Conclusion
Summary of main points
Purpose of ILL: No library can own every book, journal, or database that its patrons may need. Interlibrary loan helps to expand a library’s offerings through sharing of resources.
Purpose of guidelines: ILL is fairly labor-intensive work. Guidelines provide a way to simplify this by requiring accurate requests, respecting the preferences of lending libraries, and standardizing the steps in the workflow. They also provide help for potential borrowers in evaluating the need for an ILL request.
Borrower responsibilities and workflow: Borrowing libraries must be willing to be lenders. They should do their best to provide accurate requests, spread their requests among many libraries, use established protocols to communicate with lenders, and keep track of copyright limits.
Lender responsibilities and workflow: Lenders should respond in a timely manner to borrowers. They should try to loan materials whenever possible. As long as both borrowers and lenders work on being polite and cooperative, there should be no need to keep a “tally” of whether a library loans more than it borrows. This is a cooperative process, not a “fair and equal” one.Click the arrow below to continue.
