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Newsletter 13, October 1996 Inter-Library Loan Charges

All Inter-Library Loans requested and supplied after 1st September 1996 will incur charges on collection as follows:

Students	£1
Research Students	£1 or 1 voucher obtainable from your School
Staff	£1 or 1 voucher obtainable from your School
External Users	£6

Until now, the Library has offered Inter-Library Loans as a free service to our staff and students. However, the demand for the service has increased dramatically. The Library is charged £4.78 for each request, and we estimate that each request costs us in the region of £1 to process. We are, therefore, following the majority of university libraries in requiring our users to make a small contribution towards these costs at a time of increased pressures on funding.

The charge will be collected by library staff at the time the requested item is picked up. The requester will incur the charge if the item is received by the Library before the date specified on the request form. Requests without such a date cannot be accepted. A minimum of 15 working days should be allowed for a photocopy request and 20 working days for a book.

Following representations made by the LSS User Group and others, we have introduced a simple administrative system using vouchers to enable the contribution to the cost of inter-loans by staff and research students to be recharged to Schools. We also plan to use the vouchers to ameliorate the effects of the introduction of the charge to staff and research students.

Each voucher can be used instead of the £1 payment. The allocation of the vouchers to Schools has been made on the basis of the number of fte staff and research students associated with the School. A temporary “safety net” will be provided this year for those Schools which have historically made heavier use of the service.

The initial allocation of vouchers to Schools will be free of charge, but Schools can purchase additional vouchers from the Library if they wish. The method of distribution of the vouchers to staff and research students will be for each School to determine. The total allocation of free vouchers for 1996/7 is the same as the number of inter-library loans satisfied in 1995/6. The free allocation to Faculties will be progressively reduced over the next three years, but it will still be possible for Schools to purchase vouchers.

We have, over the last few years, considerably extended the choice of routes by which access to information resources not held locally can be obtained. These arrangements include:

• A subscription scheme to allow LMU staff and research students to borrow from the libraries of Leeds University.
• A scheme whereby LMU staff and students can be referred to other university libraries in Yorkshire and the North-East for reference access.
• Minibus service to The British Library Document Supply Centre at Boston Spa.
• Reciprocal borrowing arrangements for staff and students with Huddersfield, Humberside and Sheffield Hallam Universities.
• Access to a broad range of electronic information sources, via the CD-ROM network and through the Internet. These comprise full-text databases, including electronic journals, as well as databases of bibliographic references.

We plan to develop our range of facilities and services which extend access to information held elsewhere. For example, LMU is one of ten libraries in the UK to become a “development partner” with Blackwells for their new Electronic Journals Distribution Service. This service will provide a single point of access via the Internet to all refereed electronic journals. We are also involved in testing a new service from the British Library Document Supply Centre which links access to a database of journal contents pages with document supply.

Increasingly, the traditional method of using inter-library loans to obtain documents and information is being challenged by the use of technologies which depend upon electronic transmission to provide faster and more cost-effective document delivery services and information access.