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Dear all Many thanks to everyone who replied with information on this - it seems that although most of you are not having a problem with renewals we are not entirely alone in our experience of persistent renewers, and also in not having an official policy! A summary of responses is below... There were 24 replies in total. · Do you renew ILL items? Yes = 22 No = 2 · Do you have an official maximum number of renewals Yes = 12 No = 12 · Official or non-official maximum number of renewals Max number of renewals Number of respondents 0 2 1 4 2 4 3 5 4 3 5 2 · Other comments; No renewals unless exceptional circumstances occasionally, due to exceptional circumstances, arrange a second. Renewal counts against your quota of ILL requests Max renewals only apply to BL items, other renewals at lenders discretion We try to rigidly enforce this as we have had problems in the past with continuous renewals. We charge £2 for each ILL request but £4 to renew as we try to discourage. Max renewals do not apply to BL items, as they charge. If they wish to renew a fourth time we deduct another one from their allowance. We use Aleph and it isn't always easy to see how many renewals have already been given. If we notice, we try to stop at 3. 4 renewals and then start querying more. We would renew as long as the lending library is happy to renew though. "We have an unofficial maximum of 3 renewals, then we would ask our Collections team if they would be willing to buy the item for our stock if they felt it suitable, as we would consider it to then be at the stage of being cheaper to purchase than keep renewing. Plus, we've found if we refuse a renewal, the customer often then just requests the same item, which again doesn't seem cost effective." We charge for renewals and this tends to keep the number down I look at each one individually if I think that it is becoming a problem. I will then warn that this is the last renewal, and the book then gets returned. To be honest it's never actually come up. But as we allow members to renew books 4 times before we ask for them to be brought in (to make sure they've not been lost), I think it would probably be 4 for interlibrary loans. I think renewals should be limited to an overall period of 3 months, which is roughly 4 the way we administer them. Generally people don't ask for more than 1 Officially, users can only renew items once but we allow more. Users can only renew once through their account (online) and have to email us for further renewals. The academic school pays for one BL renewal; we charge users £5 for further BL renewals. Best wishes Natalie From: Natalie Guest Sent: 22 March 2016 11:49 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Renewing inter-library loans Dear all I'm trying to formulate a policy on how many times we will request a renewal for an ILL item from the lending library on behalf of our borrower (partly due to a recent occurrence where a reader wanted to my mind an unreasonable number of renewals.) I'm trying to find out what other libraries do and so far I'm finding a lot of people don't have information on their website regarding the maximum number of renewals so perhaps it just hasn't been an issue for other places. With this in mind I thought I should come to the list for thoughts on this issue and specifically these questions... · Do you renew ILL items? · Do you have an official maximum number of renewals and what is it? · If no policy on renewals, unofficially, how many renewals would you consider suitable? I will summarise responses for the list before Friday. Many thanks for your help :) Natalie -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Natalie Guest Document Delivery Co-ordinator, Liaison Librarian for Biological Sciences & Multimedia manager University of Reading Library, Whiteknights, PO Box 223, Reading RG6 6AE 0118 378 8786 www.reading.ac.uk/library<http://www.reading.ac.uk/library> [Twitter] <https://twitter.com/UniRdg_Library>