Future of interlibrary loan: Some perspectives from the 2016 ALA Annual Conference

I attended the session, "Resource Sharing in Tomorrowland," at ALA in Orlando.  It featured a panel discussion about the future of interlibrary loan. The presentation had multiple speakers, so there was something for everyone.  Perspectives ranged from optimistic to pessimistic but each offered a roadmap for their options. It was an engaging session on a hot and humid Orlando summer day. This introduction best summarized the presentations that were to follow: 

"We are in a richer and yet increasingly complicated and competitive information discovery-delivery environment. Interlibrary loan is based on trust and is important because people need stuff and we get it for them. It is the how of what we do that will change.”

Here is a synopsis of some of the presentations:

Dennis Massie (OCLC Research)

Using library patron data Massie's findings provide the following information:

• Collection-Sharing volume is going down.
• We are great at automating the sharing of what is widely held.
• Even the richest libraries can become net borrowers.
• POD (Purchase on Demand) items get more used.
• Libraries are borrowing and lending more free stuff on the web.
• We know what most libraries spend on what.
• Collections do not overlap as much as we think.

These findings pose the following questions for libraries: Do we buy or borrow? How much staff time is spent on what? What is the impact of ‘managed scarcity?’ What potential partners’ collection completes mine? What potential users am I not serving? What are the predictive relationships between our data sets?

Finally, he suggested things you can do with data: generate it, collect it, compile it, analyze it, visualize it (tell the story with pictures), share it (tell other people), and collaborate with your consortia.

Angela Galvan (Ohio State University)

Galvan's upbeat theme was "Reclaim Wonder." She touted the virtues of resource sharing as a vehicle for distributing the future and as an agent for building the future of libraries. She acknowledged current fears within the profession such as lack of funding, and sometimes lack support from upper management, but stressed that it was better for resource sharing staff to be active and wrong than to be docile. She encouraged ILL staff to take the attitude that ILL can do that! She views resource sharing as wish fulfillment and believes that everything we do either erodes, maintains, or strengthens our connections with other libraries.

Carolyn Gardner (California State University-Dominguez Hills) and Gabriel Gardner (California State University-Long Beach)

This presentation was an overview of non-traditional means of interlibrary loans, including Twitter and peer to peer platforms. The discussion focused primarily around Sci-Hub whose users chose it for the convenience it offers them in obtaining articles without subscription or payment.  

Research of Sci-Hub users shows that they are primarily graduate students located outside of the United States. Documents in the health sciences and biomedicine are in greatest demand. Users appreciate the easy access and speed. Most are unconcerned about copyright issues and are unwilling to wait the 24 hours traditional interlibrary loans may take.

Sci-Hub is probably here to stay. The developers of these systems can be located anywhere in the world, so the likelihood that they will be ever be punished is remote. The developers do appear to be motivated by a desire to share and reciprocate rather than by ideology.

Heidi Nance (University of Washington)

In Nance's discussion, "Not your mother’s ILL," she acknowledged current technological trends such as the cloud, APIs, NCIP, ISO, new ILS systems, as well as increasing partnership with vendors. When approaching the trends we can either be reactive (fearful and resistant) or proactive (creative and participative). In her view, the focus should be more on what we do and not how we do things. She listed some ways to achieve this: respond by being creative, resist fear and anxiety, sit at the decision table, be an early adopter, keep the bigger picture in mind, and either win the game or change the rules.