Editorial

Citation

McGrath, M. (2008), "Editorial", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 36 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2008.12236caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Interlending & Document Supply, Volume 36, Issue 3

Another international mix – articles from the UK, Canada, India, China, Ireland, the USA and Italy. Open access and as always the literature review.

Italian librarians have found it difficult to develop effective resource sharing networks mainly because of the late unification of the country, its size and diversity and its often paralysing bureaucracy. I recall the Kafka-esque nightmare of trying to organise a direct mail promotion to Italian libraries when I was responsible for overseas marketing of the British Library Document Supply Centre in the early 1990s. However an effective resource sharing and document supply network was established in 2001 and has gone from strength to strength. It is described here by staff at the National Research Council in Bologna (Bologna also has the finest food market in Italy – but we digress). The British Library has the largest document supply operation in the world and still processes 1.6 million requests today. However the steep decline from a peak of 3.8 million in 2001 has caused severe difficulties. The management of that transition and the changes that are taking place are described by Mat Pfleger, Head of Sales and Marketing at the British Library. India is of course vast and faces it own unique issues of size, diversity and relative poverty. However progress is also being made here and the development of the national union catalogue, INFLIBNET, the essential requirement for effective document supply, is described. China along with India is developing rapidly and library services find it difficult to keep up with the demands placed upon them. Preprint servers are becoming important for the dissemination of articles and these are described by two librarians from China. Whether or not to catalogue free e-resources is a difficult decision and as the amount of this type of material increases it becomes important to make the correct decision. An article from Canada addresses the issue empirically and should be of great interest to readers. We carry a report on the latest meeting of the association for information professionals in the pharmaceutical industry which met recently in France and which discussed the model licence and document supply. Recent issues of ILDS have carried articles on the exciting developments in Denmark and The Netherlands that are enabling access to national holdings by the ordinary citizen via the public library network. Now England is joining in and the progress of a similar project is described by David Potts who works at that Museums, Libraries and Archives Council for England. And last but not least your editor contributes his usual round up the literature on document supply and related topics.

Mike McGrath