The NEOS Ebook Interlibrary Lending Task Force has come to an agreement with SAGE for a six month, whole ebook ILL pilot program.
While the interlibrary loan of print materials has long been a fundamental practice within libraries, only a handful of ebook publisher licenses permit the lending of a complete ebook. These restrictions appear to be based primarily on publishers’ concerns about the loss of potential revenue through the sharing of electronic content, while some studies have shown that ebook lending is actually beneficial in increasing awareness of publisher content. But the end result of these publisher policies is that, despite our expansive ebook holdings, our lending is restricted almost exclusively to individual chapters, even to our own NEOS partners.
UAL’s SAGE license agreement has just been amended to allow our Access Services team to fulfil ILL requests from other NEOS libraries for whole ebooks, from February 1st through July 31st, and with a limit of 5 books per week. We’re anticipating that this trial will demonstrate to SAGE that opening up our UAL ebook holdings to ILL is unlikely to cause any negative impacts to their bottom line. And hopefully they will consider amending their license agreements for UAL and other SAGE customers to allow for whole ebook ILL on a permanent basis.
NEOS Ebook Interlibrary Lending Task Force:
Anne Carr-Wiggin
CJ de Jong
Sandy Stift (MacEwan University)
Elizabeth Wallace (Chair)