Editorial

Citation

Mak, M.H.a.C. (2012), "Editorial", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 40 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILDS.12240baa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Interlending & Document Supply, Volume 40, Issue 2

Dear readers, this issue concludes the two-part proceedings of the 12th Interlending and Document Supply (ILDS) Conference (www.ilds2011.org), held in Chicago on 19-21 September 2011 (part 1 of the proceedings was presented in vol. 40 no. 1 of this journal). As your humble journal editors were also active members of the conference planning committee, we are doubly pleased to present you with many (though not all) of the papers presented at that meeting. In this issue, you will find papers on topics as wide-ranging as resource sharing technology, cost analysis, ethics, and more.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that advancements in technology were a recurring theme of the conference. Oberlander and Rivenburgh lead us on a guided tour of the IDS Project, a New York-based collaborative that has spawned such innovations as: a performance analysis tool; an unmediated requesting service for electronic journal articles; and a toolkit that provides ILL users with Amazon book reviews and links to free e-book sources such as Google Books and HathiTrust.

Needless to say, technological advancements are not limited to the US. Mangiaracina and Tugnoli provide a thorough review of Italy’s newly-updated NILDE system, which boasts a multilingual user interface, links to national and union catalogues, a load-leveling algorithm, and a bibliographic citation management system. Yao and Zeng take us further eastward and introduces us to the China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS), which refers to both the cooperative itself and its ISO ILL-based system, used by member libraries to request ILL and document delivery services from over 60 designated supplier libraries.

If you have ever had difficulty locating Russian language materials, you will want to read Kinslow’s paper on this topic. He reviews some of the challenges in obtaining materials due to multiple methods for transliterating Cyrillic titles and authors to the Latin alphabet, then goes on to review some of the best library collections and online booksellers in the US, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Managing costs is always a challenge, but Leon and Kress have just made it a bit easier by creating a cost analysis tool that can be downloaded by any ILL manager for purposes of evaluating internal ILL costs and informing local decision-making.

The 2011 ILDS Conference broke new ground by exploring other forms of library collaboration, such as cooperative collection development, consortial approaches to patron driven acquisitions (PDA), and large-scale digital repositories.

Collins provides an excellent overview of the Borrow Direct cooperative and goes on to discuss how research libraries might overcome their reluctance to enter into cooperative collection development ventures by devising resource sharing partnerships and streamlining ILL operations to the extent that they can replace significant portions of local collections. Wiley and Clarage report on four PDA programs undertaken by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, either on its own or in partnership with the Illinois-based consortium known as CARLI. And if that were not enough, Eden and Beaubien provide an overview of the HathiTrust digital repository and how access to its contents is affected by US copyright law, then describe how such repositories might eliminate many of the barriers to sharing physical resources.

The ethical implications of resource sharing in the digital age are the subject of Posner’s paper. She presents an overview of major ethical challenges related to digital resource sharing using a framework of four key ethical theories: justice as fairness, utilitarianism, rights theory, and common good theory. Massie concludes our ILDS conference proceedings with a look to the future through five forces that are likely to significantly affect interlending operations: the transition from print to electronic materials; legacy print collections; mass digitization projects; competition from other information providers; and copyright. While others have predicted our demise as a result of these same trends, Massie predicts a brighter future for our little corner of the library world. His analysis is cheery reading for anyone who thinks ILL may be facing the same destiny as the dinosaur.

If the ILDS conference proceedings get you thinking about ways of improving and expanding your local ILL, document delivery, and resource sharing operations, then be sure to take in Mike McGrath’s always excellent literature review. After reading his current lit review, you are sure to come away with at least a dozen must-read papers on topics such as open access, copyright, scholarly communication, ILL and document supply, the Big Deals, and patron-driven acquisitions.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we did.

Mary Hollerich and Collette Mak