Of course, the ILL problem behind “electronic format only” is not because of the format per se. The key problem is the fact that copyright law exemptions for ILL have not caught up with the evolution of scholarly publishing. The technical problems for e-book lending could be solved by bright people, but won’t be as long as we have legislation (and legislators, and lobbyists) standing in the way.
Steven Sowards
Associate Director for Collections
Michigan State University Libraries
366 W. Circle Drive
East Lansing MI 48824
From: Joseph Wickens <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2018 13:20:13 -0300
And the "the loss of the twenty-first century" is our inability to share the bulk of library book collections from 2000 forward with other libraries at all because they are being acquired in electronic format only. This forum addresses the most important problem facing Interlibrary Lending today. Thanks for sharing, Jim.
Joe Wickens
On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 12:27 AM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2018 06:27:52 -0700
Last week, the Internet Archive's open library forum was devoted to the practice and possibilities of controlled digital lending, a way of relying on fair use to begin to make in-copyright library materials available to the public digitally while respecting copyright and complying with the law. Three recent documents:
1. a longer white paper on the subject: https://osf.io/preprints/lawarxiv/7fdyr/ Further document is included at https://controlleddigitallending.org/readings
2. a more concise 'position statement' authored by legal scholars at Harvard, NYU, Georgetown, Duke, and the Internet Archive: https://controlleddigitallending.org/statement
3. an even more concise blog post by Duke's scholarly communications librarian David Hansen summarizing the issues: https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2018/09/28/controlled-digital-lending-of-library-books/
The problem addressed is critical, what Brewster Kahle of the IA calls "the loss of the twentieth century" -- our collective inability to access the bulk of the material in our library collections, from the 1920s forward, in any form other than print.
Jim O'Donnell
Arizona State University