Of Lending and Licensing

American Library Association Annual Conference 2011

Jared Howland and Gerrit van Dyk

Given June 2011 in New Orleans, LA

Download: PowerPoint | PDF | Keynote

Documents: Handout (PDF or Pages) | License Terms Definitions | Abridged Standard License Agreement (PDF)^*

^* This document was derived from a workshop presented at the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) 2006 Annual Meeting. Thanks to Diane Grover, Electronic Resources Coordinator from the University of Washington Libraries, for allowing me to use it.

Primary Research Group just published a study on library database licensing trends
In it, it had some interesting figures related to ILL and licensing of eContent
3 out of 4 libraries surveyed have not tried to renegotiate their database licenses to allow for ILL lending

Only 42% said they even keep records for their licensing

If you library is like ours, we have seen a steep drop in print acquisition and just as steep climb in electronic acquisitions of serials
Print: blue
Serials Purple.
As more and more titles are going digital, we will all have a harder time filling journal and ebook requests if 3 out of 4 libraries do not try to get rights to lend electronically
In essence, interlibray loan as a service would not only suffer but would be in danger of irrelevance
Jared’s going to talk about what we can be doing at our institutions to be more proactive about licensing eContent for ILL

Step 1: Find out who licenses resources for your library
Their office will look like this

Step 2: Find out if your licensing guru is asking for lending rights
If not, request that lending rights be requested every time a license is negotiated

Step 3: Offer example language for lending rights
Example language can be found in what is called the “Standard License Agreement”
Specifically, the URL here has an example license agreement that includes favorable lending language on pages 2–3

Step 4: Start tracking your license agreements
Preferably using an Electronic Resource Management System (ERM), but anything is preferable to nothing
If your licensing guru is already tracking this, find out how you can access and use this data
Step 5: Do not, as a policy, prohibit electronic lending
Instead, find ways to lend – restructure, redesign do whatever you need to
Work with your licensing person to find out the best way to find out what lending rights are available
Step 6: Work with cataloging to make sure records of electronic content that can be lent are loaded into OCLC

So the question is, once you find the few titles you can’t lend…how do you just deflect them and not everything?
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to only deflect those individual titles but not everything else?

There is a way!
Our friends in the MARC world thought of it a long time ago
Character 20 on a 0-20 scale in the 008 field of the MARC Holdings record will designate an item Will Lend, Will Not Lend, Will Lend Hard Copy Only, Limited Lending Policy, or Unknown
For those non catalogers in the room, what does this mean?

This is how it SHOULD work in ILLiad:
It should make your library a non-supplier for just that item…not everything
What actually happens is it allows you to select the library but the borrower gets an autodeflect notice: Autodeflection: request type

Or if you use OCLC resource Sharing:
It makes you a non-supplier of that item, at the bottom of everyone’s custom holdings

In reality, however, this is how it really works:
You are still totally visible and show up as a supplier but then the requesting library gets a deflection notice: Auto-Deflection: request type

Other option: don’t send up holdings for those journals. That’s what we do…our journals do not even show up – those that we can’t lend

Conclusion:
We need to ask our vendors for ILL privileges
We need to keep track of the license agreements
We need to either deflect only those titles we can’t lend, or possible just not send up our holdings for those items until we intend to lend