Licensed to ILL

University of Denver librarian Michael Levine-Clark argues that libraries should scrap their interlibrary loan (ILL) services and loan out ebooks instead. “ILL is amazing, a wonderful service,” he writes, but “it doesn’t make much sense in a world of digital collections.” My heart sank as I read that. While I can testify — and I’m speaking here as a library patron, not as a librarian — that ILL is both amazing and wonderful, I think he’s way off base in arguing that e-copies can replace original, physical books. [UPDATE: Actually, it appears that I’m the one who’s off base; see Levine-Clark’s clarifying comment below.]

For the past ten years, I’ve worked as a freelance writer in, successively, a small New England town, a small town in the West, and a small city in the West. I had no access to a research library in any of those places. What I did have was access to excellent online ILL systems. I could search for books and journal articles, order copies of ones I needed from dozens of public and academic libraries, and then pick them up at my local library branch. In some cases an electronic copy of the material would have been fine. In most cases, though, the physical book was essential. Some of the reasons have to do with the limited availability of electronic versions of many books. The ability to specify, in an ILL request, a particular edition of a book can be very important. It might be argued that this limitation will eventually be remedied by further scanning efforts and improvements in metadata, but eventually can take a long time to arrive. There’s also the problem of variability in ebook formats, interfaces, and quality. (My current public library offers immediate online access to some books and journal articles. The system is agonizingly slow and clunky, to the point where I now always bypass it and request a physical copy.) This, too, is a technical limitation and may be resolved at some point in the future. But it will be a limitation for a long time, and overcoming it will not be cheap or easy.

More fundamental, though, is the fact that, particularly when it comes to research, a book and an ebook are not the same thing. An ebook has certain advantages, such as the ability to do a full-text search (particularly valuable for books that don’t have indexes), but it also has disadvantages. It’s much easier to navigate printed pages than screen images — flipping backwards and forwards, jumping between lots of marked passages, skimming quickly, and so on — and it’s much, much easier to jump among several print books than to do the same thing with e-books. It’s important to note that, as most people move away from desktop computers with big screens and toward portable devices with small screens, the ebook’s navigational disadvantages are magnified, not reduced. (I discussed the shortcomings of ebooks for research more fully in an earlier post reporting on research into why students are often frustrated by e-textbooks.)

Levine-Clark points out that inter-library loans are fairly expensive transactions. (Though I think he exaggerates the cost a bit by drawing from a chart in a recent study in which the authors exclude cheaper, automated transactions that are made possible by online systems.) But costs have been coming down steadily, and ILL remains a wonderfully efficient way to allow a library to expand its collection without having to purchase books and other items that are used only rarely. And as libraries continue to prune their print collections, drawing on a pool of collections becomes ever more important. ILL also opens the collections of university research libraries to the patrons of public libraries, many of whom (like me) can’t borrow directly from the research libraries. And it allows people without computers, or with older machines that aren’t able to make use of modern web services, to borrow an extraordinary range of books and other materials. (Speaking for myself, I would be happy to pay a fee for an inter-library loan in order to help defray the cost. That seems only fair, given the budget constraints libraries are under.)

Maybe, in the end, ILL programs will have to be killed off to save money. I just hope that, in making such a decision, we remain conscious of what will be lost as a result. I think Levine-Clark gets it wrong in saying that ILL “doesn’t make much sense in a world of digital collections.” I believe it makes more sense than ever.

3 thoughts on “Licensed to ILL

  1. Michael Levine-Clark

    I think you may have missed the point of my piece – and maybe I just needed to be clearer in my writing. I wasn’t arguing that we replace ILL of physical books with lease of e-books. Rather, I was arguing that we shouldn’t try to recreate ILL for remote access to e-books. If we don’t have a physical book in the library, and the patron wants a physical book, of course we should get her/him a physical book (sometimes through ILL, sometimes by purchasing). But if we don’t have an e-book available, and the patron wants an e-book, it makes no sense whatsover to borrow that e-book from another library (and by extension, it makes no sense to try to negotiate ILL rights for e-books). ILL makes perfect sense in libraries. ILL for digital resources makes none at all.

  2. Nick Post author

    Michael,

    You’re right – I did misread it (and going back through it again, I still misread it, at least through the first 3/4s of the text). I found your post through the New Yorker’s book blog, which I think also misread your piece: “Michael Levine-Clark on why libraries should replace interlibrary loan with the temporary leasing of e-books.” (So I’m not the only one!) Anyway, my apologies – and if it’s not too late, you might want to tweak the headline and opening of your post to make it clear you’re not arguing for the wholesale replacement of ILL (if only for the benefit of thickheaded lay readers like myself).

    I’ll leave up this post because (a) I want to celebrate ILL and (b) I’m sure somewhere there are people who (looking at ILL’s cost) may be plotting its demise. I’m sincerely glad you’re not one of them.

    Best, Nick

  3. melissa levine

    Hi Nick,
    Thank you for writing your two posts on the advantages of reading actual physical copies of books. I am a very creative reader myself. I read narrative sometimes from the middle to the back and then I go back to the pages toward the beginning. I’m an English major and I learn a lot about narrative and what the authors are doing. It’s just very pleasurable to read in this way for my own purposes.
    I have an ulterior motive for commenting. I am reading and enjoying very much your book “The Shallows.”
    The book is very interesting, the points about the brain’s neuroplasticity, how the technology we use shapes our brain, etc. While I can identify quite well with your points about the effects of using this technology on the brain, I also noticed you didn’t mention (and it wasn’t your purpose, I realize) how the radio frequency electro magnetic radiation which so many of these devices emit might also play a role. I started to learn about this last October when Edison came to install a “smart” meter. I then started researching this topic expecting that I would be reassured that this was relatively harmless, but I was really surprised to see the higher quality studies (that is not done by telecom industry) showed numerous effects. A research team at Yale for example earlier this year found cognitive effects in mice from cell phone radiation exposure. The World Health Organization in 2011 declared this radiation
    a type 2b possible carcinogen. I could give you a long list. You could check my website (StopsmartmetersIrvine.com) for more –or check out Microwave News which is run by Louis Slesin PhD or Dr. Devra Davis’ website Environmental Health Trust. Camilla Rees also has an excellent website Electromagnetic Health.org. She said in an interview that she asked you at a lecture if you had considered the radiation issue and she said you seemed rather surprised/interested.
    Anyway-you can delete this comment if you like because it veers off topic. But I just wanted to give you some info.
    Melissa Levine

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