls – will you pay for it – as an end-user with an added copyright fee – or will you order it through your library? Again I know what I would do and my credit card would not be exercised. Of course much material is becoming accessible free via the web and this trend will not only continue but will accelerate as mandation spreads. However, Digital Rights Management will ensure that much material is only available at a charge and material free in theory may be difficult to access in practice: at least until we achieve full inter-operability between institutional repositories. The role of document supply librarians – if they are smart – will be to reposition themselves as knowledgeable gatekeepers, skilled at guiding and directing end-users through the paths in the increasingly complex digital jungle.
This issue again covers a lot of territory both geographically and by subject. Stephanie Taylor, a regular contributor to ILDS with her popular guides to concepts and services, writes on Google Scholar. Our French colleagues write the second in a series of three articles that use the vast database of INIST, the French document supplier, to analyse the change in relevance of citations in relation to document supply. OhioLink is a well-known resource sharing network and the Director, Tom Sanville brings us up to date with developments and thoughts for the future. The ever productive David Reid and his colleagues write on the new inter-lending service between New Zealand and Australia. Electronic signatures have held up improvements in document supply at least in the UK. Now Graham Titley from Plymouth University describes the system that has been introduced at Plymouth in order to speed the process. Once more in the Antipodes, the Australians have done a lot of work on benchmarking document supply for best practice and we publish an article from two Australian librarians that describes the benefits that have been gained. We carry an article from TALIS that describes their new business model for resource sharing; while it is clearly promoting TALIS we feel that it should help to clarify and answer some questions that readers may have about this new model. Finally we have, as always the Literature review which once again has burst its banks and much must be held over. Librarians and information professionals generally are very bust writing these days!
Mike McGrath
