Re: ejournals and ILL

[Peter Hirtle <pbh6@cornell.edu>]

When it comes to ILL, it is important to keep that in mind that 
ILL in the US is governed by the CONTU limitations intended to 
ensure that ILL is never used to take the place of a 
subscription.  Regardless of whether an article is printed to 
paper and scanned into ARIEL or whether a patron can make a 
request directly in his or her library's ILL system, when the 
requesting library passes the number of permitted loans in a 
year, it has to start paying permission fees.

Inefficiency and what Joseph Esposito called the "Universal 
Customer Problem" may be an issue for general document delivery, 
but not for ILL.  The one exception might be for ILLs sent 
overseas, since the requesting country would not have to follow 
the CONTU "rule of five."  But even there, I don't think there is 
much of a problem.  A German library, for example, requesting an 
ILL from an American institution would as I understand it have to 
pay permission fees under the new German copyright law. 
Furthermore, few American libraries are interested in engaging in 
ILL transactions with foreign institutions since the exchange is 
usually not reciprocal.  And lastly, under standard ILL 
procedures, the requesting library must assert that the use is 
either authorized under CONTU or is a fair use.

For this reason, license terms that require that articles be 
printed and then scanned in order to be used in ILL are just 
plain mean.

Peter B. Hirtle
CUL Intellectual Property Officer
and Technology Strategist
Cornell University Library
Ithaca, NY
peter.hirtle@cornell.edu