Resource Sharing – Cataloguing the Universe

Today I was asked to help with a curly document supply request. A distance student was looking for a particular article, which my colleagues had been unable to locate. Usually we think of document supply as resource sharing, but today was really more about resource finding. It’s also similar to reference queries about how to find journal articles, which we get all the time.

It wound up being so difficult—and interesting!—that I thought others might like to know how it was done. This is also partly so that if my colleagues decide they want me to present a training session on this, I’ve already got the notes written up… teehee.

The request

The details I received looked like this:

Journal Title Risk & Regulation
Publisher CARR LSE
Volume / Issue Issue 3
Part Date Spring 2002
Call Number

Title Japan: Land of the Rising Audit?
Article Author Michael Power
Pages 10 ff

My colleagues initially thought this was a book chapter request, but the book they’d found didn’t quite match these details, at which point they roped me into the search.

Catalogue search

Step 1: Search our local catalogue. This is standard for all document supply requests—you’d be surprised how often people ask for things we already have. I consider it a learning and teaching opportunity (and sometimes also a reminder that print books and serials still exist). In this instance, we didn’t have anything with this title in our catalogue.

Step 2: Search Libraries Australia, the national union catalogue. If another Australian library held this serial, we would request it on the patron’s behalf through the Libraries Australia Document Delivery (LADD) system, of which most Australian libraries are a member. I didn’t have an ISSN, so I had to go on title alone.

Good news: there is a record in LA for this serial, so I could confirm it exists. Bad news: no library in Australia holds it. (Records without holdings are common in LA, as many libraries use it as an acquisitions tool.)

Step 3: Search SUNCAT, the British serials union catalogue. I realised later that I didn’t really need to do this step, because the only extra info that LA didn’t have was a list of UK institutions that held copies. (Which I obviously couldn’t get at.) However, it wasn’t until this point that I noticed the note stating ‘Also available via the internet.’ Which got me thinking—is this an OA online journal? It would explain the lack of local holdings if it was just on the internet…

Web archive search

Step 4: Google the journal title. Yes, Google, like a real librarian.

There is a distinct possiblity that I own this particular shirt

Turns out the journal Risk & regulation is indeed published free and online by the London School of Economics, AND they have back issues online! … going back to 2003. The one I need is from 2002, because of course it is.

Step 5: Search the UK Web Archive. Knowing the journal was a) a UK title and b) online at some point, I then turned to web archives to find a copy. I searched on the article title, it being more distinctive than the journal title, and also because a more specific search would get me results faster. This brought me to an archived LSE news page from 2002.

The LSE news page provided a link to the journal page—but the UK Web Archive hadn’t preserved it! Argh!

Step 6: Search the Wayback Machine. All was not lost, however. Because I was now armed with a dead URL that had once linked to the journal page I needed, I could go straight to the Wayback Machine, part of the Internet Archive, and simply plug in the URL to find archived copies of that page. The Wayback Machine recently launched a keyword search functionality, but it’s still a work in progress. My experience suggests this site functions best when you know exactly where to look.

I had to fiddle around with the URL slightly, but I eventually got to the journal landing page. Remembering that I needed issue 3 from Spring 2002, I clicked on the link to the relevant PDF—also archived!—and quickly located the article.

Step 7: Email article to student and give them the the good news. They thanked me and asked how I found it, so I gave them a shorter version of the above in the hope they might find it useful in future. I made sure to reassure them that this kind of thing is quite difficult and there’s often not necessarily a single place to search (they had wondered what search terms they ought to have used) and if they were stuck in future, just ask a librarian—it’s what we’re for. 🙂

Conclusions

Web archives aren’t usually the search target of choice for reference and document supply staff, but they are an absolute goldmine of public information, particularly for older online serials that may have vanished from the live web. Many researchers (and librarians, for that matter) don’t know much about web archives, if anything, so cases like this are a great way to introduce people to these incredible resources.

This was also a bit of a proud moment for me, I won’t lie. It’s so good to have moments like this every now and again—it helps me demonstrate there’s still a place for professional document hunters.

During the last few weeks I’ve been helping out the Document Delivery (DocDel) team at work with some of their workload, chiefly processing other libraries’ physical items in and out, plus a bit of journal article delivery from our collections to other libraries. I am an almost complete newcomer to the inter-library loan and document supply side of the library business, and it’s been very interesting to see how the sausage gets made, so to speak.

Knowing the Share It! Resource Sharing Futures conference is coming up in a month’s time; noting that all the speakers are managers rather than coalface staff; and wondering if a newcomer’s experience of resource sharing work might be valuable, I decided to jot down my experiences of working in DocDel for the first time.

As always, these views are entirely my own and not those of my employer (but hey, if you wanna send me to #shareit2018 I won’t say no).

Resource sharing is surprisingly labour-intensive. I was astonished to find out just how much human intervention goes into an ILL request. When someone lodges a request through the online portal, or gives up and emails, or can’t wait until yesterday and calls up directly, that request is handled by at least three different people:

1) branch staffer at lending library receives book request, confirms book is present, retrieves book, applies book strap, posts book, tells ILL system this has been done
2) docdel staffer at receiving library receives book, applies second book strap with a barcode, writes down patron details on bookmark for easy reference, pops bookmark in book, sends book to pickup branch, tells ILL system this has been done
3) branch staffer at receiving library uses bookmark to locate book on hold shelf, checks out book to patron

And that’s if everything works properly. None of the above is particularly difficult work, but there are a lot of moving parts, and a lot to get right. It’s hard to automate attaching a barcode strap to a book, but we also have to include a little paper note reminding circ staff to change the item’s due date, and I despair every time I reach for a paperclip.

Within consortia using the same ILS, internal resource sharing has a lot less overhead. The BONUS+ consortium, comprising Australian and New Zealand university libraries running an Innovative system (Millennium or Sierra), allows patrons to request items from participating libraries without needing the involvement of document supply staff. The kicker is that you can use the lending library’s barcode without having to attach a new one, because all the ILSs can talk to each other. It’s brilliant! It also shifts a fair bit of the resource sharing workload from DocDel to branch library staff, who incorporate it into their usual circ workflows.

Human labour is often compensating for poor metadata and system design. In any given day, I routinely deny over 80% of article requests. It’s not because I get a kick out of saying no, but rather that the system we use, which hooks into the Libraries Australia Document Delivery network, thinks our collection includes items it doesn’t. From what I can tell, it matches a request to a holding library using a title, author, ISBN, ISSN, or a combination of these. It doesn’t appear to consider our actual holdings of a journal (i.e. the span of years or issues we have) or whether our licensing agreements permit supply of electronic items.

Having said that, our electronic journals have their holdings data recorded in an 856 $z field. Having this data in free text rather than fixed or coded fields surely makes it far harder for an ILL system to figure out what we actually hold. The licensing information is not recorded in a MARC format, is almost certainly inaccessible to the ILL system, and would differ hugely between libraries. Consequently I waste large amounts of time figuring out that no, we can’t actually supply items after all. It would be far better—not to mention faster—for all involved if the system knew not to ask us in the first place.

My colleagues in DocDel work very hard, but I can’t help but feel a lot of their labour is wasted. Surely we can do better?

Resource sharing is interesting and engaging work. While I wish I didn’t have to think so hard about whether or not we can supply an article, there’s still a lot of problem-solving in document supply, especially for rare and unusual materials. Most of that work is handled by the DocDel team leader, who understandably hasn’t let me anywhere near it yet. People ask for all sorts of weird stuff—theses, manuscripts, books that no library in Australia has, increasingly esoteric foreign-language films… if nothing else, it’s a great insight into certain academics’ current research interests. I can almost guess who has requested certain items just by looking at them!
For undergraduates, ILL and document supply are irrelevant. For higher degree students and staff, they’re a lifesaver. I never used ILL as an undergrad, chiefly because they were gonna charge me for it, and I was too broke for that. Ten years and two degrees later, I’m far more aware of the resources beyond my library’s walls, but I’m not sure all our patrons are. If users consider the first page of discovery layer search results to be the sum total of a library’s resource provision—and let’s be honest, most of them do—what incentive do they have to look elsewhere, or ask a librarian for help, or stumble upon that wondrous part of the library website titled ‘Document Supply’? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most of our fervent ILL users discovered the service by accident. It’s usually followed by a ‘Where has this been all my life?!’ moment. It’s been right here, the whole time, but we could do with some more advertising. Also a better funnel for disappointed catalogue users.
There will always be a need for resource sharing services. In an age of open-access, preprint servers and Sci-Hub, where lots of people go out of their way to make their work (and others’) available online for free, plenty of people are questioning the need for library resource sharing services at all. As I see it, there are two main problems: people don’t know resource sharing exists; and when they do know, they often aren’t prepared to wait. Document supply is not a quick process—quite apart from being at the mercy of Australia Post, the use of substandard ILL systems and reliance on human labour means stuff just takes a while. That might work for document supply staff, but it doesn’t work for users.

No matter how often we might hear it, we will never have everything available for free on the internet. As long as there are paywalls, print books and rare items, there will be a need for resource sharing. But our systems and processes must improve. Placing a request and waiting for an item has a decidedly old-fashioned sheen to it. Like I said, I am new to this work, and I don’t profess to have any of the answers. But I sure wouldn’t mind trying to come up with some.