DUBLIN, Ohio, January 17, 2012. Following a successful five-month trial, the Article Exchange feature is now available within the WorldCat Resource Sharing service and, where available, through an ILLiad add-on. This new feature is available at no charge to OCLC libraries that use WorldCat Resource Sharing and ILLiad Resource Sharing Management Software, and will be offered in WorldCat Navigator, in regions where available, and VDX later this year.
Article Exchange provides a single, secure location where lending libraries can place and borrowing libraries and their users can retrieve requested articles obtained through interlibrary loan. Lending libraries scan documents and upload them to the site and notify the borrowing libraries of the documents' availability. The site generates a unique URL and password for each document. An e-mail button enables the lender to insert the borrower's e-mail address and send the link directly to the library.
Once a file has been retrieved, it remains available for five days or five views. After 30 days, unviewed files will be removed. A file can be picked up a maximum of five times for each URL/password combination. Access to the current experimental site will end on January 31.
"I supply articles to on-campus students, faculty, staff and a large number of distance education students and faculty across the country," said Janice Murphy, Interlibrary Loan Coordinator, St. Joseph's College of Maine. "Article Exchange saves us a lot of time and money. For all of these reasons—file size, firewalls or full mailboxes—we wanted to shift away from e-mailing PDFs. Posting to Article Exchange on the Web eliminates some of the problems we encountered in the past."
"I appreciate how delivery and storage satisfies vendor's copyright restrictions and how Article Exchange is able to accommodate various file sizes," said Robyn Clark-Bridges, Evening Supervisor & Interlibrary Loan Associate, Mount Mercy University. "I also appreciate how easy it is to use!"
"Article Exchange is a drop box for resource sharing people," said Katie Birch, Portfolio Director, OCLC Delivery Services. "It is document delivery in the cloud, and it supports our Webscale strategy of delivering efficiencies that provide new ways to share resources and innovation."
An OCLC Resource Sharing and ILLiad Users Group Meeting will be held on Sunday, January 22 from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. at the Dallas Convention Center, Room D227, during the ALA Midwinter Meeting. To see a full list of OCLC events in Dallas, visit the OCLC website.
For those unable to attend the ALA Midwinter Meeting, OCLC will hold an OCLC Resource Sharing and ILLiad Users Group Virtual Meeting on January 26, from 1:30 to 3:00 p.m., Eastern Time. Register for this event through the OCLC website.
About OCLC
Founded in 1967, OCLC is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing library costs. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries have used OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend, preserve and manage library materials. Researchers, students, faculty, scholars, professional librarians and other information seekers use OCLC services to obtain bibliographic, abstract and full-text information when and where they need it. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the world's largest online database for discovery of library resources. Search WorldCat.org on the Web. For more information, visit the OCLC website.
