Hello Everyone
As promised here are the results
ILL Quick Survey Results.
1. How much do you charge for ILL's?
Free - 3
Under £1.00- 2
£1.00 - £1.99 2
£2.00 - £2.99 4
£3.00 and over 5
Other Schemes
Pre-purchase tokens:
£6.00 Departmental purchase (bulk orders)
£6.50 Over the counter sales to any staff/registered student
£8.50 Over the counter to any non-staff/student with library record.
2. Do you charge students for the renewal of ILL's?
No charge 3
Under £1.00 1
£1.00 - £1.99 1
£2.00 - £2.99 4
£3.00 and over 4
Renewals not allowed - 3
3. Would you charge students the full cost of the ILL if they didn't
collect it from the Library?
No Charge - 12
Yes – prepayed - 4
4. Do students have to pre-pay for reservations (buy in bulk) or do you
allow them to pay when they place each request?
As requested - 8
On collection - 3
Additional repsonses
• Individual vouchers (which have to be attached to the request
forms)
are sold, obviously students have the option of buying however many they
wish. A number of academic departments send in a bulk order and
distribute them (free) to research students and staff. We are looking at
moving to electronic requests, so will need to re-think the voucher
systems.
• Departments tend to purchase blocks of ILL tokens but students
tend to purchase them as and when required. (NB - most departments
allocate some of the ILL tokens to their students - this is not within our
control - all we verify is that each request has a token affixed)
• No, we only charge for a request supplied. The charge is added to
their library record and they can pay any time. Staff and graduates who
have grant/project funds available to them can charge their Interlending
requests to that code.
• Undergraduates pay on collection (cash taken at the till). Staff
and
postgraduates can charge their departments (we sent a monthly report of
ILL charges to the Finance Office).
• Each school has an annual ILL allocation which they are
responsible for monitoring. Cost is deducted from this when item is
supplied. No charge for items not supplied.
• They generally pay at the time they make the request. Some
departments buy vouchers in bulk in advance, for which there is a 10%
discount. Other departments provide blanket Purchase Orders in advance
(e.g. for £100) which ILLs can be charged against (departments billed
quarterly).
5. Do you allow students to request for items using Electronic Signatures?
Yes - 13
No – 3
Additional
No, we don't. We ask the student to print a copyright declaration, sign it
and then send it to us. We then match it up with their electronic request,
and transmit it to BL.
6. If you do, how would you rate this service as beneficial to the Library.
• It allows online input of the request which goes straight into the
ILL system. It also allows students to place requests remotely with the
charge being added to their library account.
• Possible to allow distance requests with paying by card over the
phone if more than 3 requests placed. Streamlined the process and quicken
it. Saves on filing paperwork
• We have had very positive feedback. We are still doing a 'work
around' by having to physically sign the declaration, but people like the
idea of being able to submit their ILL requests from the library catalogue.
• Extremely beneficial, not just to the library but for all users.
No bits of
paper! No delays processing requests. Best thing we ever did!
7. Do you use the British Library's Secure Electronic Delivery(SED)?
Yes - 11
No – 5 (Pilots starting – 2)
• Just for staff at present, but we intend to extend it out to
students,
maybe next academic year. It seems to work well for staff, and we didn't
have many problems in setting it up [we currently use Talis LMS]. We used
to use the 'add-address' function on Talis to post articles out
direct from BL - SED is much faster, they usually receive the item in a
day or so. [It didn't really change our workload though, as the
articles were already going direct to the end-user, but of course, the
price differential is getting bigger every year].
8. If so, how would you rate this service as benefical to the Library.
• It's cheaper and students normally receive these items a day
sooner.
• Requested by academic staff - and will be exploring changing pre-
paid voucher system to an e-voucher system so that it can all be done from
their desk...
• Although we offer the SED service, it isn't very popular with our
users.
They don't like having to pay for their own printing! Speed, ease of use
and price is good for the management of ILLs
• It's a great bonus for people to be able to access their documents
from outside the library - particularly for our off campus and
international students. However, we have struggled with Adobe 8 and the
proper installation of the Digital Editions software. Our IT dept couldn't
stall the launch of Adobe 8 on the networked pcs, so we had some problems
with people being able to access their documents. In response to this, our
IT dept rolled out the Digital Editions software to all networked pcs
• Most participants in the trial are pleased with the service, though
there have been problems with anyone who has the latest version of Adobe
Acrobat installed. This has resulted in additional work for the ILL team,
so we will be reviewing later in the academic year.
• Good. Seen by users as more efficient. BL charge less for SED. As
long as a user's details are correct on their library record, it does not
matter a great deal to us how users want an article delivered. We have
used the BL's add address for years so we actually handle very few paper
copies anyway.
• It will greatly speed up supply of journal articles, though much
user education is necessary re limits on number of times files can be
opened and length of time for which they are available.
• It is quicker and currently cheaper to use, for the most part
involves less staff time and it is now our default for articles requests -
though people still have the option of asking for hard copy.
• As a science library, our readers want the latest information fast
and in electronic format, and were asking for this type of service before
it was available from the BL.
9. Any other comments.
• Many do not have a printer at home and would need to pay to print
out at College. They usually ask us to do it for them - this does wipe out
the advantage of cheaper SED price for us. We also tend to print out
during vacations to cover 14 day rule.
• We are using the BL digitizing services (scanning licence
material) and
have found that to be very good - so we are confident that the SED
service will enhance the service we offer to our readers. We are just
waiting for the "add-address" feature to be added to our Millennium ILL
package and then we will be ready to move ahead.
• We suspect with the introduction of charges that this will drop
significantly in the first year. It's staff not students who have objected
most to the charges but we think they will get used to it!
Hope you find it useful
Mark
|