Interlending and document supply: a review of
the recent literature: 63
Mike McGrath
Editor, Interlending & Document Supply, Leeds, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the most recent literature concerning document supply and related matters.
Design/methodology/approach – The approach is based on the reading of over 150 journals as well as monographs, reports and web sites.
Findings – It was found that fundamental debate on the direction of scholarly publishing continues intensely. Electronic books remain a minority
market but the literature at least remains optimistic. The mass digitisation of books continues apace and print on demand is becoming big business.
Open access continues to grow but with continuing and widely differing views on its impact. Recent mandating decisions will mean a step change in the
establishment of institutional and subject repositories. Publisher pay-per-view is starting to stir.
Originality/value – The paper represents a useful source of information for librarians and others interested in document supply and related matters.
Keywords Interlending, Resource sharing, Copyright law, Electronic books
Paper type Literature review
Introduction
Document supply
The 10th Interlending and Document Supply Conference was
held in Singapore in October 2007 and was a great success,
attended by 300 delegates from 34 countries. A report on it
urges readers to put October 2009 in their diaries for the 11th
Conference in Hannover, Germany (Patterson, 2008).
Document supply has long been the poor relation in
automated library systems, especially in countries such as
the UK with centralised document suppliers. One response is
of course to build in-house systems, and one such has been
installed at the Mayo Clinic in the USA. The library serves
51,000 internal patrons and in 2001 it delivered about
164,000 articles to internal customers; “and more than
46,000 articles to external customers via interlibrary loan”
(Farrell et al., 2007). The successful development of the in-
house system is described. Useful for all those frustrated with
less than adequate automated systems for document supply
and with resources enough to do something about it.
International document supply is a small but important
aspect of this service and a survey of UK libraries (21
universities, three public libraries and one national) comes to
some practical conclusions (Bradford, 2008):
. More information on web pages so that it is clear what
libraries will do and will not do.
. Greater use of the IFLA voucher scheme. It would be
good if an electronic voucher could be developed too. This
has already been suggested to IFLA and it is possible that
this may be developed soon.
. IDS librarians lobbying the decision makers in their
institutions and explaining why it is important for them to
be able to use credit cards and handle foreign currency
transactions.
. Lending returnables still poses the most problems. Speed
and the cost of postage are the most difficult issues to
resolve.
An increasing number of articles on library matters are
emerging from China. One such deals with costs at a Chinese
research library and how these have changed over time
compared to the USA (Lee and Kim, 2008). The article
provides an insight into how document supply operates in
China and the universal importance of obtaining accurate
costings.
The issue of compliance with site licences when delivering a
document supply service has become significant. It becomes
more difficult to manage as these licences increase in number
and in complexity. A brief article with a US focus addresses
the issue and makes some useful points (Long, 2007). Some
of the conclusions of a report from the US-based Association
of Association of College and Research Libraries (2007) are
good news for document supply librarians:
7 “As part of the ‘business of higher education,’ students will increasingly
view themselves as ‘customers’ of the academic library and will demand
high-quality facilities, resources, and services attuned to their needs and
concerns.
8 Online learning will continue to expand as an option for students and
faculty – both on campus and off – and libraries will gear resources and
services for delivery to a distributed academic community.
9 Demands for free, public access to data collected, and research completed,
as part of publicly funded research programs will continue to grow”.
All of which underlines the need for libraries to be able to give
access to and package information requirements for remote
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-1615.htm
Interlending & Document Supply
36/2 (2008) 99–104
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0264-1615]
[DOI 10.1108/02641610810878576]
This review results primarily from the scanning of over 150 LIS journals
and many web sites and discussion lists. Access to the journals has been
provided by the British Library Document Supply Centre, without whose
cooperation the review would not have been possible.
99

users – an appropriate task for document supply librarians.
The experience of restructuring at an Italian university
suggests more specific opportunities for them as libraries
restructure (Vaglio and D’Urso, 2008). The authors describe
the impetus given to restructuring by the introduction of a
new automated system and some proposals for staff
restructuring.
Open Access
Much is written about the success and inevitability of Open
Access (OA), and it will certainly have an impact on paid-for
document supply. However, notwithstanding the publicity
and the seeming avalanche of mandates, the creation and
populating of institutional repositories (IR) proceeds at a
snail-like pace. A recent survey (Rieh, 2007) identified only
48 of 2,147 library directors mailed in the USA who have
established an IR. There were 446 responses so the situation
may not be so bleak for OA advocates. However, one would
have thought that libraries with an IR would be more likely to
respond. This issue is addressed in the success story of the IR
at the University of Minho, Portugal, which could be used in
order to encourage both the creation of IRs and their content.
“In this article we tackle the ubiquitous problems of slow
adoption and low deposit rates often seen in recently created
institutional repositories” (Ferreira et al., 2008) – and, it
could be added, in many long established ones. The number
of items registered since 2004 has risen from less than 1,000
in the first year to over 6,000 today and users from less than
1,000 to over 4,000 today. But the significant parameter is the
near exponential growth in downloads, from 100,000 in 2004
to over 900,000 today. They describe the promotional plan
and other measure to encourage usage. Very useful for all
those involved in IRs and freely available from the D-Lib
Magazine website at: www.dlib.org/dlib/january08/Ferreira/
01ferreira.html. An excellent journal that needs our support
as its very survival is at stake. (For more details on this see
their web site.) A typically thoughtful and reasoned article
comes from the pen of the Secretary General of IFLA (and
once an editorial advisor on this journal). He identifies three
factors that gave rise to the OA movement – “an economic
crisis, a moral crisis and an enabling technology” (Lor, 2007).
The first is well known to all readers – best known as the
serials (price) crisis. The second factor involves the gulf
between rich and poor countries – it is both technical and
content access, but also “that the relationship between
authors, journal publishers and users is out of balance and
unfair”. He gives an admittedly extreme example of a book
being still in copyright in 2001 even though the writer
published it in 1860 and died in 1932. The third factor is the
enabling technology of digitisation and the internet. He gives
ten ways in which OA could make life simpler for librarians
and he notes that “IFLA itself puts its money where its mouth
is. The full text of all its publications, including its journal
(published by Sage) and the IFLA publications series
(published by K.G. Saur) is made freely available on its web
site”. So no more paid-for document supply from those titles!
He also includes the IFLA statement on open access. A
different perspective on OA and its impact on paid-for
journals is offered in a detailed article which looks at the
implications of “the move of a highly prestigious journal,
Nucleic Acids Research, from a subscription to an open access
model” (Nicholas et al., 2007). By using their now well known
deep log analysis, the authors conclude that “the rise in use of
NAR over the survey period (140 per cent) could largely be
attributed to the opening up of the site to search engines and
that the move to OA had a relatively small influence on
driving usage up further (less than 10%)”. However they also
note that “The size of the impact could be explained in part
by the fact that much content was free already”. And they
forecast that the OA factor should lead to a further increase in
usage of 20 per cent. In summary, search engines have a
bigger effect on usage than open access – at least for NAR.
An article describing a conjoint study with 424 responses
from librarians globally concludes baldly “that self archiving
of refereed papers in under 12 months of publication will
undermine subscription based peer review. A six month
embargo has little effect” (Amin, 2007). Or more precisely in
the original report:
How soon content is made available is a key determinant of content model
preference in librarian’s acquisition behaviour; delay in availability reduces
the attractiveness of a product offering. The survey tested the effect of
embargoes on OA and licensed database content set at 6, 12 and 24 months;
a significant impact on librarians’ preference for OA, and licensed database,
content was seen when embargoes were set to 12 and 24 month. A 6-month
embargo has little impact.
Given the important implications of the conclusions a look at
the original report is recommended, freely available at: www.
publishingresearch.net/documents/Self-archiving_report.pdf
After years of negotiating, the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) in the USA will mandate the deposit of manuscripts in
PubMed Central to be made publicly available and searchable
no later than 12 months after publication in a journal. This
arises because of the passage of the Consolidated
Appropriations Act by President Bush. The news is covered
in a number of journals – not least by Scholarly
Communications Report. However, SCR is a paid-for
subscription and a wealth of detail can be found in Peter
Suber’s free and excellent newsletter:
It’s big because the NIH is big. The NIH is the world’s largest funder of
scientific research (not counting classified military research). Its budget last
year, $28 billion, was larger than the gross domestic product of 142 nations.
As my colleague Ray English points out, it’s more than five times larger than
all seven of the Research Councils UK combined. NIH-funded research
results in 65,000 peer-reviewed articles every year or 178 every day.
The 12-month embargo will weaken the impact of the Act;
however, Suber also points out that “Immediate deposit
allows immediate release of metadata, enhancing the article’s
visibility, and allows the NIH to switch the article from closed
to open access, automatically, as soon as the embargo runs
[out]” (Suber, 2008). The European Research Council has
also made a similar declaration:
The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded
research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research
repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an
institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6
months of publication.
See www.ukro.ac.uk/erc/policy_docs_general/071217_scc_
guidelines_open_access_revised.pdf for more details.
Although with a smaller budget of about US$0.5 billion the
mandate period is crucially shorter. Suber also includes a
large number of responses to the passing of these mandates in
issue No. 118 of his newsletter.
This step change in mandation will ensure that document
supply librarians will need to be increasingly aware of the need
to integrate open access articles, and in particular pre- and
Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature: 63
Mike McGrath
Interlending & Document Supply
Volume 36 · Number 2 · 2008 · 99–104
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