
In March 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, members of the SHARES resource sharing consortium started gathering weekly for informal virtual town halls. This week, nearly five years later, we convened our 238th SHARES town hall, with 30 attendees and no preset agenda. The sense of community that has developed around these sessions has been described by participants as welcoming, innovative, and fun — an ideal environment where staff from the most outward-facing department in the library can bond with peers, collaborate, teach, learn, and flourish.
Previously, I’ve shared some significant, tangible outcomes from the town halls, such as the creation of the International ILL Toolkit by SHARES volunteers and a crowd-sourced set of preferred practices around processing interlibrary loan returns and overdues. This time let’s explore the value of coming together within a trusted community to address a long-standing challenge that stubbornly resists definitive solutions.
Sharing physical library materials across borders
Interlending library books and other physical formats internationally has always been fraught, and the obstacles to sharing across borders have stayed pretty much the same since I started working in ILL in 1983:
- Ever-rising shipping costs
- Ineffective shipment tracking
- Customs complications
- Increased risk to the material
- Difficulty in identifying willing lenders
- Language issues, complicating communications
- Lack of effective, universally available payment options
- Lengthy, unpredictable request lifecycle
- Negative impact on the environment
Over the years, every step forward in international sharing—such as the development of the International ILL Toolkit, which compiles vetted contact and policy information on international suppliers along with request templates in over a dozen languages—has been tempered with a significant step back, like the new customs rules for all European Union countries which are erratically enforced. The challenges remain as persistent as ever.
The community came together to pool uncertainties, share strategies, and identify preferred practices
SHARES’s governing body, the SHARES Executive Group (SEG), noticed that international ILL issues had been coming up constantly in town halls throughout 2024 and launched a suite of interrelated activities:
- Facilitated two special town halls in November 2024 devoted to discussing borrowing and lending physical items across borders, inviting SHARES members to come ready to share their challenges, successes, and questions
- Prepared a statistical analysis comparing SHARES international ILL activity in 2023 and 2024
- Gathered and shared information on current international shipping practices, issues, and aspirations from SHARES participants
- Drafted a new international ILL section that will soon be added to the SHARES Procedures Web page, documenting preferred practices and mitigation strategies
Top insights gleaned from these activities include:
- Over 60% of SHARES libraries loaned a returnable item overseas in 2024, same as in 2023 (Note: 25 years ago, only 10% of SHARES libraries loaned returnable items overseas)
- Overseas shipping expenses when using carriers such as FedEx, UPS, and DHL have skyrocketed, with reports of $70 charges for one book not uncommon, but these carriers usually do well getting things through customs
- US Postal Service and Royal Mail are cheaper but offer poor tracking capabilities overseas
- Customs processing is the biggest wildcard, especially in European Union countries; you can do everything correctly and still have your package get stuck in customs, incurring delays and extra fees and in some cases resulting in items being returned to the sender undelivered
- ILL practitioners all over the world recognize the value in sharing research materials across borders and tend to be extremely patient and helpful in sorting out difficulties
Biggest tip of all: mitigate
Given the extra expense and risk of sharing physical items across borders, town hall participants strongly agreed: libraries should implement mitigation strategies to ensure that such items aren’t requested from international suppliers unless it’s the only way to fulfill the patron’s information need.
Borrowers should:
- Exhaust all domestic ILL sources before requesting physical items internationally
- Ask patrons if having the entire work in hand is critical, or if a scan of the index or table of contents might be a workable first step in identifying what portions of the work should be copied to fulfill their request
- If the entire work is needed, make sure the patron is willing to wait for the needed item to arrive from another country before you request it
- Consider purchasing an in-print title for your collection and user as this may be cheaper than paying the lending fee and shipping costs for an international loan (and allow you to be a new domestic lender for the title!)
Lenders should:
- Provide a digital surrogate when licensing and copyright permit
- Offer to scan tables of contents or indexes of works you are unable or unwilling to ship
Uncertainty loves company
The SHARES community certainly didn’t solve all the vexing issues around sharing physical items across borders. But we shared plenty of tips, tricks, and data, reached consensus on preferred practices, affirmed the immense value of connecting library patrons with the global research materials they need, and supported each other in our shared calling of making ILL magic happen.
Dennis is a senior program officer for the OCLC Research Library Partnership, where he conducts research projects centered on sharing collections and coordinates the SHARES resource sharing consortium.
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