ILL Requests for Electronic Resources Now Available Through UC-eLinks

The Systemwide Operations and Planning Advisory Group (SOPAG) has approved a recommendation from the Resource Sharing Committee (RSC) that interlibrary loan (ILL) requests for items with electronic copy no longer be blocked.  The CDL implemented this recommendation on Monday, March 8.

The primary modification was to remove the block in UC-eLinks.  This means that a UC-eLinks user will, when appropriate, see a screen that has both a link to electronic text as well as a link to Request.  The link to electronic text will appear first in the list, and the link to Request will be the second or third link on the screen.  This change will prevent the situation in which a user clicking on an electronic copy link receives a response that the item is not available but is given no option for initiating an ILL request.

The RSC recommended this change because it is now impossible for the CDL to detect how complete the electronic copy is — it may just be an extract rather than the whole document.  There is frequently “missing content” as well.  This causes confusion to the user and means that many valid requests are blocked.  Statistics for UC-eLinks indicate that users overwhelmingly choose full text links when they are present, so there is unlikely to be a large increase in ILL requests as a result of this change.