Talis Source Blog

It's an interesting term that generally has widespread understanding amongst librarians and those who work with librarians but has no sense of meaning to those outside library walls other than in a very literal sense.

Libraries have resources and they want to share them. Let's leave aside human resources for now, although we shouldn't forget the human efforts that can be deployed to resolve community-wide issues. In that sense, are the numerous virtual reference/ask a librarian type initiatives that are underway, a type of resource sharing?

I was pleased to find out that there is effort being expended Stateside at the moment to rethink resource sharing. The various discussions and intellectual output that is being generated has been made available at: http://blog.aclin.org/. Although you have to register to access a lot of the material.

It was interesting to read Ted Koppel's blog entry on demolishing the narrow constructs we have put on defining resource sharing:

I'm struck by one consistent theme - that resource sharing (in this context) is the equivalent of interlibrary loan. The two phrases seem to be used interchangeably.

That is simply wrong. Resource sharing - in my definition - covers a far broader scope. It can include consortial reciprocal borrowing, it should include ILL, but to be relevant for the future it cannot stop there. It must include Google (and other similar) book and journal delivery efforts. It must include patron (ugh, how I hate that word) provoked as well as library provoked activities. And by my definition, resource sharing should include document delivery and similar commercial services. They're part of the continuum.

Limiting the definition of resource sharing to the narrowness of interlibrary loan is tantamount to sticking our heads in the sand and ignoring the changed information landscape. If this initiative only defines resource sharing as ILL, then we're not reinventing anything - we're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I think what Ted alludes to is that search and discovery of resources is very much wed to the subsequent sharing of such resources. They have a symbiotic relationship. So resource sharing should be about a whole host of things that we as libraries and librarians do, to promote our wares for all to see, not hiding them away behind walls or in the confines of our own web catalogues. How many of us thought that by creating a web view of our catalogues, we were actuallly making our collections more accessible? It would be nice to think we all did, but if we look at the quality and the navigability of some of these sites, we would find ourselves sadly mistaken. So then it becomes a ticking the box exercise, something that we do to meet various national or institutional agendas.

It is also valuable to think about resource sharing in this way because it stops becoming a backroom activity. We often hear ILL staff lament the fact that ILL is frequently regarded at senior levels as something that goes on behind the scenes. The knock-on effect of that attitude is that ILL units are frequently understaffed and under-resourced. By turning it on its head, and promoting resource sharing as very much a frontline service, it acquires the importance it needs and deserves.

The Research Team at Talis have started to experiment with the holdings from the Talis Platform to show how data that has previously been closeted in union catalogues that only ILL staff could access, could easily be made accessible to any member of the public. This is not simply done by making the union catalogue free to view, which is of course one way of doing things, but can be achieved through taking the data to where the user wants to view it. In other words, taking the data to the user's interface of choice.

So, what's different about this Amazon page?

Click for a larger view

A new box has appeared on the right-hand side of the page displaying the relevant library holdings information for that particular title. And how has this come about? We've used a plug-in from Greasemonkey to display that data in the browser. We did it because we wanted to demonstrate how easy it is for data to be brought to the user at the point when the user might need it. We assume that a user who goes to Amazon is actually looking to buy a book. Perhaps. But if that book isn't available to buy new or second-hand, maybe that user is prepared to borrow the book instead in order to have his/her query ultimately satisfied?

Working on the principle that resource sharing is about a) providing the mechanisms for making collections more accessible, and b) furnishing items to the user - I think that this could be a considered as an example of innovation in the resource sharing space. And of course there are many others, which we would be keen to hear about.

Redefining resource sharing to encapsulate not only the work that takes place behind the scenes to get resources to the customer, but also the work that takes place to point the user to our materials in the first place reinvigorates the discussion. And as Ted Koppel points out, we need to take resource sharing out of the very restricted definition of ILL only, in order to breathe new life into it.

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