Eligibility Guidelines

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) provides DOCLINE Elegibility Guidelines which detail the requirements for becoming a DOCLINE participant.

You are eligible to become a DOCLINE participant if your library is currently subscribed to a minimum of 25 titles in the health sciences, which you are willing to lend through DOCLINE.

The eligibility guidelines are meant to reinforce the role of DOCLINE as a resource sharing system. They are meant to preclude libraries from joining with the intent of only ever using DOCLINE to borrow. They are not meant to prevent libraries with small collections or limited resources from participating. If you are interested in DOCLINE but think that you may not meet the eligibility guidelines, you should contact the DOCLINE Group to discuss your situation.

Within the guidelines that DOCLINE participants should be willing to do some lending through DOCLINE, each participating library is entitled to set its own ILL policies, including restricting the scope of its lending and setting ILL fees and similar policies.

Procedures for Joining

If you are interested in joining DOCLINE, contact the DOCLINE Group. The coordinator will outline the registration process and answer any questions you might have.

Docline Responsibilities of Members

1. Contact the Regional Medical Library (RML) to become a DOCLINE participant and to establish a system account.
2. Comply with the minimum system requirements for DOCLINE.
3. Protect the system from unauthorized access and use.
4. Provide and maintain all data for an accurate institution record in DOCLINE.
5. Log in to DOCLINE daily to receipt requests or to update the status of loan requests. Maintain awareness of the DOCLINE system-applied time limits for receipts and updates.
6. Create and maintain an appropriate routing table in DOCLINE, and review it annually.
7. Maintain and update holdings in Serial Holdings and review them at least annually (all Level 2 holdings should be upgraded to Level 3).
8. Submit new serial titles to be added to Locator Plus to NLM.
9. Notify the regional DOCLINE coordinator of any changes in the library's status (network membership, closings/mergers, consortia membership changes, etc.).
10. Submit suggestions for system enhancements to NLM when appropriate.
11. Subscribe to NLM's DOCLINE-L email discussion list to receive communications about DOCLINE.