ILL and so much more...

  There's no getting away from the fact that since the 1990s heyday ILL requests have steadily declined mainly due to the extensive electronic journal and e-book packages available particularly to academic libraries. This is good news for our customers who, with a click of the mouse can access the full text of the item they require. There is still a thriving market for loan requests and rather than the c.70/30 split there once was for loan/article requests we have moved more to 50/50. Interestingly our level of supply to other libraries has remained constant with no reduction and we see this as having equal importance to our own users' ILL requests.

So does this mean ILL staff can put their feet up now we handle fewer traditional ILL requests? Of course it hasn’t! It has however led to losing a full time post along the way but the team that remain, all 2.3 FTE of them, now get to add several specialist services to their portfolio of talent, including digitisation of chapters and articles to upload to reading list software, creating bespoke documents for the visually impaired through our alternative format pilot service, book and copy delivery to off campus users including those at our London campus so diversification is now the name of the game.

Along with many other ILL practitioners we gave a big cheer when the new copyright legislation came into force in June that enables libraries to supply from electronic journals without the need to check licences. We are however frustrated by those who still feel this may not apply to them and continue to refuse supply. The message is taking too long to get across but events such as our FIL@BLDSC day this Friday can only help to rectify any misapprehension. Looking forward to seeing many of you there!

 

  Lesley
University of Liverpool