Promoting Interlibrary Loan in the Traditional Catalog and Discovery Layer: Two Pilot Projects

This paper describes two projects that promote interlibrary loan (ILL) in both traditional online public access catalogs and discovery settings to address user frustrations with gaps in the collection. By creating and inserting OpenURL links into bibliographic records for titles held exclusively by external institutions, the authors leveraged the discovery capabilities of their shared catalog and promoted ILL as an alternative means of access. The second project targeted the overwhelming amount of content indexed in the library's discovery layer that was not locally available. To more directly translate discovery into access, the authors worked with EBSCO to create and enable ILL CustomLinks for this content indexed by EBSCO Discovery Service and not available to their users. This paper presents ILL data to investigate whether these projects are changing the ways our users find and access content not held locally.
Before the advent of publicly searchable, online union catalogs, requesting an item via interlibrary loan (ILL) was discrete from library catalogs and opaque to library patrons. Patrons completed forms by [...]