Interlibrary Lending Peer-to-Peer—SHARES Partners' Migration

This activity is now closed. The information on this page is provided for historical purposes only.

In July 2002 we asked all SHARES participants to begin moving from RLG's centralized legacy system, RLIN® ILL, to the ISO ILL-compliant distributed system of their choice. No new ILL requests would go through the long-running, centralized RLIN ILL system after July 31, 2003.

On August 31, 2003, the RLIN ILL system was retired.

RLG had long promoted the distributed model of interlibrary loan, which enables users to communicate with all resource-sharing partners using a single interface. In 1999 we created our own system, ILL Manager, based on this model, relying on SHARES practitioners for guidance.

To facilitate the SHARES partners' transition RLG provided a copy of ILL Manager to every RLG library that wanted one, and coordinated a phased movement, with virtual meetings, several regional meetings, and many opportunities for SHARES staff to ask questions and share ideas. SHARES liaisons received information specific to their institutions. The SHARES Executive Group, Practitioners Council, ILLiad users, and other program participants were all consulted as part of making this transition successful.

This project was a watershed in the world of ILL. SHARES partners made themselves the first resource-sharing consortium with a net-lending reimbursement calculation running in a distributed environment of different systems.