National Library News January/February 2000 Vol. 32, nos. 1-2

Coming Soon: New Options for Protocol-Based ILL Management

The ISO Interlibrary Loan Protocol, a set of standard rules governing the communication between interlending partners, was officially approved as an international standard by ISO (International Standards Organization) in 1991.

Canadian libraries, with systems such as AG-Canada’s AVISO, TKM’s Interlend and the Université du Québec’s PEB, have been using ILL Protocol-compliant messaging, as defined in the Canadian Standardized Profile, to communicate with the National Library since the Protocol was first approved almost 10 years ago.

Outside Canada, however, the use of the ILL Protocol has remained an abstract idea. With recent development of protocol-based applications by libraries, software vendors and bibliographic utilities working together in the ILL Protocol Implementors Group (IPIG), this will soon change. Within the next year, there will be several new protocol-based software options available to libraries.

The Library Corporation’s Library.Request, and Ameritech’s RSS (Resource Sharing System) were the first commercial systems released that allow the management of ILL messaging, while conforming to the profile defined by IPIG. Other systems followed, including Fretwell-Downing Informatics’s VDX (Virtual Document Exchange), Perkins and Associates’s CLIO and Pigasus’s WINGS. The Research Library Group (RLG) is developing a stand-alone system, ILL Manager, which, at the time of writing this article, is in beta testing.

Large library consortia have recently implemented or are in the process of implementing protocol-based ILL message management systems to communicate both within the consortia and externally.

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities were able to adapt their own in-house system, PALS, to function in a protocol-based environment by using a tool kit developed by The Library Corporation (TLC).

The CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation), which is a consortium of 11 large university libraries in the U.S. Mid-west (the Big 10 and the University of Chicago), worked with OCLC (the Online Computer Library Centre, Inc.) to develop their new protocol-compliant Distributed Resource Sharing System (DRSS). Library networks as far away as SABInet in South Africa are reported to be seriously considering implementing this system.

LIDDAS (Local Interlending and Document Delivery Administration System), a consortium of Australian university libraries, is implementing an ILL network in university libraries in Australia using software developed by Fretwell-Downing Informatics.

The large bibliographic utilities OCLC and RLG, in addition to developing the library systems already mentioned, are both adapting their own ILL systems to be able to handle protocol-compliant messaging from their users. This will happen sometime in the year 2000.

Several national libraries have installed new systems or re-engineered their legacy systems to handle ILL messaging as specified in the new IPIG profile.

In 1999, both the National Library of Australia with its new system, Kinetica, and the National Library of New Zealand with its system, Te Puna, have implemented new ILL message management modules based on Fretwell-Downing’s VDX system.

National document supply services such as the British Library Document Supply Centre, the National Library of Medicine (U.S.) and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information have highly customized systems to manage their document supply operations. Rather than develop new systems, they are developing protocol-based gateways to their legacy systems.

The National Library of Canada, which developed and implemented the first protocol-based system in 1987, is now upgrading its new ILL system, NAVIS, to conform to the IPIG profile. The National Library of Canada plans to be able to communicate with the new IPIG profile-based systems by the beginning of the new fiscal year (April 2000). At the same time, the Library will continue to accept messages from Canadian libraries using AVISO, Interlend and the Université du Québec’s PEB, which were the early Canadian implementations of the ILL Protocol. Check with Canadian vendors for their timetables for upgrading to the IPIG profile.

Over the next year, there will be a vast array of new-generation ILL messaging products from which Canadian libraries may choose. For up-to-date details on the status of these new software packages, consult the List of IPIG Implementations on the Interlibrary Loan Application Standards Maintenance Agency Web site: <http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/iso/ill/impl_list.htm>.