Interlibrary Lending Peer-to-Peer—RLG's ILL
Manager
This activity is now closed. The information on this page is provided for historical purposes only.
In the mid-1990s interlibrary loan practitioners in RLG's SHARES program
realized how frustrated they were with the limitations of centralized
ILL systems. Many were required to use several systems to serve their
communities. What had been breakthroughs in interlending years before
were becoming a workflow, data management, and training nightmare.
Planning in 1996 by SHARES leaders led to a SHARES
Technical Advisory Group, whose members urged that RLG develop, a
flexible, networked software solution. Emerging international standards
enabled our staff and member advisors to envision and design
software—RLG's ILL Manager—based on a new,
peer-to-peer model. The goal:
- Software that would be fully standards-based for
maximum interoperability.
- Automation of routine procedures.
- A unified workflow addressing all trading partners.
- Full integration with Ariel® document
delivery software.
- Understanding and adoption of the new interlending
model.
Through early and active participation in the ILL
Protocol Implementors Group, RLG has helped shape the international
standards as well as the practices necessary to ensure effective
interworking of multiple standards-based systems. RLG's promulgation of
the standards has prodded the ILL systems community to support
universal peer-to-peer interlending.
SHARES Technical Advisory Group's role
In late 1996 the SHARES Executive Group held a two-day strategic
planning session at the Library of Congress out of which several
initiatives emerged. A SHARES Technical Advisory Group was appointed,
as were two task forces, one on SHARES participation and one on
international interlibrary loan.
The Technical Advisory Group (also known as STAG) took
on the
technical deficiencies of the long-running, centralized RLIN®
ILL
system, felt particularly by the large university library SHARES
partners. Besides new distributed ILL management software, over the
group's active life its members fostered:
- Implementation in RLIN ILL of support for ISO ILL
protocols.
- Ariel® support for these protocols.
- Z39.50 client gateways with European databases to
facilitate interlending.
- Integration into RLIN ILL of requests submitted by
patrons through RLG's Eureka® interface.
- Interim enhancements in RLIN ILL pending the new
peer-to-peer software.
- The "Borrow Direct" pilot project undertaken by
SHARES
participants Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale
University with RLG's support.
Implementation of 20 basic ISO ILL protocol messages in
RLIN
ILL allowed ILL requests to be sent between this centralized legacy
system and other ISO 10161-compliant, both centralized and distributed.
Ariel support of the ISO ILL protocols made Ariel
interoperable with ISO-10161-compliant systems and enabled greater
integration of Ariel into ILL workflows for nonreturnables.
The RLG Z39.50 client gateway between the RLG Union
Catalog
and the union catalogs shared by RLG members in Europe and Australia
enabled users to extend their searches to the CURL Union Catalog
(Consortium of University Research Libraries), the Deutsche Bibliothek
Database, and the National Library of Australia Catalogue.
Enhancing the Eureka Request feature enabled patrons to
search
the RLG Union Catalog and send ILL requests to be placed automatically
into an RLIN ILL file for processing.
Among other changes in RLIN ILL before ILL Manager
became
available, SHARES participants welcomed the "favorite lenders" feature
that enabled libraries to ensure that their requests went first to the
institutions they knew were most likely to be able to fill them without
delay.
The effort among Columbia, Penn, and Yale (originally
dubbed
the "CoPY Project"), created a "virtual catalog" of library holdings of
the three institutions, providing student and faculty access
simultaneously to all three. It was studied as a potential model for
establishing "primary supplier institutions" within the SHARES
partnership.
By 1999 the SHARES Technical Advisory Group concluded a
particularly busy 18 months by "donating" its participants to two
larger, successor working groups.
The ILL supervisors on the technical advisory group
became
part of an ILL Manager Advisory Group to help RLG solve functionality
and interface issues in developing ILL Manager. Six institutions
beta-tested the new software before its production release in March
2000. A year later RLG's ILL Manager had been licensed by over two
dozen institutions and was being used to exchange requests with other
ILL Manager users, with RLIN ILL users, and with OCLC ILL users.
The systems administrators became part of the
just-formed RLG
Systems Librarians and Administrators Discussion Group, which continues
to share information and strategies with their colleagues and RLG staff
on topics as diverse as Z39.50 clients, metadata, non-Roman alphabet
support, authentication/authorization issues, and sharing holdings data.
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