THE FUTURE OF COLLABORATIVE COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT AMONG RESEARCH LIBRARIES

THE FUTURE OF COLLABORATIVE COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT AMONG RESEARCH
LIBRARIES
Steven A. Knowlton
University of Memphis, April 2, 2010
Good morning, it’s great to be here in Memphis.
Mary asked me to speak this morning on “The
Future of Collaborative Collection Development
among Research Libraries.” I’ll be doing that
shortly, but I thought you might like to hear a
little about me and my background first. I’m a
graduate of the other U of M – Michigan, that
is, and went on to study librarianship at Wayne
State University in Detroit. Since 2005 I have
worked at the publishing firm ProQuest – you
may be familiar with some of our databases such
as
ProQuest
Dissertations
& Theses,
ABI/INFORM, and HeritageQuest. My roles at
ProQuest have involved what we call
“consultative solutions”: that is, working closely
with customers to identify their collection
development interests, and finding ways that
ProQuest can help meet their users’ needs.
While I have been working for a commercial
publisher, I have also been active in library
research and have had peer-reviewed articles
published, as well as serving on the ALA
Continuing Resources Section Committee on
Holdings Information. On a personal note, my

hobbies include flag-spotting and playing the
electric bass – I’m really hoping to make it down
to the Stax studio museum and worship at the
shrine of “Duck” Dunn.

collection development and how it’s done these
days. Let’s talk about:

But enough about the past, let’s think about the
future. I’d like to get a little poll going -- just
raise your hand if you:

The key to this idea is that the cooperating
libraries have to view their various collections
not separately but as a larger body that serves
scholars at all the cooperating institutions.

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Use Google
Email colleagues at other libraries
Use Facebook or MySpace
Use wikis
Pull documents from Institutional
repositories

Well, then, you’ve already got one foot into the
future of collaborative collection development.
In a little bit I’ll explain what I mean, but before
that we should talk about what is collaborative

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Current efforts at collaborative
collection development
Challenges to the models in place right
now
How technology is both shaping
efforts to respond to those challenges
and making new models available

And throughout, we’ll be talking about how an
institution like the McWherter Library can play
a role in collaborative collection development.
Collaborative collection development is simple
in concept but more challenging in practice. In
concept: similar libraries at different institutions
can work cooperatively to manage collections
with several purposes in mind:
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Achieve cost savings for electronic

products by leveraging collective buying
power
Reduce duplication of rarely used print
materials
Develop preservation plans to ensure
that the last copy of a title is not weeded

The most common model for collaborative
collection development is the consortium. This
idea is well-known at Memphis, because you are
part of several consortia: the Association of
Southeastern Research Libraries, LYRASIS,
Tenn-Share. Consortia often apply their efforts
to the first goal of collaborative collection
development, buying electronic resources in
bulk.


Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries

Publishers will often seek out consortium deals,
for a couple reasons. One is short-term gains:
rather than have an individual price point that
forces some libraries out of the market, a
consortium deal allows more libraries to
subscribe, result in a cumulative value of all the
subscriptions that may be greater than selling
individually and losing some customers because
of the higher price.
But equally important is

exposure to new users. A person’s college years
are when information-seeking habits are formed
– if a future researcher grows accustomed to
using a particular database, then demand for that
database will continue in other libraries as that
researcher moves on in his or her career.

titles are acquired, but at the same time too
many libraries don’t waste their money on books
that won’t be read. For example, the Center for
Research Libraries is a consortium in the sense
that it receives its funding from member libraries
– but it collects scarce materials such as
newspapers, foreign books and microfilm, and
stores them in a
warehouse in Chicago.
Member libraries call upon the warehouse to
ship the materials as needed. Recent initiatives
of the CRL include microfilming newspapers
from the African nation of Liberia, and
collecting British doctoral dissertations. The
advantage to members of CRL is, of course, that
their contributions to the CRL budget allow
them access to unique materials without having
to purchase and maintain them.

So, the consortium is one model of collaborative
collection development: it does a great job of
keeping prices down for commonly used
resources.

Another model of collection
development addresses the opposite problem:
how to handle acquisitions of scarce but vital
materials?

Other efforts in collaborative collection
development are organized by the Library of
Congress. To help with collaborative collection
of foreign materials, the Cooperative
Acquisitions Program operates branch offices
around the world
to gather hard-to-find
materials in places such as India, South America
and East Africa, and make them available to
participating libraries.

Think of it this way: libraries often buy books on
the “just in case” principle – let’s get this book
in a field our researchers study, “just in case”
someone needs it.
And the result is that
libraries hold a lot of books that never had the
“just in case” occasion arise.
It’s a pretty
common finding in library use studies that books
on the shelf don’t circulate much: one group of
Connecticut libraries discovered that over half
its books hadn’t been checked out once in the
last decade.

One seemingly outdated but still surprisingly
useful tool is the National Union Catalog. The
NUC is a gigantic set of books containing
copies of the catalog cards for virtually every
book held at a large research library in the
United States before 1956. This tool allowed
libraries to determine whether a particular scarce
book existed anywhere in the country, so they
could borrow it rather than purchasing another
copy. The reason I say it’s still useful is that
many libraries never completely converted their
card catalogs into online versions – so that more
than a quarter of the titles in the NUC aren’t
found in web-based catalogs.

And that’s just books that a librarian honestly
believes somebody will use. There are lots of
books that one researcher in a million wants –
covering the minutest subset of knowledge in an
esoteric discipline. So most libraries won’t even
bother with the obscure stuff. But really,
somebody needs to have those obscure books on
hand, for that Ph.D. student who’s chasing down
his last bit of data on the post-structuralist
critiques of the hermeneutics of quantum
gravity. And that’s why libraries collaborate to
make sure this type of material gets collected
somewhere, but definitely not here.

And speaking of web-based catalogs, the last

tool I’ll discuss for avoiding duplication of
obscure books is the OCLC WorldCat database.
Libraries who are members of OCLC – and that
includes most university libraries in America –
upload their holdings to a massive database
hosted by the OCLC organization in Dublin,
Ohio (just outside Columbus – and the original

There are a number of initiatives to insure that
the most important of the obscure and foreign
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Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries

home of Wendy’s hamburgers). All the other
libraries can use WorldCat to find limitedinterest books and borrow them through
interlibrary loan.

run available to researchers. Communication
about holdings is key to making this idea work.
It’s not all upside to this kind of collaborative
collection development, however.
Libraries
have long relied on that wonderful experience
called serendipity – when you find one item you
need in the catalog – then go to get it off the
shelf and find another book right next to it that
will also serve your research.
There’s no

serendipity in interlibrary loan – you just have to
hope that the catalogers and indexers assigned
the kind of headings your researcher is looking
under. But hopefully some good bibliographic
instruction is going on and researchers are also
learning how to use citations to get to the
resources they need.

Interlibrary loan: I’ve said the dreaded words.
The drawback to all the efforts I’ve just
described is, of course, that relying on other
libraries to hold titles means they have to be
loaned via courier – necessitating a delay. Most
libraries feel that the tradeoff is worth is it,
however – delayed access for the book that
might only be used once is better than spending
money on books with little anticipated use.
That said, collaborative collection development
for scarce books is not done only by national
organizations. Regional groups also maintain
communication in order to facilitate access –
such as
the California Cooperative Latin
American Collection Development Group.
This group of ten university libraries meets
twice a year to discuss which libraries are
planning to acquire materials in which areas of
Latin American studies, and thus make
appropriate acquisitions plans to avoid
duplication.

For example, one library may
collect Caribbean serials, and another will
therefore avoid acquiring those materials.

A complement to the efforts against duplication
of low-use materials is the establishment of
informal standards to help libraries understand
the materials that every collection should have.
The American Library Association – a body
consisting entirely of librarians from various
institutions working collaboratively – issues
recommendations on “Outstanding” titles in
various fields, such as “Outstanding Reference
Sources”, “Notable Books for Adults,” and
many others. These lists are assembled on a
yearly basis and reflect newly published titles.
In addition, there are ALA-sponsored lists of
“Core Collections”: essential works in a field
that no self-respecting bibliographer should
omit. Other core collection lists are available
from the H.W. Wilson publishing company, and
many specialized library organizations such as
the Medical Library Association. These lists are
an example of collaborative collection
development because they draw on the wisdom
of many experienced librarians about which
titles are most important to gaining the basic
knowledge of a discipline.

Memphis has some special collections, like the

Center for Earthquake Research or the
Mississippi Valley Collection, and there may be
an opportunity to work with other specialized
libraries to formulate collaborative collection
development plans – for example, Berkeley’s
National Information Service for Earthquake
Engineering, or The Louisiana and Lower
Mississippi Valley Collections (LLMVC) at
Louisiana State.
The drawbacks of delayed
access would of course have to be carefully
weighed against the savings in the acquisitions
budget.

Collaborative collection development works
well for libraries in consortia to acquire shared
electronic resources, and libraries sharing
information about holdings in obscure and hardto-acquire materials.
One last element of
collaborative collection development is an area
that is part of the ethical obligation of libraries,
but that some users and other stakeholders may

I’ve been talking about books, but print serials
are another important part of this discussion.
Most libraries used to aim to collect a complete
run of their serial subscriptions – hence the
effort devoted to check-in and claims. But with
collaborative collection development, those lessused journals might have shorter runs at several
different institutions, and still make the entire

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Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries

place less value upon: I’m speaking of
preservation. Libraries – particularly research
libraries – have a duty to make sure that
information is preserved, whether digitally, in
paper or in microform (or clay tablets with
cuneiform, if you happen to be an Assyriology
library.) But that’s a budget item that can be
hard to justify to the regents.

But another surprising truth as that many
libraries don’t participate fully in the
collaborative
collection
development
organizations they belong to.
They may
continue to purchase materials that they know
other libraries already have, or they might ignore
collective decisions about the division of
responsibility in collecting for a discipline.
Several factors influence resistance to
completely
collaborative
collection
development. They include:

Again, collaborative collection development is
part of the solution. A library should never
discard the “last” existing copy of an item – so
when weeding decisions are being made, the
OCLC database can be a handy guide to
knowing whether other copies of an item exist
elsewhere. In this example, the library is the
only one holding a copy of this book – so be
extra cautious about throwing it out.
In
addition, the vast network of librarians on blogs,
emails and wikis is another way to share
preservation data – I remember when the
University of Hawaii suffered a mudslide, they
were all set to replace a large microfiche
collection by purchasing it from ProQuest – and
then another institution emailed to donate its
copy that they were planning to de-accession
anyway. A tough day for the sales rep, but an
outstanding example of collaboration between
libraries.

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Concerns about sacrificing a library’s

autonomy
Reluctance to rely on another institution
to supply part of the collection
The complexity and time-consuming
commitment
Fears that costs will outweigh benefits
And, as we discussed, delays in meeting
user needs

Regarding
autonomy:
librarians
are
professionals, highly trained for independent
judgment.
So when libraries are divvying up
collection responsibilities – it may be considered
slightly offensive to be told one may not buy a
title – even when it’s felt that a local copy is
important to have. And tied to that is a perhaps
reasonable lack of trust in other institutions.
Sure, they say they’re picking up everything of
value in Puerto Rican literature, but how can we
be sure? And when that professor needs that
anthology of Angel Lozada or that Fall 2007
issue of Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos,
will it really be available?

In preserving digital materials, some libraries are
faced with the daunting task of either printing

out or saving to disk all the journals and
database materials they subscribe to – just in
case the original publisher fails to maintain the
file,
or
the
subscription
terminates.
Fortunately, another collaborative project called
LOCKSS (for Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)
exists to preserve digital material automatically
in a peer-to-peer network. If one institution’s
digital copies are corrupted, they are replaced
with good copies from another institution.

Librarians are also busy people, and who’s got
time to keep coordinating with six other libraries
about collection decisions? Some would rather
just go ahead and directly acquire the materials
they want.
And finally, there’s a certain
amount of concern about costs – if I’m buying
all these Dominican titles, and the other library
is doing Puerto Rico, how do we know they’re
not getting the better deal? We could be
spending that money on titles we feel certain our
researchers need.

There are other digital preservation methods, but
LOCKSS is the best example of one born from

collaboration between libraries.
From leveraging collective purchasing power, to
locating scarce materials, to working together on
preservation, there’s a lot that collaborative
collection development is already doing in
research libraries.

What’s to be done about lack of cooperation in
collaboration?
Aside from changing human
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Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries

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nature, only binding agreements can have an
effect.
One method that’s been proposed in
several consortia is to require all members to use
the same book jobber – and to limit that jobber
from selling duplicate titles within the
consortium.
That way, member libraries
couldn’t buy duplicate titles even if they wanted
to. I’m not aware of any consortia that have
actually adopted that plan, however.

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A national effort to collaborate between
consortia on rationalizing print holdings
Joint operations between public libraries
and universities
Collaborative digitization to save money
and improve distribution of resources
Contributing to open web document
portals such as Google Books and Open
Content Alliance

So we’ve seen some of the reasons for
collaborative collection development – to save
money, avoid duplication, and manage
preservation – and some of the natural human
impulses to distrust collaboration. But the title
of my talk is the future of collaborative
collection development, so it’s about time we
talked about that!

Hey – I said technology was the second point,
and a lot of these are technology solutions!
Well, that’s interesting. Technology is often a
driver of change because it reduces cost, as well
as making information more freely available. In
addition to these solutions, I’ll address some
technology-driven changes that are less costcentered in a few minutes.

Like everything in libraries, there are some basic
pressures and opportunities caused by outside
forces that will have an effect on collaborative
collection development. The first we’ll address
is budgets.
The second is technology. And
you’re waiting for a third, aren’t you?
I’ll
share a little marketing secret – research shows
that people respond better to an odd number; it
catches your eye because of a psychological
quirk that makes us pay more attention to odd
numbers than to even numbers. So almost any
advertisement will have 3 or 5 selling points.
But I’m not trying to sell you anything, and
these two are enough to worry about.

As we discussed, libraries everywhere are
looking for savings through collaboration. One
place to start is through saving space.
Open
shelves in a library are costly – one estimate is
25 cents per book per year in overhead costs.
Putting the same materials in a closed storage
unit drops those costs considerably, besides
being better for preservation. Offsite storage is
becoming more accepted to researchers because
collaborative collection development, with its
reliance on interlibrary loan, has been part of the
library landscape for several decades now, and

researchers are accustomed to the wait to receive
material.

Back to my actual point – budgets!
We’re
living through the worst economy since this
place was called West Tennessee State, and the
state government is cutting funds to universities
just as almost every other state is.
And, not
surprisingly but inconveniently – serials prices
continue to squeeze the rest of the collection
budget.

But some libraries are taking that idea farther –
groups of universities in southern California,
Missouri and Ohio have pooled their offsite
storage collections into single buildings that
serve the entire region, saving on the cost of
operating separate buildings. For most, that’s
the extent of the savings.
Each library
continues to manages its offsite collection within
the shared building separately.
However, a
couple groups in central Colorado and
Massachusetts have begun managing their
offsite collections collaboratively – for example,
making deaccessioning decisions based upon the
entire corpus of books in storage, managing

interlibrary loan requests for the collection as a
whole, and operating a union catalog – with
universal circulation rights -- for all the

Now, collaborative collection development, at
least in terms of consortium buying, was
intended as a salve for sore budgets. But there
are some other developments that have been
cropping up in some places that I think we’ll see
spread because they are effective cost-cutters.
They include:
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Managing off-site storage collaboratively
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Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries

participating institutions. This solution couples
cost savings with truly collaborative collection
development that serves a large community of
researchers. This may be a trend that gains
traction – as libraries face space shortages (as
they all do eventually) and no funds to expand,
cooperative offsite storage will become an
attractive alternative.

Lyrasis will gather information from all its
members and report back to the national steering

committee of "Preserving America's Print
Resources". The conversations about collection
development policies will be easy, because
Memphis already has well-documented policies
in place.
The need to save costs isn’t limited to university
libraries, obviously; public libraries are facing
many of the some budget difficulties. In a few
cities, universities and municipalities have taken
the bold step of unifying their libraries,
including the collections.
San Jose State
University and Metropolitan State University in
St. Paul, are two universities who have
undertaken collaborative library projects. The
San Jose library is an absolutely beautiful
structure with strong collections of both popular
and scholarly material. The goal of the joint
library is to provide community members with
access to the broadest possible range of
materials, and to support the University’s
educational mission by leveraging its collection
to expand knowledge among more users.

It’s interesting to note that some offsite storage
facilities may be quite a distance from the main
library – Harvard’s is 35 miles away – so if
Memphis were to undertake a cooperative
storage project, collaboration with places as far
away as Ole Miss or Arkansas State could be

possible, as well as working with more local
libraries like UT-Health Science Center,
Christian Brothers University, Crichton College,
Rhodes College or Lemoyne-Owen College. I
hope I haven’t betrayed my ignorance of some
deep-seated rivalries with this suggestion.
Storage isn’t the only way that costs can be cut,
however. If holdings can be reduced through
collaborative collection management, then even
less space will need to be rented. There is
nationwide initiative that is looking to create a
unique method for managing collections to
reduce duplicate print holdings, called
"Preserving America's Print Resources". The
Center for Research Libraries recently
commissioned a report on proposed methods for
governance of regional and even national
collections in specialized disciplines. The plan
is for cooperation between consortia to
determine the extent of holdings nationally and
to develop plans to judiciously cull unneeded
duplicates and manage the remaining collections
under best practices for preservation.
This
project promises to have guidelines in place
within three years, and its final outcome will be
“to reduce the costs systematically and
significantly and to increase the accessibility of
heavily redundant serials holdings.” It promises
to be an important change with massive

ramifications for the holdings policies at
research libraries, including this one.
The
librarians at Memphis should be prepared for
plenty of questions from their colleagues at
Lyrasis about holdings, collection management
and preservation practices, and local priorities.

The challenges of such an approach include
managing a large collection for sets of users
with different expectations. For example, the
San Jose city council recently voted down a
proposal to install internet filters – an issue that
is not very common in academic libraries.
Shared funding can have its perils as well –
when budgets are tighter in one entity than
another, both may suffer. For example, the San
Jose library had to cut its hours recently, entirely
due to municipal shortages; in this case, the
students at the university are enduring the
consequences even though their funding didn’t
fall short.
However, the attraction of shared space remains
as a way to cut overhead and improve
community outreach.
For universities
undertaking new library construction in the
future, unification with public libraries may
come to be seen as an investment with long-term
budget benefits.

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Even if libraries aren’t willing to go as far as
operating a shared building, universities and
public libraries can benefit from collaborative
collection development.
For example, New
York University, Columbia University and the
New York Public Library have an agreement
allowing holders of a library card at one library
to use the other libraries.
With that in mind,
each library monitors the others’ collections and
focuses its acquisitions on areas where the others
are not collecting. They meet once a year to
discuss issues in collection management as well.
It’s not a formal collaboration but it does help
manage costs and serve users of both
universities and the public library.

And digitization can now be done at a lower cost
to the library. Lyrasis has created the Mass
Digitization Collaborative – it’s a program that
is operated out of Lyrasis libraries, and accepts
contributions from any member library.
Members save the costs of setting up an inhouse digitization project, as well as taking

advantage of economies of scale because Lyrasis
digitizes so many documents, and the perdocument cost is lower than it would be if a
library digitized its own materials. Digitization
saves the host library money on the costs of
access – and it saves the collaborating libraries
money on travel costs to view the materials.
Furthermore, the Lyrasis Mass Digitization
Initiative eliminates redundant scanning: all the
Lyrasis libraries host their digitized material in a
common repository, so that documents don’t
accidentally get digitized twice. And of course
it offers instant access to researchers

Dr. Ford mentioned her interest in making the
McWherter library a resource for the Mid-South
community beyond campus, and perhaps a more
structured collaborative collection development
plan with Memphis Public Library is one way to
approach this goal.

And that brings me to the fourth technologybased cost saver we’ll discuss. Earlier, we
talked about how collaborative collection
development cuts down on acquisitions costs by
eliminating the need for cooperating libraries to
purchase duplicate titles; however, it does
impose the costs of interlibrary loan, which
some sources estimate between 20 and 30
dollars per title.
Digitization is helping to
eliminate even that cost, as a digitized titles

doesn’t have to be checked out, sent in the mail
or checked in. There are a number of ways for
libraries to furnish digitized material to assist
with collaborative collection development.

Again, as budgets force libraries to reconsider
how they’re spending their funds, cooperation
between universities and public libraries may
come to be seen as an attractive choice.
Storage, inter-consortial cooperation and
public/university library unification are some
ways of addressing budget problems for print
material. But many libraries are moving toward
digitized materials as another cost savings.
That seems counter-intuitive, as digitization has
a high upfront cost.
But if digitization can
reduce other costs, it can be a cost-saver.
Consider the costs of access, particularly for
rare and unpublished materials – such as the
manuscripts in the Mississippi Valley
Collection.
Archivists must oversee the
researchers, special acid-free binding materials
must be prepared, and so on.
And for
researchers from elsewhere, the travel to
Memphis is a big cost.

You may have heard of the Google Books

program.
Google is working with several of
the very largest research libraries – it started
with Stanford and Harvard but now includes 20
libraries, including some in Europe and Japan –
to digitize books on their shelves and make them
searchable in Google.
For out-of-copyright
books, the entire text may be read, but for books
in copyright, only snippets are available. The
snippets are helpful to determine whether the
book is a useful resource that a researcher wants
to acquire through traditional ILL.
Although
Google Books is a handy way to acquire
digitized books, Google’s policies and practices
are quite controversial, as they are scanning all

If instead, materials are posted online in digital
format, then access costs are reduced to the price
of maintaining files on a server.
Not really
nothing, but minimal. It pays off if the costs of
digitization is less than the cost of access over
the next several years.
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the books on the shelf, in copyright or not,
without gaining the publishers’ permission; and
furthermore, there are a lot of concerns about a
commercial enterprise controlling content that
originated in a library. Nonetheless – if you can
find a title in Google Books, that’s one ILL
request you don’t have to process.

facing. But I think we’ll see technology impact
the way that librarians collaborate, as well.

Other digitization projects include the Open
Content Alliance. The OCA is also a mass
digitization project, but they only scan works
with the approval of the publisher.
Libraries
contributing to OCA include dozens of research
libraries around the world including many
members of Lyrasis. Books scanned by OCA
are hosted in the same “Internet Archive” as the
documents scanned by Lyrasis Mass Digitization
Collaborative. In addition to books, the Open
Content Alliance makes available computer
software, audio recordings, films and other
formats.

You’ll recall I discussed that one of the reasons
librarians may be reluctant to get involved with
collaborative collection development is the
complexity of organizing tasks among so many

people. Well, that kind of thing is a lot easier
than it used to be. Way back, people would
actually have to go to meetings. Then there
were conference calls. Then you could send an
email and have your colleagues “reply to all”
and back and forth until your inbox was clogged.
But now – you can set up a wiki – ask your
colleagues what titles or disciplines they’re
collecting, and everyone can add information on
their own time, make comments on their
colleagues’ choices, and by the end of a couple
days you’ve got a consensus and nobody had to
argue (out load, at least! – they might argue in
the wiki.) Easy peasy, as Jamie Oliver says. In
this example, librarians at Ohio University have
listed their favorite business directories.
Anyone with a password can log in and add an
entry or make a comment on an existing entry.
It doesn’t have to be a wiki, per se. You could
use the comments function on a Facebook or a
MySpace page, although that seems a bit
clumsy, and Google Docs and similar programs
have a functionality that allows many different
users to work on a shared document that’s
posted to a server. In this example, after the
original document was posted other users added
changes, shown in pink highlight. In all these
ways, librarians working collaboratively can
take advantage of social networking to share
ideas, preferences, and priorities in the blink of

an eye. As collaboration becomes easier, it may
make collaborative collection development more
feasible.

I’d win no prizes as a futurist by telling you that
social networking software is going to change
the way people communicate. But it’s still true
even if it’s obvious.

Although Google Books and OCA represent the
most truly collaborative efforts at digital
collection development – because many
libraries’ holdings are available together –
individual libraries are expanding the reach of
their holdings with Institutional Repositories.
IRs typically hold the digitized intellectual
output of a university’s students and faculty –
such as keystone projects for undergraduates,
and masters theses and doctoral dissertations,
along with research papers by faculty members.
As these types of materials are among the most
frequently requested for interlibrary loan,
creating an IR can be a cost saver as well as
exposing research to a broader audience.
To
demonstrate, let’s look at UT-Martin’s
institutional repository – here’s the home page,
where you can browse in several categories or
search; and here’s page of search results: you
can see there are master’s projects, journal

articles, and even a privately published booklength manuscript.
Shared storage, public-university library
unification, interconsortial cooperation on print
holdings, mass digitization, open web document
portals – those are some of the ways that
collaborative collection development will be
responding to the budget difficulties we will be

Although technology is moving collaboration a
lot further, I’d like to add one thought about a
place technology doesn’t appear to be taking us.
Earlier this decade, librarians and scholars took
the idea of collaboration beyond collection
8


Knowlton, The Future of Collaborative Collection Development Among Research Libraries

development and into collaborative creation – in
the form of open access journals.
There has
been a lot of hope that open access journals
would help break the stranglehold of journal
publishers. But it looks like the publishers will
be partners with us for a while, because open
access journals have not done much to displace
the more traditional titles.
One way of
measuring a journal’s value for researchers is
impact factor.

The impact factor is a
measurement of how often researchers refer to
articles published in a journal – the higher the
impact factor, the more researchers are using a
journal. This slide shows the top 100 journals in
the sciences ranked by impact factor. The only
open access journal in the list is in yellow. Not
very near the top. So, it seems that researchers
who want to access the most popular and
relevant journals will continue to ask libraries to
keep paying Lippincott Williams & Wilkins and
their ilk for some time to come.

you learned a fraction of what I did by putting
this talk together, then I’m sure it’s been
worthwhile.

That said, I believe that collaborative collection
development holds a lot of promise. First of all,
there is still progress to be made getting libraries
to overcome those barriers of autonomy and lack
of trust that are inhibiting cooperation; even if it
does require forcing a particular book jobber
down someone’s throat! Secondly, the library
community is making a serious effort with
Preserving America’s Print Resources to
rationalize print collections on a large scale.
Third, digitization is becoming less expensive
and easier all the time, and the digital bounty
available for librarians and researchers is simply

astounding.
And finally, modern social
networking is making collaboration a snap.
So there it is: the current state and future
prospects
of
collaborative
collection
development in 40 minutes. We’ve covered the
ways that libraries collaborate to save money,
manage holdings, and ensure preservation, and
talked about some of the reasons it doesn’t
always go as planned. We’ve talked about how
budgets continue to be a problem, and how
cooperative storage, national print holdings
management and digitization can help, and
we’ve discussed social networking as a tool to
make collaboration easier. It’s been a real
pleasure to go over this with you today, and if
9


Opening interlibrary loan to open access
Tina Baich
University Library, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine interlibrary loan requests for open access materials submitted during fiscal years 2010 and 2011
and to determine the impact of open access materials upon fill rate for interlibrary borrowing requests.
Design/methodology/approach – Borrowing requests for open access materials were quantitatively analyzed and compared to total borrowing
requests.

Findings – During the period studied, borrowing requests for open access materials increased while overall requests held steady. As the number of
requests filled with open access documents continues to rise, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis University Library is able to provide a
service to users and cost savings for the library by utilizing this material. The difficulty users have in navigating the online information environment
makes it unlikely that interlibrary loan requests will decrease due to the growing amount of open access material available.
Originality/value – The literature discussing the use of open access materials to fulfill ILL requests is limited and largely focuses on educating ILL
practitioners about open access and providing suggested resources for locating open access materials. This research paper studies actual requests for
open access materials and their impact on interlibrary loan.
Keywords Open access, Interlibrary loan, Interlending, Academic libraries
Paper type Research paper

Introduction

Literature review

Even though open access materials are freely available on the
internet, library users still request them through interlibrary loan
(ILL). In February 2009, Indiana University-Purdue University
Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library began tracking
borrowing requests for open access materials. As the number
of requests filled with open access documents continues to grow,
IUPUI University Library is able to provide a service to users and
cost savings for the library by utilizing this material. This paper
presents data regarding IUPUI University Library’s open access
ILL borrowing requests for fiscal years 2010 and 2011 and
describes some of the most commonly used online resources for
filling these requests.
Discussion of open access is generally focused on scholarly
journal publishing and the free availability of content either
directly from publishers or through the self-archiving efforts
of authors. Proponents of open access in this context argue

that it allows for wider dissemination of scholarly work, thus
providing authors the opportunity for greater impact. It also
lowers the cost barrier to providing content for libraries and,
in the academic world, gives the institution access to the
scholarly output of its faculty. However, many other
documents fit the general criteria of open access: digital,
online content that is both free of charge and free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions (Suber, 2010). Based on
these criteria, I include conference papers, electronic theses
and dissertations (ETDs), and public domain works in my
discussion of open access ILL requests.

There is no shortage of articles on open access, but very little
tying open access to ILL. In 2006, Karen Kohn encouraged
ILL practitioners to find both free lenders and free materials
in order to lower ILL costs (Kohn, 2006, p. 58). The section
on finding free materials describes “sites that list journals with
free full-text access and databases that either include full text
or provide links to full text at publishers’ Web sites” (Kohn,
2006, p. 61). Kohn also rightly suggests checking for online
availability of commonly free materials such as government
documents, reports, and white papers before attempting to
borrow them. Despite listing a number of resources for open
access journal articles, Kohn never uses the term open access
beyond recommending the Directory of Open Access
Journals. The sites the author recommends are still
prominent sources for open access materials.
In the same year, Heather G. Morrison discussed open
access and its implications for resource sharing. Morrison
uses the majority of her article to provide an overview of open

access, a list of specific open access resources, and a
discussion of a Canadian library network knowledgebase,
which includes records for open access journals. Where she
sets herself apart is in her presentation of possible
implications of open access on resource sharing. Early in the
article, Morrison quotes Mike McGrath’s statement that open
access “is one of the reasons for the decline in document
delivery in many countries” (McGrath, 2005, p. 43), but does

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-1615.htm

Received 29 November 2011
Accepted 29 November 2011
Published with the kind permission of IFLA,
www.ifla.org/

Interlending & Document Supply
40/1 (2012) 55– 60
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0264-1615]
[DOI 10.1108/02641611211214305]

This paper was originally presented at the IFLA 12th
Interlending & Document Supply Conference held in
Chicago, Ilinois, 19-21 September 2011.

55


Opening interlibrary loan to open access

Interlending & Document Supply

Tina Baich

Volume 40 · Number 1 · 2012 · 55 –60

not entirely accept this assertion. She suggests that increased
user expectations may result in “a decrease in routine
interlibrary loan requests, combined with an increase in more
complex requests requiring more expert knowledge and/or
more advanced search skills” (Morrison, 2006, p. 106). While
IUPUI University Library has not seen a marked decrease in
routine ILL requests, it is clear that users are locating rare
materials that do require more effort on the part of staff to
locate. Although Morrison did not present data to support her
arguments, she rightly anticipated a partial shift in ILL work.
Another article connecting open access and ILL was
published in 2010 (Martin, 2010). Martin seeks to educate
reference and ILL staff about open access resources and the
importance of maintaining current awareness of new open
resources and trends in open access. Martin’s article is less an
inventory of resources and more a primer on the open access
landscape. The author presents a concise, straightforward
introduction to different categories of open access materials.
She sees this as a way to provide a value-added service to
patrons without detriment to library departments. Martin
includes a discussion of open textbooks and educational
resources in addition to open access journal content. These
additional types of open access materials should not be

discounted in the ILL environment as this author expects we
will begin seeing requests for such items in the near future.
The literature discussing the use of open access materials to
fulfill ILL requests is limited and largely focuses on educating
ILL practitioners about open access and providing suggested
resources for locating open access materials. This paper will
present data on the use of open access materials in ILL and an
updated survey of commonly used open access resources.

department saw a 28 percent increase in borrowing requests
received, with total submissions reaching 23,210.
Total ILL borrowing requests increased slightly in FY 2010
to 23,422 submissions, of which 21,308 (91 percent) were
filled through traditional ILL, the Article Delivery Service, or
remote circulation between other Indiana University campus
libraries. In FY 2011, requests declined 6 percent from the
previous year, with 22,098 borrowing requests received and
20,093 (91 percent) requests filled through ILL, the Article
Delivery Service, or remote circulation (see Figure 1).

Open access ILL workflow
IUPUI University Library uses OCLC ILLiad as its ILL
management system, which provides greater automation and
customization of ILL procedures than OCLC WorldCat
Resource Sharing (Weible and Janke, 2011, p. 95). The ability
to create custom e-mails, queues, and routing rules within
ILLiad makes it easy to process and track open access
requests. Two custom queues, “Awaiting Open Access
Searching” and “Awaiting Thesis Processing”, prompt ILS
staff to search for open access materials before referring the

request to a potential supplier via OCLC. Items published in
the USA prior to 1923 fall into the public domain. In IUPUI
University Library’s ILLiad system, patron requests
containing a pre-1923 publication date are therefore
automatically routed to the “Awaiting Open Access
Searching” queue regardless of document type. Staff
members then use ILLiad add-ons to search the HathiTrust
(www.hathitrust.org/), Internet Archive, and Google for freely
available electronic copies. Likewise all requests with the
document type thesis or containing the phrase “Dissertation
Abstracts” are automatically routed to the “Awaiting Thesis
Processing” queue. Staff members then search the ProQuest
Dissertations & Theses database for subscription access and
the internet for the existence of an ETD if not accessible
through ProQuest.
Staff members search OCLC first for all requests that fall
outside of these two queues. OCLC holdings information
prompts ILL staff to verify local holdings and, in the case of
returnables, the library holdings of other Indiana University
campuses. Requests for returnable items held locally or within
the Indiana University library system are transferred to the
remote circulation service for processing. Through the Article
Delivery Service, locally owned non-returnable items are
delivered electronically to patrons through the document
delivery module in OCLC ILLiad. If an item is not available
locally or through the remote circulation service, the staff
member proceeds with requesting the item through OCLC
unless it is apparent from the OCLC record that the material
is open access. The staff member might also locate an open
access item in the course of citation verification. Extensive

searching for open access options does not occur for these
requests until all other borrowing options have been
exhausted.
When an open access document is located, the staff
member enters information into the request form including
the URL in the Call Number field, “open” or “etds”
(depending on the document type) in the Lender field, and
changes the System ID to OTH. The Lender field entry
allows for internal tracking of requests filled using open access
materials and ETDs. She then saves the PDF to the ILLiad
web server and sends the patron a custom e-mail notifying

Overview of institution and ILL operations
IUPUI is part of the Indiana University system, which
comprises eight campuses across the state of Indiana. IUPUI
also has its own extension campus, Indiana University-Purdue
University Columbus, located approximately one hour south
of Indianapolis in Columbus, Indiana. All Indiana University
campus libraries collaborate in a number of ways including a
shared online catalogue and a remote circulation service.
IUPUI University Library Interlibrary Services department
serves the faculty, staff, and students of the Schools of Art and
Design, Business, Education, Engineering and Technology,
Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Informatics, Journalism,
Liberal Arts, Library and Information Science, Nursing,
Physical Education and Tourism Management, Public and
Environmental Affairs, Science, and Social Work as well as
University College. The campus’s professional schools are
each served by their own library. The Interlibrary Services
(ILS) department consists of 1/2 FTE librarian, two FTE

staff members, and approximately three FTE student
employees. The University Library is an OCLC supplier,
participates in RapidILL, and uses the OCLC ILLiad ILL
management system.
In fall 2008, the ILS department began offering an Article
Delivery Service to deliver articles electronically from the
library’s print collection to patrons. Prior to fall 2008, only
distance education students qualified for this service. This
new service contributed to a large increase in requests in fiscal
year (FY) 2009 as compared with the previous year. In FY
2008, ILS received a total of 16,638 ILL borrowing requests.
In FY 2009, the first year of the Article Delivery Service, the
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Opening interlibrary loan to open access

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Tina Baich

Volume 40 · Number 1 · 2012 · 55 –60

Figure 1 ILL borrowing requests submitted and filled

places in FY 2011. A discussion of the top four document
types follows.

him of the document’s availability. The URL located in the
Call Number field is automatically inserted in the e-mail for

the patron’s reference. The email also informs the patron that
the document was found freely available on the internet.
IUPUI University Library chooses to deliver open access
documents to patrons for their convenience. In
acknowledgement of the staff time and effort required to
locate and deliver these materials, open access requests are
counted towards the department’s fill rate. If a library
preferred not to deliver the document to a user, the staff
member instead could choose to send the URL to the patron
and complete the request without actually posting the
document to the user’s account, or cancel the borrowing
request and provide the URL in the cancellation e-mail.

Article requests
Open access article requests were filled through a number of
sources, but most were located on the web sites of open access
journals or in digital repositories. Search tools commonly
used include Google Scholar, IUPUI University Library’s ejournal portal, and OCLC. The library uses Serials Solutions
as its vendor for electronic resource management. Within the
administrative module, it is possible to activate
“subscriptions” to various open access journal collections.
Thanks to this feature, resources such as PubMed Central
and the Directory of Open Access Journals as well as various
collections of freely accessible journal titles are linked through
the library’s e-journal portal. MARC records are generated
for the titles in these open access collections and added to the
library catalogue, thus providing an additional access point.
The ILS staff regularly use the e-journal portal to determine
whether requested items are held electronically. The inclusion
of open access collections in the e-journal portal allowed staff

to locate 101 open access articles. These account for onequarter of the total open access article requests received
during fiscal years 2010 and 2011 (see Figure 3).
Despite the wealth of open access titles included in the
library’s e-journal portal, 75 percent of open access article
requests were discovered through other means. ILS staff filled
an additional 81 requests using journal web sites typically
located through Google Scholar or through URLs present in
OCLC bibliographic records. Other major sources for open
access articles included university web sites, institutional
repositories, or US library digital collections (52); other
digital repositories (51); author/faculty web sites (34);
organization web sites (33); and government web sites (18).
Though targeted searches are done for difficult requests, most
of these were located with a simple Google search.
In the category “other digital repositories”, the three most
frequently used sites were Gallica (11 ( />CiteSeerX (nine ( and arXiv.org
(seven ( Gallica, the digital library of the
Bibliothe`que nationale de France, provides free access to over
a million books, periodicals, manuscripts, maps, images,

Open access borrowing requests and resources
In FY 2010, 318 borrowing requests were filled with open
access materials. The following year, 487 were filled for an
increase of 35 percent. Though these requests account for a
small percentage of the whole, many of them would have been
difficult to fill through traditional means and would have a
negative impact on the department’s overall fill rate. Over two
years, borrowing these 805 items through traditional ILL
carries the potential cost of $14,087.50 based on Mary
Jackson’s 2004 cost estimate of $17.50 per borrowing

transaction (Jackson, 2004, p. 31). Assuming borrowing all
of these items would even be possible, the cost to potential
lenders would be approximately $7,462.35 based on Jackson’s
mean lending cost of $9.27 per transaction (Jackson, 2004,
p. 31). Although there are minor costs associated with
processing open access requests, this represents a significant
savings for the library and our lending partners.
The 805 open access requests received during the two-year
period under study represent a wide range of material types
(see Figure 2). The most frequent was journal articles (405),
followed by books and book chapters (136), theses and
dissertations (108), conference papers (104), reports (44),
government documents and patents (five), and other
miscellaneous materials (three). This ranking remains
largely the same when considering individual years, with
only theses and dissertations and conference papers trading
57


Opening interlibrary loan to open access

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Volume 40 · Number 1 · 2012 · 55 –60

Figure 2 Open access requests by document type

Figure 3 Number of open access requests filled through e-journal portal

sound recordings, and scores. Text documents are freely
available and can be downloaded as a PDF. Gallica contains a
number of pre-1900 texts that would typically be difficult to
borrow from a French library. CiteSeerX, a scientific
literature digital library and search engine, was developed in
1997 at the NEC Research Institute and moved to
Pennsylvania State University’s College of Information
Science and Technology in 2003 (Pennsylvania State
University, 2010). It primarily indexes computer and
information science research articles. CiteSeerX provides
links to download open access documents from their original
locations. arXiv.org is owned and operated by Cornell
University Library. It started in 1991 as a subject-based
repository for preprints in physics and has since expanded to
include a number of science and science-related subjects.
arXiv.org now contains nearly 700,000 open access articles.

Most freely available books were located in Google Books (50
( the Internet Archive (39), or the
HathiTrust (25). IUPUI University Library utilizes the
ILLiad add-ons, which provide access to various web sites
from within the ILLiad client, to quickly check for electronic
availability of public domain books in each of these
repositories.
Google Books is an online repository of digitized print
materials. Although free full-text is not available for all
content, Google Books does contain a large number of out of
copyright monographs and journals. Google Books has a
simple, user-friendly interface and is readily accessible to

anyone with an internet connection. The metadata associated
with Google Books items is not always as complete or
accurate as that of the Internet Archive or HathiTrust, which
sometimes makes it difficult to locate an item.
Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive collaborates with a
number of institutions to collect and preserve materials. It
provides access to an extensive archive of moving images,
audio, software, educational resources, and text and serves as
home of the Wayback Machine, an archive of web pages. In
addition to housing public domain documents, there is also a
collection of open access documents. Text materials can be
read online or downloaded as PDF, EPUB, Kindle, and
various other file types.

Book and book chapter requests
Books and book chapters represented 17 percent of total open
access borrowing requests. The titles obtained were evenly
distributed in terms of their publication date, ranging from
the oldest published in 1582 to the most recent published in
2009. The greatest number of requests was submitted by
patrons from the History department (30), followed by those
from Philanthropic Studies (18) and Religious Studies (17).
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Opening interlibrary loan to open access

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Tina Baich

Volume 40 · Number 1 · 2012 · 55 –60

The HathiTrust began as a collaborative digitization effort
between the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)
member universities and the University of California system,
but is now open to other institutions. This shared digital
repository currently contains over nine million volumes with
nearly two and a half million volumes in the public domain.
Users from member institutions can log in to the HathiTrust
to download full-text PDFs of public domain materials. Other
users can view the full-text online.

Other sources for ETDs included the OhioLINK ETD
Center (ten ( and Theses Canada
Portal (nine (www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/thesescanada/)).
The OhioLINK ETD Center, a joint repository for Ohio
academic institutions, was the second most heavily used
source for locating ETDs. OhioLINK, or Ohio Library and
Information Network, is a consortium of 88 Ohio academic
libraries and the State Library of Ohio that provides statewide
access to resources and resource discovery systems. In 2001,
OhioLINK launched the ETD Center, which is a free, online
database of theses and dissertations granted by Ohio
academic institutions and includes full-text when available.
Currently, 25 of the 88 OhioLINK academic institutions
participate in the ETD Center.
The Theses Canada Portal is a service of the Library and
Archives Canada. Although launched in 2004, most Canadian
theses written since 1998 are available electronically through

the portal. The Library and Archives Canada estimates the
number of ETDs available is approximately 50,000.

Thesis and dissertation requests
When processing requests for theses and dissertations, the
ILL department first seeks to borrow a physical copy of the
requested item. Additionally, the department will purchase
PDF copies of theses from online-only institutions, such as
Capella University, for all patrons. When unable to borrow,
student requests for theses and dissertations are cancelled
with a note telling them they can purchase a copy through
ProQuest. The department will purchase a PDF copy of a
dissertation if requested by faculty. However, thanks to
increasing availability of ETDs, the department is able to
provide patrons with access to content that is often difficult to
borrow.
Of the 1,119 borrowing requests for theses and
dissertations during the period studied, 649 were obtained
through traditional ILL. The ILS department was able to fill
an additional 246 requests using remote circulation services
(28), purchasing through ProQuest (110), and locating open
access ETDs (108). This left 224 requests unfilled for a fill
rate of 80 percent. Were it not for the availability of ETDs, the
department’s fill rate for theses and dissertations would have
decreased by a full 10 percentage points.
Of the 108 ETDs obtained, only eight were written prior to
2000; an additional 21 were written between the years of 2000
and 2005, leaving the highest concentration of theses written
from 2006 to 2010. The ETDs represent the scholarly work of
five different countries. While most ETDs obtained were

written at institutions in the USA (91), ETDs from other
countries were also requested by users: Canada (12),
Australia (three), The Netherlands (one), and South Africa
(one). Florida (15), Ohio (11), and Texas (ten) led US states
in the number of ETDs requested. Results drop by nearly half
for the next states in line, California (six) and Virginia (six).
ETDs are typically located through URLs found in OCLC
records or through Google searches. Not all ETDs are
catalogued separately from print, so OCLC records for their
print counterparts should be checked for URLs in addition to
looking for internet resource OCLC records (see Figure 4).
The majority (n ¼ 83, 76.9 percent) of ETDs were located
in the granting institution’s institutional repository.
Institutional repositories are created by individual academic
institutions to collect, preserve, and distribute the collective
research output of its faculty, staff, and students. Such
repositories may include research article preprints, conference
papers, presentations, working papers, ETDs, and more.
Institutional repository metadata can be harvested by any
organisation using the OAI-PMH protocol, such as OCLC’s
OAIster database. The contents of OAIster are included in
OCLC WorldCat search results, which increases the visibility
of institutional repository collections. Institutional
repositories can also be crawled by Google, thereby making
their contents discoverable through a simple Google search.

Conference paper requests
Conference papers comprised 9.7 percent of total open access
borrowing requests in FY 2010 and 15 percent in FY 2011.
Of the 805 total open access requests submitted during this

two-year period, 103 requests were for conference papers
(12.8 percent). More than half (57.3 percent) of the
conference papers located were written between 2006 and
2009. While conference or association web sites are often the
best source for conference papers, 44.7 percent (46) of open
access conference paper requests were located in All
Academic ( />esearch/index.php?) or the related repository, Political
Research Online ( />prol/prol01/). All Academic is primarily a conference
management tool with features including abstract
management, peer review, scheduling tools, reports
generator, and final program documents. The site also offers
an archiving service. Archived conference papers are available
free of charge. All Academic also hosts Political Research
Online, a pre-print repository project of the American
Political Science Association and a consortium of similar
associations. These two archives are especially strong in
papers on the subject of political science.

Conclusion
In 2010, OCLC Research released a report on the findings of
12 user behaviour studies, which found that seven of the 12
provided evidence for the “increasing centrality of Google and
other search engines” in the information-seeking behavior of
researchers (Connaway and Dickey, 2010, p. 27). This
reliance on search engines may be a result of another common
finding, the importance of speed and convenience to users
(Connaway and Dickey, 2010, p. 32). The importance of
convenience is reinforced in a paper by Connaway et al.
(2011), in which they defined information source, ease of
access and use, and time constraints as aspects of

convenience. Significantly, the authors found that
convenience is so critical to the information-seeking process
that users will “readily sacrifice content for convenience”
(Connaway et al., 2011, pp. 27-8).
The simplicity of a Google search typically results in
millions of results. It takes time and evaluative skill to process
59


Opening interlibrary loan to open access

Interlending & Document Supply

Tina Baich

Volume 40 · Number 1 · 2012 · 55 –60

Figure 4 ETDs obtained by country and state (US)

Kohn, K. (2006), “Finding it free: tips and techniques for
avoiding borrowing fees and locating online publicly
available materials”, Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document
Delivery & Electronic Reserve, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 57-65.
McGrath, M. (2005), “Interlending and document supply:
a review of the recent literature – 51”, Interlending
& Document Supply, Vol. 33 No. 1, pp. 42-8.
Martin, R.A. (2010), “Finding free and open access
resources: a value-added service for patrons”, Journal of
Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve,
Vol. 20 No. 3, pp. 189-200.

Morrison, H.G. (2006), “The dramatic growth of open
access: implications and opportunities for resource
sharing”, Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery
& Electronic Reserve, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 95-107.
Pennsylvania State University (2010), “About CiteSeerX,”
available at: />nid¼440EFBF183647A637F0950A3DDEE89CE
Suber, P. (2010), “Open access overview”, available at: www.
earlham.edu/, peters/fos/overview.htm
Weible, C.L. and Janke, K.L. (2011), Interlibrary Loan
Practices Handbook, American Library Association,
Chicago, IL.

even a fraction of these for relevant and accurate information.
However, users value speed and convenience most, making it
virtually impossible for them to assess the full information
landscape. They will make do with the first page of search
engine results and may disregard library resources entirely. If
access to an important information item is not immediately
apparent from the point of discovery, it is unlikely the user
will search extensively for access before submitting an ILL
request.
ILL requests are unlikely to decrease as a result of
increasing numbers of open access materials. In fact, IUPUI
University Library’s ILL data shows that the number of
requests filled with open access materials is actually growing
while overall requests hold relatively steady. As more and
more materials become freely available on the internet, users
have increasing difficulty in navigating the vast information
environment and the myriad options that the Library and the
internet offer for finding what they want. ILL librarians and

staff have specialized search skills and knowledge of resources
of which our patrons are often unaware. Users can easily
discover resources, but it is often up to ILL to deliver them.
ILL departments must begin utilizing open access materials
to enhance service and educate users about open access.

References

About the author

Connaway, L.S. and Dickey, T.J. (2010), “The digital
information seeker: report of the findings from selected
OCLC, RIN, and JISC user behaviour projects”, available
at: www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/publications/reports/
2010/digitalinformationseekerreport.pdf
Connaway, L.S., Dickey, T.J. and Radford, M.L. (2011), “‘If
it is too inconvenient, I’m not going after it:’ convenience as
a critical factor in information-seeking behaviors”, Library
and Information Science Research, Vol. 33, pp. 179-90,
available at: www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/
2011/connaway-lisr.pdf
Jackson, M.E. (2004), Assessing ILL/DD Services: New Costeffective Alternatives, Greenwood, Westport, CT.

Tina Baich is an Assistant Librarian at Indiana UniversityPurdue University Indianapolis’s University Library where
she has been the Interlibrary Loan Librarian since September
2006. She is a Member at Large on the ALA RUSA STARS
Executive Committee and also serves as Chair of the ALA
RUSA STARS International ILL Committee. She is
especially interested in web-based interlibrary loan finding
aids and the impact of open access on interlibrary loan. She is

a graduate of the Indiana University Schools of Library
& Information Science and Liberal Arts with master degrees
in Library Science and Public History. Tina Baich can be
contacted at

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