Interlibrary Loan of E-Books

      There have been several articles in the past few weeks detailing the efforts of schools such as Duke, Texas Tech and Hawaii to facilitate the interlibrary loans of ebooks (for example, see http://chronicle.com/article/Library-Consortium-Tests/144743/ ) . Hawaii is an especially interesting case, as interlibrary loan to the middle of the Pacific is a somewhat daunting process, which loaning e-books would almost certainly make easier. To that end, Texas Tech and Hawaii have partnered on Occams’s Reader , a pilot program for loaning e-books. The program currently works in concert with ILLiad and is limited to .pdfs. Given the current restrictions  of DRM on many published e-books, this limitation is understandable. The program begins in March and will run for a year.

            Additionally, Angela M. Carreño and Bill Maltarich have documented New York University’s E-Book strategy in their article in the lastest eContent Quarterly, “Aggregation, Integration, Cooperation: The Three Imperatives of New York University’s E-book Strategy”. ( eContent Quarterly1.2 (Dec 2013): 36-52. ) 

          There has been several papers on this topic in the last few years, including ones from Heather Wicht at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Joanne Percy at Eastern Washington,  and Xiaohua Zhu and Lan Shen from the University of Tennessee and University of Purdue, Calumet, respectively.