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VIVA: Whole ebook lending general recomendations

Virginia's Academic Library Consortium

This guide has variable layouts and houses the majority of the "sub" pages for VIVA's website.

Whole Ebook ILL General Recommendations

  • All requests for the new ebook content should be treated as copy requests/articles.
  • Books should be coded using the vendor name and a note that it is an ebook, in a field you are not currently using. (e.g. Item Info field, or another undesignated field not being populated). This will allow the total number of ebook loans to be disambiguated at the end of the year while allowing for easy transmission of the pdf, whether a chapter or whole ebook.
  • Do track these requests at the end of the year – in WorldShare this should be doable via the imprint field, in ILLiad, it will need to be in the above-mentioned note field.
  • Ebook requests submitted as articles should arrive with a default copyright compliance (CCG/CCL).
  • Requests should also indicate if it is an ebook being requested, and not a print book.
  • Ebook requests should be conditionalized so that when a patron requests a book, they know immediately that this is the ebook.
    • This will be particularly important to minimize charges since patrons often want the physical book.
    • Conditional example: This is an ebook. Do you want the whole ebook or select chapters? We do not have a hard copy.
    • Loan requests which do not specify if an ebook is acceptable will be conditionalized when only the ebook is available.
  • Make ILL license agreements about ILL easily accessible and understandable to the resource sharing staff.  Make ILL license agreements available at the title level.
  • If the same title is from more than one source, provide separate license agreements with each source for resource sharing staff.
  • Add holdings to WCKB (and ILL licensing agreements), OCLC, DOCLINE, and RAPID, etc..
  • All front and back end material must be downloaded in addition to the chapters (e.g., title page, appendix, bibliography, etc.) before supplying to the borrower.
  • The group recommends that all files be compressed before sending.
  • The group recommends using Adobe Pro 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 to compress it.