National Resource Sharing Working Group

Codes for Australian Document Delivery Service Levels

The National Resource Sharing Working Group has approved a series of codes to represent Australian Document Delivery Service Levels in ILL Protocol compliant requests.

Why Australian Service Level Codes are needed

In order to conform to the Interlibrary Loan Protocol Implementors Group Profile for the ISO ILL Protocol, systems that support the use of specific service level standards must also support the use of specific codes to represent these service levels. The Australian Interlibrary Resource Sharing Code specifies a series of specific service levels for Australia. Systems that support these must therefore also support specific Australian codes to represent them.

Approved codes for Australian service levels

The following codes should be used to represent Australian document delivery service levels in ILL Protocol compliant document delivery requests:

Service level Code
Core C
Priority P
Rush R
Express E

Considerations for implementers

  1. Implementation of the Australian Service Level Codes will require configuration changes to document delivery systems that are utilising the ISO ILL Protocol. software that complies with the Protocol should support these changes.
  2. Document delivery systems should, as a minimum, support both the Australian Service Level codes and the default abstract codes described in the IPIG Profile.
  3. System implementers may also wish to consider supporting other service levels and codes used by libraries that they frequently use as suppliers. Where a supplier is used infrequently it may be preferable to manually add the appropriate service level code at the time of request creation.
  4. If a rota contains locations that use different service level standards, the system should ideally map to the appropriate service level code for that supplier.
  5. In cases where the specific service level codes used by a supplier are not known, the system should ideally map to the most appropriate abstract code as described in the IPIG Profile.
  6. As an increasing number of service code schema are introduced in document delivery services around the world it may become desirable to provide a directory of the service levels and associated codes that are in use.

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