Monday 3 March 2014

The Value of IFLA Vouchers





Although I imagine many UK interlenders are aware of IFLA vouchers and how they are used I would boldly suggest that there are just as many who are not. Having attended a number of FIL Conferences in the last few years I have met many people new to the world of Interending.  Those in the UK know that most requests can be fulfilled by the British Library and by other libraries generously supplying this material to us.  There is however the (usually single digit) percentage of requests that need additional steps in order to be fulfilled.  Of course some use the British Library to find it for them.  Since I have not used the British Library’s ‘Get It For Me’ service I can’t comment on its effectiveness in fulfilling requests that can’t be fulfilled by a UK supplier.   

King’s College London uses OCLC WorldShare ILL to fulfill a decent number of those requests that can’t be located in the UK.  OCLC ‘s stronghold is still North America. Although increasingly users worldwide are subscribing to WorldShare ILL (and supplying through it) what do you do for the large number of libraries worldwide that don’t use OCLC?  In my experience you can still use IFLA vouchers.  The IFLA voucher system has been around since the mid 90s and was the idea of Graham Cornish, then the UAP (Universal Availability of Publications) Programme Officer.  Graham mentioned in his keynote presentation at the 2013 Interlend Conference that initially the idea of a voucher system was met with considerable skepticism.  The system was trialled and over time it became incredibly successful.  It’s successful to a point where it really is one of the most globally recognised ways to share library resources.  I think the beauty of vouchers is found in their simplicity.  IFLA vouchers have the same value worldwide.  They can be purchased from IFLA HQ and they can be ‘sold back’ to IFLA also.  There’s no real reason to do this though unless you find yourself with a considerable excess of the vouchers.

Further information on how they work and how to obtain them can be found here:

There’s a great article from 1995 written by Sara Gould called “A voucher scheme to simplify payment for international interlibrary transactions” in the Interlending & Document Supply journal (DOI - 10.1108/02641619510154933).  This is accessible only to those people or institutions that subscribe to the journal.  It talks about the scheme as it was emerging and explains the rationale behind it.  Of course you could try and make an IFLA request for it if you don’t subscribe.


The current value of IFLA vouchers is EUR 8 for a full voucher (which are green) and EUR 4 for half a voucher (which are red).  In a sense though the true value of an IFLA voucher is the pioneering spirit they represent.  They ask the library professional to traverse the globe in search of hard to find resources and to work collaboratively with other library professionals in order to share resources worldwide.

Mark Kluzek

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