In this issue
Article Type: Editorial From: Interlending & Document Supply, Volume 37, Issue 4
The ups and downs of the prospects for interlending and document supply are like an English summer; overall decline is punctuated by impressive increases,some of which are described in this issue. Shortly after your editor presses the button to send this issue off to the publisher he will be winging his way to Milan, second city of Italy, to the 75th IFLA congress. The Document Delivery and Resource Sharing Section holds an open session and it is an opportunity to meet colleagues from all over the world. And as the printed version of this issue rolls off the presses in October we will be assembling for the biennial ILDS conference, this year being held in Hannover Germany. The agenda looks excellent and can be seen at http://www.ilds2009.de/ This journal will publish a selection of papers presented there – usually revised and updated for publication.
As for this issue – in 2003 Danuta Nitecki and Carol Jones presented on what was then the fairly new service, Borrow Direct, at the ILDS conference in Canberra. Now they update with the help of their technical expert –Jeffrey Barnett. As the name implies Borrow Direct is a service for the unmediated lending of books within a consortium – now expanded to include seven US East Coast universities with plans to expand out to the west. Nearly a million books have been requested in ten years of operation and it has clearly been a great success – both in terms of satisfaction and in driving down costs. Given that it has achieved over 85 per cent satisfaction rates it is surprising that it has not been emulated more widely. Also from the US, Sherry Buchanan gives a scintillating run through of the resources available “to connect patrons with materials to meet their needs”. Thomas Deardorff and Heidi Nance evaluate the enormous and positive impact that WorldCat Local has had on the document supply of both returnables and non-returnables at the University of Washington. Joachim Schöpfel appears again in our pages with his co-author Hélène Prost. They have updated their 2004 study of the impact of grey literature and open access on document supply by investigating five major document suppliers. Their article contains much valuable information about the activities of these five suppliers and thoughtful assessments about their future. From the UK, we publish an update on the developments at SUNCAT,the very successful serial findings tool by Zena Mulligan. From India Sanjay Desale and his colleagues give a highly critical evaluation of the document supply service provided by 22 Indian university libraries to all the other university libraries in India. Searching is slow, satisfaction rates are poor– as low as 24 per cent – and delivery is slow. The service is free to users but as a result many articles are not picked up at the library. Recommendations are made for improvements. From Uganda Maria Musoke describes the ways in which the users of Makerere University are supported with a document supply service but also how the university in turn supports the information needs of Ugandans outside of the university. The supply of newspapers via document supply must rank with theses and music scores as some of the more difficult material to obtain. The British Library has embarked on an ambitious programme of digitising much of its vast collections of newspapers and transferring the physical stock to a new state of the art facility at Boston Spa. Progress is reported and put in context by Patrick Fleming and Ed King both at the British Library. One of our regular contributors, Stephen Prowse,provides a review of “Profiles of best practices in academic library interlibrary loan”. And as always your editor provides a review of the recent LIS literature. Of particular interest is that 26 of the 52 articles referenced are available freely on the web.
Something I hope for everyone in this issue!
Mike McGrathEditor
