Ejournals and ILL

["Beth Jacoby" <bjacoby@ycp.edu>]

I'd like to hear how other libraries are handling interlibrary 
loan transactions for online journal articles when the license 
agreement forbids electronic transmission of the article.  We 
recently signed two separate license agreements which, according 
to my interpretation, do not allow us to fulfill ILL requests 
unless we print out the article and send it via snail mail.

Wording of the license from the first publisher: "The Subscriber 
may print and deliver Excerpts to fulfill requests as part of the 
practice commonly known as 'interlibrary loan' from 
non-commercial libraries located within the same country as the 
Subscriber."

Wording of the license from the second publisher: "The 
subscribing Institution's library facilities are permitted to use 
printouts from the electronic versions of the Journals, but not 
manipulable electronic files, for the purpose of inter-library 
loan, subject to the limitations of Section 108 of the Copyright 
Act of 1976 and the CONTU Guidelines related thereto."

If we get an ILL request for an article we have only in print, 
our current practice is to scan the article and send it to the 
requesting library as a PDF document.  As I interpret these 
licenses, we may neither send the article from the e-version nor 
scan the print and send it as a PDF for ILL purposes.

1.	How do you interpret these clauses?
2.	Would you consider a PDF file as "manipulable"?
3.	Have you had any success in negotiating more liberal ILL clauses?

Beth Jacoby
Collection Development Librarian
Schmidt Library
York College of Pennsylvania
York, PA  17405-7199
Email: bjacoby@ycp.edu