RLUK

In March 1996 the CURL Board appointed an Inter-Library Loans Working Party to investigate the feasibility of a service between CURL members for the loan of monographs on inter-library loan. The testing of such a service was regarded as essential before any wider service could be offered through the COPAC database, which is being run by Manchester Computing with JISC funding. The members of the Working Party had considerable experience of reader services, including inter-library loan, in a variety of research libraries in the UK and Ireland. The Working Party was chaired by Fred Friend (UCL) and the Secretary was Chris Bailey (Glasgow). Jacqui Dowd (Glasgow) was appointed as project officer for the trial. The aim of the project was to establish the feasibility of developing a monograph interlending service, based on COPAC.

The Working Party secured the co-operation of six CURL libraries as lenders and borrowers (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Oxford and Trinity College Dublin). A further three CURL libraries (Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield) and one non-CURL library (Lancaster) participated as borrowers only. The trial was run between 1 April and 30 September 1997. The six supplying libraries were chosen because they had bibliographic records available through COPAC as at 1 April 1997. These libraries have huge holdings of monographs, although the holdings were only partially included in COPAC at the time of the trial. They have a variety of different systems and regulations, although three of the six - being legal deposit libraries - were only able to loan monographs for use in the borrowing library only and not for home use. Although the situation was not in all respects as it will be when COPAC is complete, the mix of libraries and range of holdings accessible was felt to be adequate to test the feasibility of an inter-library loan service. The procedure chosen by the Working Party for the trial was e-mail requesting library-to-library in a pre-determined order. This was considered to be essential to prevent too heavy a load falling upon one library. Although end-user requesting may be part of any long-term service through COPAC, it was felt that the trial could only be monitored if it was on the basis of library-to-library. E-mail was chosen as the requesting vehicle because it was expected to be robust and unlikely to require the participating libraries to make any change to their various housekeeping systems, some of which have inter-library loan modules and some of which do not.

On this basis, during the six months of the trial:

	7550 monographs were requested by users in the six libraries
	2776 (37%) were found in COPAC
	2620 (94% of those found) were applied for on inter-library loan
	1693 (65% of those applied for) were supplied
	774 (46% of those supplied) were supplied for use-in-library only
	the average supply time was 8.1 days

Significant features of the trial were :

1. The low hit-rate on COPAC at the time of the trial
2. Problems with the reliability of e-mail systems
3. Problems caused by the lack of circulation information on COPAC
4. The high proportion of items supplied for use-in-library only
5. The extra workload for inter-library loan staffs in both requesting and supplying libraries
6. High postage costs incurred by supplying libraries.

The CURL Board considered the report on the trial at its meeting on 26 November 1997, thanked the staff of the participating libraries for their co-operation, and resolved that a small task force should be established to review in more detail the outcomes of the trial and to assess how best to take things forward. The task force will liaise with the COPAC Steering Group and will report to the CURL Board through the Access Steering Group. Consideration will be given to future developments in co-operation with other services, such as RLG Shares and LAMDA. Much has been learned from the trial which will benefit the research community as new services develop.