CHAPTER ONE

INTERLIBRARY LOAN

EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION

Margaret W. Ellingson and Susan D. Morris

Many library staff members today have the impression that resource sharing in general and interlibrary loan (ILL) in particular are relative newcomers to the library scene. After all, how could libraries systematically locate and obtain requested items without the Internet, computers, and scanners? In fact, resource sharing and interlibrary loan have a long-established place among library services that is traceable to ancient times. Interlibrary loan transactions through the ages have been conducted with an ever-evolving array of “technologies” to carry out the familiar processes of identifying, locating, requesting, and delivering items desired by library users. And from the earliest days, familiar issues such as bad citations, difficult users, technological glitches, overburdened lenders, costs, and copyright have challenged participants in the interlibrary loan process.

On the one hand, tracing the evolution of ILL reveals the truth of the old saying that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” On the other hand, it can help us to understand the developments that have dramatically altered both user expectations regarding interlibrary loan and the ability of libraries to respond in an ever-changing environment.

IN THE BEGINNING…

The roots of interlibrary loan were established thousands of years ago. In Western civilization, writing was invented between 3400 and 3000 BC in today’s southern Iraq. The technology was the material at hand—clay tablets with styluses. The works created were not histories, philosophies, or epic legends; however, while seemingly mundane, they were still of vital importance to their users—business transactions, rosters of names, and other official records.

These records sometimes required duplication and delivery elsewhere. People later realized that the processes of recording and copying could also be applied to histories and legends. Eventually, specialized workers called scribes established their place as valued members of society, spending their lives recording, copying, and making the distribution of information possible.

New technologies continued evolving to make information sharing easier. Clay tablets got the job done, but they were both heavy and fragile. Scrolls fashioned from papyrus and leather were a much lighter medium, easier to manipulate and more durable for transport. To record information on this medium, ink was invented.

Scrolls were collected and housed in buildings constructed specifically for their storage. When it burned during the age of Caesar, the legendary library of Alexandria in Egypt was home to tens of thousands of scrolls. Some scrolls had been added through confiscation from passing ships. Others were added when Ptolemy III (246–221 BC) wrote to the known world’s sovereigns asking to borrow their scrolls for copying. He deposited a bond—what we might call a loan fee—to cover expenses and ensure the safety of the items in transit, but he often kept both original and copy, thus making himself one of history’s earliest known problem patrons!¹

During the next thousand years or so, the monasteries of the European Middle Ages adopted the use of skins worked into vellum as their writing medium. Hand-inscribed and gorgeously embellished with illuminations, these sheets were bound into today’s familiar codex—or book—format. Copying, swapping, and lending books were thriving activities. However, an exchange of letters between Lull, Bishop of Mainz, and Guthbert, Abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow, gives us a glimpse into medieval technological glitches. Lull had requested copies of a list of works concerning Bede the Venerable, one of England’s foremost scholars. Guthbert, whose cloister was home to Bede, apologized to Lull saying that, of the many items on the list, Guthbert could only manage to supply a single biography of Bede, because his own hands and those of his other copyists had been paralyzed by the unusually cold winter of 763–764.² The medieval copy machine was out of order, and ILL requests could not be filled!

Two technological advances soon provided a quantum leap in information sharing. Paper, brought to Europe from China, was faster and cheaper to produce than vellum. Movable type, popularized by Johannes Gutenberg around 1460, further revolutionized the ability to duplicate and spread information more quickly and efficiently than ever before. While the privileged classes continued to amass great private collections, over the next four centuries more and more commoners could afford books. Libraries proliferated—in universities, in offices of individual scholars, and, finally, in cities and towns for the benefit of the general population. Catalogs became recognized as more than mere inventory lists; Gabriel Naudé, a French librarian, stated in 1627 that catalogs can direct friends to an owning library if their own library lacks the desired book.³

In the late nineteenth century, Germany was unified into a single country. It became a leader in the rapidly developing science and technology of the time and was among the first of modern European countries to regard the functions of a library in a professional way. The Germans designed libraries with reading rooms for users and processing areas for staff. They also realized that the methodical nature of German scholarship, coupled with German principles of cataloging and multiple access points, made interlibrary loan as a formalized process both necessary and possible. Nationalization throughout Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries resulted in most countries designating an official national library, including the British Library in the United Kingdom and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

“NATIONAL” LIBRARY DEVELOPMENT

Though the United States has no official national library, the Library of Congress (LC) serves as our country’s de facto national library. As early as 1776, the Continental Congress authorized a congressional library, but legislation providing for its creation did not pass until 1800. In the mid- to late 1800s, Congress authorized LC to be a copyright depository and to administer copyright law; as a result, its collection began to grow exponentially. Today, the Library of Congress is arguably the largest library in the world. In the late 1960s LC embraced the MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) format, providing the big push needed to make library automation possible. Two results of the MARC format are online bibliographic records and online ILL systems. Because the original mission of LC was to serve the information needs of the U.S. Congress, LC is a library of last resort for interlibrary loan by libraries both at home and abroad.

What was to become the first true national library in the United States began modestly in 1836 with a $50 request for medical books for the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army. In 1864, at the height of the Civil War, the library issued its first printed catalog of approximately 2,100 volumes. After the Civil War, numerous Army hospitals closed and sent their collections of medical books and journals to the Surgeon General’s office. John Shaw Billings was appointed as the librarian to deal with this windfall of medical material. By the time he resigned in 1895, Billings had assembled the world’s greatest medical library collection, consisting of 116,847 books and 191,598 pamphlets and encompassing the medical literature of all nations and eras to date. In so doing, Billings laid the foundation for today’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), including actively lending books and journals to physicians across the country. Congress passed legislation in 1956 that formed the basis for an expanded interlibrary loan program at NLM. Subsequent legislation in 1965 established, among other programs, eleven Regional Medical Libraries that still provide ILL and other services within their regions.

The Department of Agriculture library opened in 1862 with a collection of one thousand volumes. By 1934, with a collection of over 250,000 volumes, the library began participating in the Bibliofilm Service, the first large-scale attempt by a library to provide microfilm copies of articles to scientific researchers, rather than lending the original documents. In its first year, this program distributed over 300,000 copies. In 1962, on the one hundredth anniversary of the library’s establishment, the library was officially designated the National Agricultural Library (NAL), making it the third national library in the United States. Over the years NAL has participated in a variety of resource-sharing programs, including coordination of a national network of state land-grant and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) field libraries. NAL participates in ILL as a library of last resort.

NINETY-THREE YEARS OF EVOLUTION: ILL IN THE UNITED STATES, 1876–1969

Throughout the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, an increase in the number of public and academic libraries in the United States and in the development of librarianship as a profession laid the foundation for further advancement in resource sharing.

1876–1899

Informal resource sharing undoubtedly occurred among U.S. libraries from colonial times through the early years of the republic. In the nineteenth century, the idea of formalized interlibrary loan steadily gained strength in North America, influenced by what was happening in Europe. By 1876, the year that the American Library Association (ALA) was founded, Samuel Green of the Worcester (Massachusetts) Free Public Library wrote in the very first issue of the American Library Journal:

It would add greatly to the usefulness of our reference libraries if an agreement should be made to lend books to each other for short periods of time…I should think libraries would be willing to make themselves responsible for the value of borrowed books, and be willing to pay an amount of expressage that would make the transportation company liable for the loss in money should the books disappear in transit…I am informed that a plan of this kind is in operation in Europe…Perhaps the matter is worthy the consideration of the Conference of Librarians at Philadelphia?⁴

On the page following Green’s letter pleading for consideration of interlibrary loan as a legitimate activity of libraries, “library cooperation” was listed as one of the topics for discussion at the Philadelphia Conference.

Some twenty years later, in the October 1898 edition of Library Journal, Green updated his experience with interlibrary loan and made suggestions to improve the process:

[T]he first instance of a general and systematic plan in this country of loaning books to out-of-town libraries was that…acted upon in the great medical and surgical library of the Surgeon-General’s Office…I frequently borrow from the library of the Surgeon-General’s Office…I have sent for books to a place as far away from Worcester as Detroit…I have had a precious and unique manuscript entrusted to me by the custodian of one of the law libraries of Boston for the use of a special student…I am of the opinion that the system of library inter-loaning should be more widely extended and that small libraries should lend to one another as well as the smaller libraries borrowing from larger ones…[T]hey (the smaller libraries) should be on the lookout for opportunities to help the larger libraries.⁵

With the seeds of formalized resource sharing firmly planted by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, we will next examine the evolution, and later the revolution, of interlibrary loan in the United States, exploring four main areas of development—codes, cooperation and consortia, technology, and copyright—from 1876 to the present.

Codes

Though formal codes were still decades away, Samuel Green laid out several ideas that eventually became the foundations of ILL codes in the United States, noting that certain problems could be avoided by “enforcing rules dictated by common sense.”⁶ Besides the notions of reciprocity and load leveling, he also discussed the special nature of scholarly interlibrary loan, the responsibilities of the borrower, the lender’s right to exclude or restrict certain materials, and the need to cover mailing costs.

Cooperation and Consortia

The development of cooperative groups, or consortia, occurred partly to help libraries cope with technological advances, concern with copyright, and costs of materials and services. The proliferation of consortia has proved to be both product and producer of advancements, as we shall see in tracing their development throughout the twentieth century. Two major developments in the latter part of the nineteenth century set the tone for library cooperation as we still know it. In 1876 the American Library Association (ALA) was founded, signaling the beginning of significant national library cooperation in the United States. The need for more localized cooperation was also recognized, and in July 1890, the New York State Library Association was founded. One of its four objectives was “to organize and promote among New York libraries…interlibrary loans and other forms of cooperation.”⁷ Before the decade was over, states as far-flung as New Hampshire, Iowa, and Georgia had also established state associations.

Technology

As early as 1839 the processes of photography and microphotography were being developed in France. A prototype of the first fax machine was given a patent in Scotland in 1843. Production of a commercially viable typewriter began in 1873. Carbon paper, first invented around 1806, found a practical use as the typewriter grew in popularity, and by 1877 the value of the typewriter as a cataloging aid was debated at ALA.

Other forms of data transfer included the linotype machine, invented in 1884. Libraries such as the Public Library of New London, Connecticut, experimented with printing and distributing finding lists, thus reducing the practice of “blind” requesting interlibrary loans.

The first “online” interlibrary cooperation occurred in 1897: the Boston Public Library provided a telephone information service utilizing stenographers to contact other libraries by phone and to furnish patrons with typed verbatim copies or abstracts of requested documents.

Copyright

In 1787 a provision for copyright appeared in the newly ratified U.S. Constitution, followed by the implementation of the Copyright Act of 1790. During the nineteenth century a series of court rulings shaped revisions to U.S. copyright law. The 1841 case of Folsom v. Marsh stands out in that it resulted in a ruling forming the basis of the “fair use” doctrine. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the need for mutual recognition of copyright between sovereign nations grew more and more apparent. In 1886 the Berne Convention first met for this purpose. The United States, however, did not sign the Berne Convention until over one hundred years later, in 1988.

1900–1949

Codes

Despite Samuel Green’s 1876 recommendation that librarians formalize interlibrary loan procedures in the United States, the ALA Committee on Co-ordination did not submit the first Code of Practice for Interlibrary Loans for approval until 1917. This code, with minor modifications, was approved in 1919. The committee chairman characterized the code as embodying “the more essential points in the actual practices of those libraries in North America which are now the chief lenders to other libraries” and further stated that “compliance with its recommendations will entail no departure from well recognized procedure.”⁸ Significantly, subsequent interlibrary loan codes have been written in the same vein—attempting mainly to codify current library practice rather than to break new ground.

Many of the provisions of the relatively brief and surprisingly liberal 1917 code are still in practice. This first U.S. code espoused interlibrary lending not only to aid research but also to “augment the supply of the average book to the average reader” and went on to say that “it may be assumed that all libraries are prepared to go as far as they reasonably can…in lending to others.”⁹ In addition, the code incorporated the concept of reproduction in lieu of a loan and encouraged the use of legible, complete, and accurate citations, reasonable loan periods, and notice of receipt and return of materials. The code further stated that the borrowing library was responsible for requested material, even in transit, and that lenders could suspend service to libraries that disregard provisions of the code. Costs were also addressed by the first code, which stipulated that the entire cost of shipping and insurance, if applicable, was the responsibility of the borrowing library.

Subsequent changes in academic and library environments, including war-related research and publication, spurred significant increases in interlibrary loan activity and prompted revisions to the original 1917 Code of Practice. A new interlibrary loan code, with significant input from apparently overburdened research libraries, was approved in 1940. This code was significantly longer and more restrictive than the 1917 code in an attempt to address increasing costs and other “difficulties,” including the need for load leveling, improved citations, less “blind” requesting, and compliance with copyright law.¹⁰

Cooperation and Consortia

The earliest cooperative efforts in the United States focused on the shared cataloging of books and serials. A major advancement in verification and location of serials, the Union List of Serials in Libraries in the United States and Canada, was published in 1927, under the auspices of the Library of Congress.

Regional cooperation also blossomed in the United States, facilitating ILL both directly and indirectly with programs such as shared cataloging and centralized storage or cooperative acquisitions or both. Some of the earliest regional cooperatives that continue today include the Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR), founded in 1935 in the western United States; the New England Depository Library (NEDL), which opened in 1942; and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), which began as the Midwest Inter-Library Center in 1949.

Technology

The technology developed in the 1900s continued to build on that of the previous century. In the 1920s Bell Labs developed a forerunner to the modern telefacsimile (fax) machine. During the 1930s Kodak’s Recordak Division began microfilming newspapers, such as the New York Times, as concern for preservation began to grow. From 1941 to 1945, amid the bombing and destruction of World War II, a realization dawned that microfilm could also preserve other records of civilization, such as documents found in the archives and libraries of various countries. In 1935, telex machines, using telephone-like rotary dialing to connect teletype machines, were put into use, functionally automating message routing.

In 1946 the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the first electronic computer, was developed for the U.S. Army. The public had little idea of the impact this invention would have in the future.

Copyright

A major revision of the U.S. Copyright Act was completed in 1909, mostly concerned with broadening the scope of categories protected and extending the term of protection. Interlibrary loan activity in the United States was still considered moderate and therefore was not a focus of this revision. Another revision came in 1947; again ILL practices were not affected.

1950–1969

Codes

As postwar research and student populations continued to grow, so did interlibrary loan and the need for further revision of the ILL Code. The General Interlibrary Loan Code of 1952 was even longer and more defensive than its predecessors. It explicitly sought to establish “standard procedures to cut costs and control the greatly increased volume of loans…and to relieve a measure of the present strain on the large research libraries which bear the principal burden of the loans between libraries.” Notably, the primary purpose of interlibrary loan became to make library materials “available for research and for serious study” with no reference to the needs of the average reader, and two weeks, not four, was suggested as a reasonable loan period.¹¹

Perhaps the most important feature of the 1952 code was the introduction of the first standardized ILL request form. It was a half-sheet, four-part carbon form designed for window envelopes. The multipart form enabled libraries to more easily notify each other by mail regarding shipment and return of requested items and to request renewals.¹² This form, with minor modifications, was used over the next few decades to request material. It was also the basis for the ALA ILL Request form that remains a part of the ILL code today.

In part in response to improved, though mostly still printed, tools for verification and location of library materials, the National Interlibrary Loan Code, 1968 had a less defensive tone than its immediate predecessors. In a major change, this code, for the first time, was accompanied by a Model Interlibrary Loan Code for Regional, State, Local or Other Special Groups of Libraries. The Model Code was intended to be modified and adopted, as needed, by groups of libraries below the national level, which had begun to play a more significant role in ILL and resource sharing during this period.¹³

Cooperation and Consortia

In 1956, a major initiative of the Library of Congress and libraries across the country bore fruit: the first volumes of the National Union Catalog of Pre-1956 Imprints were published, containing invaluable bibliographic and location information. This and other printed tools for verifying and locating books and serials helped overcome two of the major barriers to effective interlibrary loan—knowing exactly what was needed and where it was located—and fueled the growth of ILL well into the 1970s. In addition to cooperative cataloging efforts at the national level, more libraries and related institutions began coming together at the local, state, and regional levels to deal with ongoing challenges, including the rising cost of acquisitions, interlibrary loan, collection storage, and related emerging technologies. Two of the more familiar names among the cooperatives originating during this period are the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), founded in 1957, in the Midwest, and the New England Library and Information Network (NELINET), founded in 1966.

In 1966, as computers were just beginning to impact libraries, the Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA), Title III, became law to support multitype library cooperatives. In what was to become a watershed development, the first incarnation of OCLC, then known as the Ohio College Library Center, was founded in 1967 as a nonprofit membership organization to foster computerized access to information, to facilitate resource sharing, and to reduce library costs.

Technology

In the 1950s, interest in microfilming for the preservation of rare and unique material in libraries continued. In addition to film, microcards, microprint, and later microfiche were also being used. Computing continued to develop as an expensive and esoteric field. In 1951 the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), the first general-purpose commercial computer, was developed and delivered to the U.S. Census Bureau. The National Cash Register Company (NCR) developed carbonless paper in 1954 as a “less messy” replacement for carbon paper. Library supply companies subsequently adopted carbonless paper for use in the new four-part, ALA-approved ILL form.

The 1960s saw many innovations that had far-reaching effects on interlibrary loan workflow. In March of 1960, Haloid Xerox shipped the first plain-paper copier to a paying customer. Libraries quickly adopted photocopiers, which opened whole new vistas for ILL. The IBM Selectric electronic typewriter appeared in 1961, featuring several programmable keys. These keys enabled ILL offices to reduce the number of keystrokes needed to complete the four-part paper ILL request forms. Bell System–approved modems came into use in the 1960s to connect computers by phone lines. In the late 1960s, e-mail was developed for the Multics mainframe operating system, and the U.S. Department of Defense began test operations using ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), forerunner to the Internet. These two developments eventually made e-mail between any two computers possible. Much as before, people generally regarded these innovations as interesting curiosities, having nothing to do with daily life in the United States.

By 1969 the Library of Congress had begun advocating use of its MARC format. Assigning fields to bibliographic records made standardized library computing and improved resource sharing possible in the years to come.

Copyright

The United States began participating in the Geneva Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) in 1955. The UCC was designed as an alternative to the Berne Convention and allowed the United States to participate in some form of multilateral copyright protection without a major overhaul of U.S. copyright law. By the late 1960s, however, the escalating debate between libraries and rights holders, especially publishers of periodicals, concerning the impact of photocopy machines in libraries indicated that a major reworking of U.S. copyright law was inevitable.

THE REVOLUTION BEGINS: ILL IN THE UNITED STATES, 1970–1999

During the 1970s, a technological revolution began that continues to transform the creation, management, and dissemination of information throughout the world today. As previously indicated, the proliferation of consortia proved to be both product and producer of advancements. This was especially true from 1970 onward. Advances in ILL stopped fitting into the relatively neat categories of the “evolutionary” period. Technological advances spurred changes in ILL codes, consortial activity often drove technology forward, and copyright issues loomed over the library landscape.

Codes

Changes occurred so rapidly during this period that not only were the ALA ILL Code and forms revised several times but other guidelines were also adopted to address changing technologies and changing attitudes concerning ILL.

The ALA ILL form was revised in 1977. In 1980 revisions of the National ILL Code and Model Code were approved, and both codes remained integral parts of the U.S. resource-sharing landscape until the “National Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States, 1993” was approved. This code was published with the 1988 revisions to the ALA ILL form but without a Model Code. The 1993 code was much more access-oriented than its predecessors and was itself seen as an appropriate model for consortia and other groups of libraries as well as for the country at large.¹⁴

The growing use of fax technology for the delivery of requests and articles led to the need for guidelines. The year 1990 saw the adoption of Guidelines and Procedures for Telefacsimile Transmission of Interlibrary Loan Requests. As delivery shifted to Internet transmission of documents, a revised version was approved in 1994 as Guidelines and Procedures for Telefacsimile and Electronic Delivery of Interlibrary Loan Requests and Materials. Once electronic delivery of ILL requests and materials became the norm, these separate guidelines were withdrawn in favor of related revisions to the Explanatory Supplement to the U.S. ILL code.

In 1994 the first Guidelines for the Loan of Rare and Unique Materials were approved to encourage lending from formerly “off-limits” special library collections.

Cooperation and Consortia

Not surprisingly, libraries and library organizations played a major role in the ILL revolution from its earliest days, to the great benefit of resource sharing in general and interlibrary loan in particular. Beginning in the mid-1970s, the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS), among other entities, led a concerted effort to develop a unified national network for library and information services. One goal of the commission was to provide everyone in the United States access to the information resources they needed. The network did not come to fruition as originally conceived, and, over time, the concept of a single national network evolved into a network of networks that continues today. Along the way, a new kind of library organization was born—the bibliographic utility—an entity that facilitates the development of bibliographic databases and offers related products and services such as union catalogs, authority control, collection assessment tools, interlibrary loan systems, or any combination of these. OCLC became the first and largest, but not the only, such organization to make significant contributions to the ongoing revolution in library services.

In 1974 three Ivy League universities and the New York Public Library formed the Research Libraries Group (RLG) to meet the specialized needs of research libraries and their users. Also in 1974 the Washington Library Network was formed in the Pacific Northwest, later to become the Western Library Network (WLN). In 1977 OCLC became the Online Computer Library Center and began to expand its membership and systems beyond Ohio via regional networks.

In the early 1980s, RLG expanded membership to include key research libraries across the United States and introduced the Research Libraries Information Network (RLIN) shared cataloging and ILL systems. Also, the WLN system, particularly noted for its authority control and collection assessment components, continued to expand its reach within the United States and beyond, including Australia. By 1992 RLG membership comprised more than one hundred North American and overseas members, including the British Library. The Western Library Network merged with OCLC in 1999, and its online catalog and other offerings were incorporated into OCLC services such as WorldCat.

Concurrent with the rise of bibliographic utilities in the United States, the Z39.50 standard and the ISO ILL Protocol were developed to enable the peer-to-peer exchange of information between different online catalogs and ILL systems, respectively. Although Z39.50 has been widely adopted throughout the world for catalog searching, the ISO ILL Protocol, developed in Canada, is used much more sparingly in the United States than in Canada or Europe.

Technology

In the 1970s companies began to develop modems outside strict Bell System approval; these modems, encased in a briefcase-sized carrier, connected computers through phone lines by clamping acoustic couplers over the mouth- and earpieces of the telephone.

The Bell System began marketing the Teletypewriter Exchange (TWX) machine to transfer data. Libraries such as CRL began accepting TWX orders. To cut telecommunications costs, requesters used a keyboard to punch a paper-tape offline, creating the ILL request. The tape was then run through the machine online to send the request.

By the mid-1970s microform technology had grown in popularity with better quality film and improved readers and reader-printers. Libraries began producing and distributing COM (Computer Output Microform) catalogs in the form of microfiche sets, making their holdings more widely available. ILL offices used multiple COM catalogs, checking individual libraries for holdings.

In 1971 OCLC initiated the first shared online library cataloging system, which had multiple holdings on one record and eventually made COM catalogs obsolete. By 1979 OCLC began production of its ILL Service, linking request forms to both bibliographic and holdings information.

By the mid-1970s companies such as Lexis, BRS, and DIALOG were providing hundreds of citation databases. The ease of searching a single database versus the tedium of searching multiple annual volumes for bibliographic citations greatly increased the number of ILL requests made each year.

In the late 1970s a new generation of smaller fax machines became ubiquitous, offering faster, more efficient, and cheaper service. Patrons and ILL staff alike realized that these machines could deliver articles faster than the U.S. mail.

In 1981 Hayes Microcomputer Products introduced the Smartmodem, containing a controller that sent commands to the computer and enabled it to operate the phone line. This kind of technology remains the basis for online communication today. Database providers such as DIALOG and BRS began offering special subsets of their search services such as BRS Afterdark, which allowed users to do their own database searching at considerable cost savings. Ease of connection, cheaper phone rates, and the enormity of data available allowed users to harvest numerous bibliographic citations, and ILL requests skyrocketed.

In 1986 OCLC developed the ILL Microenhancer (ILLME) to help ILL practitioners update their growing batches of requests more effectively. The ILLME enabled staff members to mark records offline for updating and later upload them into the OCLC ILL subsystem.

ILL practitioners recognized the need for management systems to help cope with various aspects of ILL. During the 1990s a progression of software was developed to automate and streamline the ILL process. In 1991 SAVEIT (the System for Automating Vital Elements of Interlibrary Transactions) was developed to assist with record keeping and statistics. It was supplanted by Clio, a more sophisticated system developed by Perkins and Associates in 1996. ILLiad was developed by Atlas Systems for Virginia Tech and launched in 1999. The following year OCLC began distributing ILLiad as a complement to the OCLC WorldCat Resource Sharing system.

Other major developments involved tools to aid in the delivery of copies. In 1991 RLG released Ariel, which uses a scanner and the Internet, rather than fax technology, for document delivery.

Copyright

Although technological advances made information sharing easier and faster, they also caused rights holders more and more alarm. As early as 1973 lawsuits such as Williams and Wilkins Co. v. United States occurred, focusing on the making of unauthorized photocopies of articles. Widespread adoption of photocopy machines in libraries, especially in ILL, was a major reason that the U.S. Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1976. Although Sections 107 and 108 of the new law included provisions relevant to ILL photocopying, they caused considerable confusion in libraries. Later in 1976 the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) attempted to clarify matters by issuing guidelines. Both the 1976 Act and the “CONTU Guidelines” are still in effect and still sometimes cause confusion, especially among new ILL practitioners. In fact, the 1976 Act is law and the CONTU Guidelines are not. The 1976 Act also triggered concern on the part of ILL departments regarding record keeping and the payment of royalties. In 1978 the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) was established by authors and publishers to act as a clearinghouse for royalty fees.

In 1988 the United States signed the Berne Convention, resulting in the elimination of the requirement for copyright notice. By the early 1990s, rapid development of the Internet allowed information sharing in ways that the Copyright Act of 1976 could not imagine. The result was the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which attempts to address online infringement of copyright.

Other Developments

The latter part of the twentieth century also saw revolutionary developments in other aspects of ILL practice: the proliferation of publications specifically addressed to ILL practitioners, an increase in cost and performance studies aimed exclusively at ILL, and the creation of new service alternatives.

Dedicated Publications

Accompanying the explosion of ILL activity, publications began to appear specializing in aiding practitioners with how-to’s and giving them a platform to share best practices. Among the how-to’s, Sarah Katharine Thomson’s Interlibrary Loan Procedure Manual was published by ALA in 1970, largely in response to ALA approval of the 1968 ILL and Model Codes. The development and rapid acceptance of online ILL systems soon made the need for a new manual necessary. In 1984, ALA published Virginia Boucher’s Interlibrary Loan Practices Handbook, followed by a second edition in 1997.

Virginia Boucher also was responsible for an early ILL newsletter. Bearing the catchy title just b’twx us, it was produced at the University of Colorado and ran sporadically from 1970 to 1986. In 1988, Mary Jackson’s bimonthly “Library to Library” column began its run in the Wilson Library Bulletin. By 1990 Haworth Press began publication of a full-fledged periodical dedicated to ILL, the Journal of Interlibrary Loan and Information Supply, edited by Leslie R. Morris.

Methods of communicating among ILL practitioners have evolved along with the Internet. In the 1980s electronic discussion lists began popping up to help ILL practitioners connect to one another. One of the earliest discussion lists that is still going strong is ILL-L. As the Internet has become even more sophisticated, ILL practitioners have adopted wikis, blogs, and other new technologies for information sharing.

Cost and Performance Studies

With the proliferation of ILL activity during the 1990s, libraries were faced with several questions: Does it cost less or more to provide material through ILL than to purchase a needed book or article? What are the hidden costs of ILL? How can libraries determine where to spend money to achieve less staff stress, faster turnaround, and greater patron satisfaction? Cost and performance studies began in earnest during this period. Among the more comprehensive studies were two involving Association of Research Libraries (ARL) institutions: The ARL/RLG Interlibrary Loan Cost Study, published in 1993, followed by Measuring the Performance of ILL Operations in North American Research and College Libraries in 1998. In 2004 ARL published Assessing ILL/DD Services: New Cost-Effective Alternatives. In addition to providing cost and other data from research and some college libraries, these studies identified several ILL and document delivery best practices that are of value to all types of libraries.

New Resource-Sharing Models

By the mid-1990s, some consortia began to offer a new type of resource sharing, featuring direct patron-initiated requesting of books from other libraries. This alternative to traditional ILL employs software that enables institutions to share user status and item-availability information. One example is OhioLink, which began full production in 1996. This new service model introduced new practices and procedures and sparked a need for codes to govern them. Consortia often adapted existing ILL codes to address the needs of the new resource-sharing environment.

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Developments in the twenty-first century will seem mild in comparison to the profound impact of technology on resource sharing that occurred in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, enhancements in technology continue to impact the practice of resource sharing and have allowed ILL units the ability to improve and expand services as well as focus on developing relationships with other libraries.

Codes

ALA’s Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) now requires reviews of its codes and guidelines every seven years. Therefore, we’ve seen two revisions of the U.S. ILL code since 1993. The first was a major overhaul of the code in 2001, incorporating references to unmediated ILL and redefining the date due of an ILL item as the date the item is due back at the lending library. Another major change in 2001 was to the two-part format that we have today: (1) the Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States, itself, containing the essential and relatively “timeless” guidelines for interlibrary borrowing and lending,¹⁵ accompanied by (2) the Explanatory Supplement for Use with the Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States, which amplifies the provisions of the code and provides “fuller explanation and specific examples for text that is intentionally general and prescriptive.”¹⁶ This format was adopted so that the more general code, which requires formal approval by RUSA, would need less-frequent revision while the detailed Explanatory Supplement could easily be revised as needed.

Interlibrary borrowing and lending in the United States today are conducted under an ILL Code and Explanatory Supplement that were revised in 2008. As expected, the 2008 revisions to the code were very minor while a few substantive changes were made to the Explanatory Supplement to address such current issues as discouraging the use of adhesive labels on borrowed items and the need to request special uses of items in advance.

Among other codes, revised Guidelines for the Interlibrary Loan of Rare and Unique Material were approved in 2004. Approval of another revision is expected in 2011.

Cooperation and Consortia

One of the most intense, if short-lived, uses of both Z39.50 and the ISO ILL Protocol involving U.S. libraries began in 2000, when RLG introduced ILL Manager, a peer-to-peer ILL management system. In 2003 RLG migrated all of its consortial ILL activity to peer-to-peer systems like ILL Manager and retired the RLIN ILL system.

In 2006, however, RLG combined with OCLC, the RLIN Union Catalog was merged into OCLC WorldCat, RLG’s citation databases moved to OCLC FirstSearch, and RLG ILL activity moved to OCLC WorldCat Resource Sharing and ILLiad. Today, OCLC serves more than 72,000 libraries of all types in the United States and over 170 countries and territories around the world. OCLC is closer than ever to being a de facto national network for the United States and has an increasing international scope as well.

Technology

After a flood destroyed most of its periodical collection in 1997, Colorado State University developed FastFlood software to expedite the delivery of journal articles. In 2001, this service evolved into RapidILL and since has become international in scope.

Article delivery methods are also changing: electronic journal providers are becoming more inclined to allow direct delivery of PDF files, eliminating the need for ILL staff to go through multiple conversions between electronic and paper formats. In 2003, Atlas Systems introduced its Internet document transmission software, Odyssey, which can function either as part of ILLiad or as a stand-alone product.

Delivery of materials is also changing in the formerly highly restrictive area of academic dissertations and theses. Institutions are adopting the practice of accepting and providing direct access to their theses and dissertations in electronic format only (ETDs). ProQuest’s Dissertation and Theses database, the successor to Dissertation Abstracts, also offers a full-text option for many theses. These academic works, once so carefully guarded in the library’s archives and often unavailable for ILL, are now much more freely available.

INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY COOPERATION

Changing technology continues to blur the boundaries of ILL among countries on all continents. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) plays a major role in facilitating library activity among countries. As early as 1927, librarianship as a profession had solidified around the world to the point that IFLA was founded in Scotland as the global voice of the library and information profession. Within its first ten years, IFLA worked out a system of international library loans, even proposing in 1932 that international loans be a principal theme of its Second World Congress held in Madrid in 1935. A duty-free loan system and uniform rules and procedures among participating libraries were proposed. By the Warsaw meeting in 1936, nineteen countries had joined the plan, which was unfortunately interrupted by World War II in 1939.

By the mid-1950s, IFLA resumed a strong role in facilitating communications among libraries worldwide, approving its International Lending and Document Delivery: Principles and Guidelines for Procedure in 1954. Subsequently, international ILL became a necessity rather than a luxury for researchers and prompted three revisions of the principles and guidelines between 1978 and 2001. In the late 1970s, IFLA established a Core Programme for Universal Availability of Publications and an Office for International Lending. Today, the Document Delivery and Resource Sharing Section encourages libraries throughout the world to make information in all formats available using a variety of resource-sharing and document supply techniques. The section monitors international resource-sharing developments and provides information through its website, a semiannual newsletter, interlending conferences, document delivery workshops, and cooperative projects with other international organizations. In 1995 IFLA introduced its Voucher Scheme, which enables libraries to pay for ILL transactions with reusable vouchers, negating the need for invoices, bank transfers, and currency conversions, further facilitating international lending transactions. Today IFLA has over 1,600 member libraries in approximately 150 countries worldwide.

CONCLUSION

As we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century, many issues in interlibrary loan continue to evolve: staff and delivery costs; copyright versus contract law; the sharing of international, electronic, or rare and unique materials; the communication of policies; and even the locus of ILL in the library. Also, both bibliographic utilities and regional networks are transforming themselves in response to a rapidly changing environment. An example is the 2009 emergence of Lyrasis, formed by the joining of SOLINET, PALINET, and NELINET. As in the past, we in interlibrary loan will meet the challenges of continuing technological, legal, organizational, and societal changes. One thing is constant: we interlibrary loan practitioners will continue to do our best to connect users with the information they desire, regardless of its format or location.

NOTES

1. Roy MacLeod, “Introduction: Alexandria in History and Myth,” in The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, edited by Roy MacLeod (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 4–5.

2. Karl Christ, The Handbook of Medieval Library History, trans. Theophil M. Otto (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), 113.

3. William H. Carlson, “Cooperation: An Historical Review and a Forecast,” College and Research Libraries 13, no. 1 (1951): 5.

4. Samuel S. Green, “The Lending of Books to One Another by Libraries,” American Library Journal 1, no. 1 (1876): 15–16.

5. Samuel S. Green, “Interlibrary Loans in Reference Work,” Library Journal 23, no. 2 (1898): 567–68.

6. Ibid., 568.

7. Elizabeth W. Stone, American Library Development, 1600–1899 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1977), 287.

8. C. H. Gould, “[Report of the ALA] Committee on Co-ordination [regarding the Code of Practice for Interlibrary Loans],” Library Journal 42 (1917): 634.

9. Ibid.

10. “Interlibrary Loan Code–1940,” College and Research Libraries 3 (September 1941): 318–19, 376.

11. “General Interlibrary Loan Code, 1952,” College and Research Libraries 13, no. 4 (October 1952): 350–55.

12. Ibid., Appendix II, 355–58.

13. Sarah Katharine Thomson, “Model Interlibrary Loan Code for Regional, State, Local or Other Special Groups of Libraries, Annotated,” Interlibrary Loan Procedure Manual (Chicago: American Library Association, 1970), 8–17.

14. Reference and User Services Association, “National Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States, 1993,” RQ 33, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 477–79.

15. Reference and User Services Association, “Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States,” Reference and User Services Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 318–19.

16. Reference and User Services Association, “Explanatory Supplement for Use with the Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States,” Reference and User Services Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 312–27.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carlson, William H. “Cooperation: An Historical Review and a Forecast.” College and Research Libraries 13, no. 1 (1951): 5–13.

Christ, Karl. The Handbook of Medieval Library History. Translated by Theophil M. Otto. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984.

“General Interlibrary Loan Code, 1952.” College and Research Libraries 13, no. 4 (October 1952): 350–58.

Gould, C. H. “[Report of the ALA] Committee on Co-ordination [regarding the Code of Practice for Interlibrary Loans].” Library Journal 42 (1917): 634–35.

Green, Samuel S. “The Lending of Books to One Another by Libraries.” American Library Journal 1, no. 1 (1876): 15–16.

———. “Interlibrary Loans in Reference Work,” Library Journal 23, no. 2 (1898): 567–68.

“Interlibrary Loan Code–1940,” College and Research Libraries 3 (September 1941): 318–19, 376.

MacLeod, Roy. “Introduction: Alexandria in History and Myth.” In The Library of Alexandria: Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, edited by Roy MacLeod. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000, 1–15.

Reference and User Services Association. “Explanatory Supplement for Use with the Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States.” Reference and User Services Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 321–27.

Reference and User Services Association. “Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States.” Reference and User Services Quarterly 40, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 318–19.

Reference and User Services Association. “National Interlibrary Loan Code for the United States, 1993.” RQ 33, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 477–79.

Stone, Elizabeth W. American Library Development, 1600–1899. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1977.

Thomson, Sarah Katharine. “Model Interlibrary Loan Code for Regional, State, Local, or Other Special Groups of Libraries, Annotated.” In Interlibrary Loan Procedure Manual. Chicago: American Library Association, 1970.