[Ads-l] Electronic interlibrary loan

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Thanks to Stephen Goranson for sharing the article in The Chronicle of
Higher Education about the collection of proverb books which
researcher Wolfgang Mieder has assembled over many years.

There are two main actions that the University of Vermont can take to
help the research community in 2019 in my opinion.

1) Scan all the books in the collection and build an electronic search
index. Set up a webpage which allows researchers from around the world
to search all the texts. Search results should include snippets.

2) Allow researchers to access the books via an electronic
interlibrary loan mechanism. A researcher should be able to "check
out" (with a time limit) an electronic facsimile of a book, i.e., a
PDF of the page scans. An organization is currently operating a "check
out" system of this type. I do not know if it has been legally
challenged.

Every library in the nation should be doing this. I know there
significant legal, economic, and logistical obstacles. Scholars should
be acting to remove the obstacles.

HathiTrust is a very valuable organization which has accomplished part
of this vision for public domain books. Electronic check out is not
really needed for public domain books although it would be nice to be
able to download a PDF. The downloading of PDFs is restricted to
"partners" by HathiTrust.

Garson

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