Patron to Patron Lending
June 10, 2009
When a user can’t find an item in our catalog they go to ILL. ILL then contacts various libraries to see if they would lend the item in question. What if ILL instead contacted local BYU users who have volunteered their personal library “holdings” as potential lenders?
What Patron to Patron Lending would look like: The loaning BYU user would bring their book to the ILL office. ILL would then check out the book for a typical checkout period to the borrowing BYU user. When finished with the item, the borrower would then return the book to the ILL office to be returned to the loaner.
The borrowing patron would never know their request was filled by a local BYU user; ILL would be the full mediator of the exchange.
To do this, ILL would need a database of all user volunteered holdings with the contact information of the potential lenders. The BYU users would need also a browser extension that would pop up any time the browser is displaying a book record (e.g., even if they are searching on sites like Amazon, eBay, Goodreads, etc). The language would be something like: “Do you own this? If so, would you be willing to loan this anonymously to another BYU user?” This would need user authentication. If they check the box, Yes, then the user information and title information would go to the ILL database for future reference.
This project could also have implications for items that we do own but are currently checked out. This could be a way to alleviate pressure on long queues of Holds on popular items.
Gerrit van Dyk