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From Thursday, March 22^nd through Friday, March 23^rd, Ellen Makaravage and I attended the ILLiad International Conference in Virginia Beach, VA. Jay Jordan, President and CEO of OCLC, was the keynote speaker for Thursday’s kickoff session (since Ellen will discuss his presentation in detail, I’ll say only that his goals for expanding WorldCat will revolutionize the way we search for and discover materials). Following his presentation, I ventured to “Fear and Trepidation: Entering the World of Campus Delivery for Graduate Students.” Collette Mak, of Notre Dame University libraries, facilitated the session, which focused on Notre Dame’s expansion of DocDel services to grad students. Although Notre Dame Libraries do not provide book chapter delivery services to grad students, they do deliver physical books and scan and deliver articles; physical items are delivered to the departmental library closest to the student (as opposed to their own departmental library). Since implementing the service, DocDel requests have increased by approximately 13,000 (including book and article delivery).

Pay-Per-View for article requests was a trending topic of this ILLiad conference; ILL departments are using PPV to provide on-demand access to articles (and eBook chapters), and although some libraries are relying on this service instead of traditional ILL for articles, others are using PPV when they exceed the Rule of 5. Cost per article, journal and publisher content, and mediated/unmediated options vary by vendor; some vendors offer package plans, where article tokens can cost as low as $12; some vendors offer what I call the “Costco plan”: you get articles for as low as $12, but you have to buy article tokens in bulk (at least 1,500 tokens to get the reduced price). Nathan Hosburgh (Florida Institute of Technology) assessed four of the big PPV vendors: Wiley, SciDirect, IngentaConnect, and Copyright Clearance Center’s “Get It Now.” After mostly working with Wiley in both mediated and unmediated PPV, Hosburgh indicated that Florida Tech will likely migrate to CCC’s “Get It Now,” with mediated PPV.

In a separate panel session, Heather Weltin (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Kristine Mogle (Drake University), and Kelly Smith (Eastern Kentucky University) discussed the pros and cons of CCC’s “Get It Now.” Pros include: “instant” access to articles (depending on mediated/unmediated), access to nearly 10,000 journals, fixed fee per article, and an alternative to paying royalties plus IFM when the Rule of 5 is exceeded. Cons include: cost per article, the need for exact citations/ISSNs in a request (otherwise, a tab in ILLiad won’t appear for ILL staff), and the possibility for duplicate orders and abuse through both mediated and unmediated PPV. Libraries using any of the vendors seemed to prefer mediated access, where all article requests are routed through ILL, matched against the library’s holdings by ILL staff, and then depending on local holdings, either purchased through a vendor or cancelled. The PPV model is beneficial to our patrons in a number of ways; first, access to articles occurs within minutes, as opposed to the days or weeks it could take a request to make its way through a lending string. Second, when we exceed the Rule of 5, ILL won’t pay copyright royalties as well as IFM costs assessed by lending libraries to acquire an article (both can exceed $30). Third, ILL staff aren’t sending requests for electronic journals and materials that, due to licensing agreements, lending libraries can’t send. The downside to all of this is that publishers will probably be less likely to work with libraries in allowing ILL of electronic materials, and libraries may lose all bargaining rights. As a result, ILL could become a purchase-only service, as opposed to a resource sharing service.

On Friday morning, following OCLC’s update and breakfast, Ellen and I presented “Preserving and Sharing: Bridging the Gap between ILL and Special Collections.” We discussed the history of filling ILL requests for Special Collections materials and unveiled our Scan-On-Demand ILLiad Addon, which Kevin Gilbertson created to help us streamline our request process. Our presentation generated a lot of conversation about the challenges both Special Colletions and ILL face in filling these requests. As always, we’re extremely grateful to our Special Collections staff for their willingness to fill so many of the requests we send their way, and for their time in helping to create a more efficient solution for both departments!