I was both surprised and honored when I was approached to produce the third edition of the ILL Handbook. Unlike Virginia Boucher who single-handedly created two wonderful editions, I felt that I needed to call on a little help from my ILL friends. The first person I contacted was Karen Janke, a trusted colleague, a good writer and editor, and someone I knew I could work with well. Thank you, Karen, for helping to make this edition of the ILL Handbook happen!
This edition of the handbook covers the basics of ILL and is aimed at the new practitioner as well as those who have suddenly found themselves responsible for an ILL unit. We didn’t want the writing to be overly prescriptive, but we did want enough basic details so that someone who found himself or herself working in an ILL unit would have some idea of how to get through the job!
I also want to thank each of our chapter contributors. We chose a variety of contributors, some who have been in the field for decades and some newer, because fresh ideas and new energy are always valued in ILL. We and the chapter authors have a combined 158 years of experience in ILL!
Cherié L. Weible
I became an ILL practitioner exactly ten years ago, quite by accident: I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois Graduate School for Library and Information Science, I needed a summer job, and the ILL department was hiring. However, I quickly learned to love the chaos: requests were constantly coming in and there was always something to do. The process of interlibrary loan captured my imagination, and perhaps the simplest thing inspired me to think about the work I was doing in my library and what was happening in libraries all over the world. The simple thing was the ILL request number created when you submitted a request on the OCLC ILL system. This was back in the day of OCLC’s Prism. Using that program made me feel like I belonged to a keystroke-based, command-driven secret society: 3,2,2,1 or 4,4 anyone? Even if you were a savvy searcher and fast typist, hundreds or thousands of new requests could be created by other libraries in the brief moments between your requests. And you knew this because of that request number, the sequential indication of just how busy we all were. You know you’re an addict when you start to daydream what it might take to achieve the ultimate: sequential ILL request numbers.
Another amazing realization was that interlibrary loan was the concept of a lending library writ large: libraries sending their materials simply because another library submitted a request, and trusting that they would be returned unharmed. No user was at a disadvantage if her library didn’t have the specific item she needed, because in the vast majority of cases another library was willing to help. At times I felt that it was a small miracle that a request could be filled at all. Given that so many people touched some aspect of a request from beginning to end, it seemed that there was a lot of room for error. But all it takes is one library to say yes. In the ten years since then, I have learned so much from other interlibrary loan colleagues. We are a creative, collaborative group of people, and we succeed in our mission of meeting our patrons’ needs because of each other. Even though technological advances have revolutionized the mechanics of the ILL request process in the past ten years, the spirit of trusting and helping remains.
Karen L. Janke