VIVA Whole E-book ILL Recommendations
These recommendations pertain to the VIVA collections with whole e-book lending rights. The VIVA Product Specification Recommendations have been developed to outline the VIVA collections. Note that these are recommendations only and not specific to a particular ILL/ILS system. Workflows and terms related to specific systems may vary.
General Recommendations:
The general recommendations are administrative and not necessarily specific to the Borrowing or Lending process, which are provided below.
- Send the whole e-book when a patron requests specific chapters from a book, rather than spending time stitching together select chapters, since the whole book pdf download is available.
- Treat all requests for e-book content as copies/articles to avoid issues with due dates, receipt and return.
- Add holdings to WorldCat Knowledge Base (and ILL licensing agreements), OCLC, DOCLINE, and RapidILL/Rapido, etc. in order to streamline the process for both identifying potential lenders and fulfilling requests.
- Make ILL license agreements easily accessible and understandable to the resource sharing staff. For VIVA resources, refer to the ILL Rights in VIVA Contracts webpage for more details. For resources licensed by your institution with whole e-book lending rights, refer to the system or institutional liaison.
- Include vendor-identifying information in filled requests in order to compile statistics on e-book lending.
- Deliver via secure methods (e.g., Odyssey, Electronic Delivery Utility [EDU, Odyssey Helper], Article Exchange, VCU FileLocker, etc.) and ensure the deletion of the file after a defined period of use. Note that e-mail attachment is NOT secure transmission.
Borrowing Recommendations:
- Consider how patrons will access the request form. (Borrowing requests may be submitted via a link resolver or manually.)
- Give patrons the option to indicate whether an eBooks is acceptable.
- Consider using a modified version of an Article request form.
- Allow for unmediated ILL borrowing through the proven/trusted sender option or other system(s) unmediated ILL features, which will improve turnaround time and reduce borrowing staff workload.
- Indicate whether an electronic copy is preferred when submitting the request to a lender if system allows.
- E-book requests submitted as articles should indicate copyright compliance.
Lending Recommendations:
- Condition request when you cannot determine if an e-book is acceptable:
- This will be particularly important to minimize charges since patrons often want the physical book.
- Conditional example: We own this title in electronic format only. Will this format be acceptable?
- If the system does not allow Conditionals, communicate via e-mail.
- Confirm e-book requests are copies/articles before sending.
Compression:
- Larger files (pdfs) may require compression prior to sending. Maximum file size for delivery is determined by the individual institution’s campus network capability. The current file size limit in Article Exchange and Odyssey is 120 MBs.
Stitching Best Practices:
- Each chapter should be saved so the file name is the title of the chapter with a numeral in front of it.
- This is helpful when sorting the files to be merged, and if using Adobe Acrobat Pro, it will automatically generate bookmarks in the merged file based on the individual chapters. This will help the patron quickly jump between the chapters.
- Pay very close attention to the chapter order when merging the file! Example of numerals that can be utilized in front of the section title(s) to keep them in order:
- i, ii, iii… for the Front Matter
- 1, 2, 3… for the Chapters
- a, b, c… for the End Matter
- Adobe Pro is recommended for both compression and stitching of pdfs. If AdobePro is not available at your institution, Smallpdf (http://smallpdf.com) is a free service that will allow you to merge and compress a file once per hour, and there is no limit on the file size or number of pages.
- Upload the files to merge them, and then re-upload the merged file (pdf) to compress it if necessary due to file size. Maximum file size for delivery is determined by the individual institution’s campus network capability. The current file size limit in Article Exchange and Odyssey is 120 MBs.
