Direct Requests from Information Wants To Be Free

2.0 and don’t even know it | Information Wants To Be Free

Great post from Meredith over at Information Wants To Be Free about an innovative idea for getting books posted direct from Amazon to distance students for their requests. It's worth reading the post and the comments as well as it seems the idea isn't unique. An innovative way to deal with the problem of delivering information to distance students and I'd be interested to know how many other places are doing something similar.

OA, public libraries and distance learning

Many thanks to Heather Morrison who has taken the time to write a comprehensive comment on yesterday's post about open access articles. She has included some interesting links and a reference to her blog The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics which has been added to my Blogllines subscription for updates on the open access world. I've also read a few posts recently about distance learning and how students can feel a little abandoned by their institution and library service when studying from afar. I wonder whether this is an issue that public and academic libraries should be looking at together in more detail? We tend to focus on offering support for Open University students but distance learning seems to be an increasingly popular option for other HE institutions. I'd be interested to know how easily distance learners access library services, both remote access and locally and whether public libraries could do more to help with this.

This week seems to be my random thought week, please feel free to add your random thoughts to the mix!

Free Journal Articles

Over the past few years open access to journal articles has been the hot topic among academic librarians but rarely gets a mention in the public sector. When we receive an article request in our interlibrary loan department we tend to send it straight to the British Library and usually a quality scan appears in my inbox within 24 hours even when using the 3-5 days option. Today I received a list of article requests from a reader that were all from medical journals and decided to investigate whether any could be obtained free online - I found 4 of the 8 and thus saved us approx £20. I also saved the reader £6.00 in request charges which I'm sure she appreciated. Now I've had to learn a lot of my ILL skills by trial and error and maybe all the other ILL departments are shaking their heads and muttering at my lack of knowledge but I can't believe that I'm the only one who doesn't usually have time to hunt down journal websites in case there may be a free copy of an article out there somewhere.

I guess the point of this rather rambling post is how many students and public library authorities are paying for articles that they could get for free? How easy is it to find free articles? Is PubMedCentral a unique site or are there similar sites out there for other subjects? That's 3 points, sorry! The Forum for Interlending Conference this year is focussing on equality of access to document delivery and I think these are some questions that I may try to answer before the conference.

So answers on a postcard...

Topeka & Shawnee - mailing requests to readers!

I'm really interested at the moment in direct delivery to readers - to their homes or offices.

Netflix for Library Books by Tame the Web referred my to the exciting service offered by Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library. They don't shout about it on their website but placing a hold on a book on their system means getting that book mailed to your house AS DEFAULT! If you don't want this you can request a phone call and pick up the item at the library. There is no premium rate for this service and the options for returning the book include - in person to the library, to the drive-by book drop box in their car park and to a number of book drop locations in the city (these are not libraries, the one I looked at was a petrol station!).

Much more details on how it all works and what it costs is available in David Lee King's post on The Missing Piece of the Library Netflix Model including some interesting comments and questions.

This is a fascinating example of direct delivery in a public library setting and is my favourite example so far. Now I'm on the lookout for more...