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Peer-to-peer or bust: how RLG's SHARES Resource Sharing
Consortium staked its very existence on the promise of the ISO ILL
protocols
Dennis Massie
Abstract | Paper in
Portable Document Format (PDF) Presentation in Microsoft® PowerPoint®
format
RLG and its four founding members
organized a resource sharing network -- SHARES -- in 1975. Today, over 150
libraries at research repositories in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and
Australia participate in this successful and evolving partnership that in
recent years has focused on using technology to overcome the many barriers to
international resource sharing.
By 1998, some SHARES members
complained that RLG's centralized interlibrary loan system, RLIN ILL, was
behind the times and becoming a barrier to SHARES participation. In response,
RLG created ILL Manager, a peer-to-peer alternative that allows users to
exchange interlibrary loan requests with other systems through the use of an
international standard, the ISO ILL protocols. By 2001, one in three SHARES
interlibrary loan requests had ILL Manager on at least one end of the
transaction. But three quarters of SHARES institutions still clung to the more
familiar RLIN ILL.
In June 2002, RLG asked staff at
SHARES institutions to take part in a bold experiment. Given the successful
performance of ILL Manager and the increasing interest by other developers in
implementing the ISO ILL protocols, RLG decided to retire the centralized RLIN
ILL system and asked all SHARES institutions to move onto ILL Manager or any
other peer-to-peer system that could prove interoperability with ILL Manager.
SHARES libraries had one year to complete the transition if they were to remain
in the program.
This paper will recount how SHARES
became the world's first completely peer-to-peer resource sharing consortium
utilizing various standards-based ILL systems made by different developers,
fulfilling the ultimate promise of the ISO ILL protocols. |