Sue Hutley, Executive Director, ALIA, introduced the topic of the review of the ALIA ILL voucher system. She explained that while use of the voucher scheme has reduced significantly in the past decade, the issue that had brought it to ALIA’s attention is the associations audits over the past several years. ALIA’s financial management needs to be strong and there is not clear information about how many vouchers are held and also concerns about ALIA's obligations.
The ILL vouchers were developed to facilitate interlibrary lending pre Libraries Australian Document delivery scheme and interlibrary lending automation.
The ALIA Interlibrary Lending Advisory Committee is reviewing the scheme and seeking information through discussions and several surveys. The first survey, launched on 12 October 2010, seeks information on how many vouchers libraries are holding. All libraries are encouraged to complete the survey which can be accessed through the following page: http://www.alia.org.au/interlibrary.lending/voucher.review.html This survey closes on 7 November 2010. Please note it is important that libraries that do not use vouchers also complete the survey or send ALIA an email with the information
ALIA have also announced on the website that a further survey to be conducted from November which deals with the issues and future future requirements to support effective resource sharing in Australia.
A question was asked about whether libraries could redeem their vouchers for attendance at ALIA training or products to enable a cost effective benefit for the redemption, rather than a reimbursement that may end up in the organisations accounts. This was referred to ALIA and will be considered along with any other suggestions that come out of the second survey.
The next survey will seek information to review overall issues and options for interlibrary lending/resource sharing schemes in Australia.
Very animated discussion occurred on topics including:
· How does ill fit into the 21st century library environment? We increasingly use online journal aggregations and databases, with decreasing reliance on traditional document delivery of journal articles. Over the past 10 years ILL requests from government libraries have fallen in some cases to around 20% of what occurred a decade ago. Requests for monographs have mostly remained steady for government libraries, however in those sectors where there are new resource discovery tools, such as BONUS, requesting has increased.
· Cost – discussion suggested that while the costs of providing a journal article have fallen as we most often obtain these online to supply via ILL rather than retrieving a physical item, cost from monographs have probably increased because of overall cpi type increases. The discussion referred the issue to the Advisory Committee about understanding the costs of ILL better and having appropriate charges, noting that it was about a decade since the last charge review.
· Information on overall issues and trends – NLA reported that ILL through LADD was increasing slightly, and Margarita Moreno reported that supply through copies direct to the public had increased very significantly – up now to around 8-9k per annum. Discussion on the different experiences in different sectors suggested that perhaps it was time for a roundtable discussion on ILL, whether through a general national library sectors meeting or through a specific event on ILL.
· Reciprocal resource sharing. Discussion noted that many sectors have very successful reciprocal arrangements and asked whether it was time to discuss more or broader reciprocal arrangements.
· ShareIT wiki a reminder the wiki is available at http://www.alia.org.au/governance/committees/interlibrary.lending/wiki/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.ShareIt please consider sharing your experience/knowledge with others.
Roxane Missingham
Parliamentary Librarian
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