Erasmus Staff Training Week @ ULiège Library

Presenter: Elisabetta Guerra, Librarian, member of the Interlibrary Loan staff (Verona University, Italy)

Abstract:

NILDE (Network for Inter-Library Document Exchange) is a web software for document delivery, developed by the National Research Council (CNR) Research Area Library of Bologna, and can be considered an excellent example of cooperation among libraries. NILDE is also a library network that shares rules and best practices in document delivery.

The first prototype of NILDE was presented by the library community during the first Italian conference “Internet, document delivery and inter-library cooperation” held in Rome in 2001. Since 2005, NILDE has been integrated with the main Italian catalogues (ACNP, OPAC SBN, MAI). In 2012, 33 Spanish libraries joined the NILDE network thanks to the integration with GTIBib-SOD software. Moreover, in 2013, a software integration project has been implemented to directly query the library Aleph catalogues through the Z39.50 protocol. NILDE uses the most innovative Open software technologies to simplify the workflow of librarians and users.

Today NILDE is a collaborative community of 894 active libraries, and since 2003, 2820861 documents have been exchanged, with a 85% success rate. Libraries that join the NILDE community accept the Rules and Regulation and undertake to provide documents free of charge and on the basis of the principle of reciprocity.

The Representing bodies of NILDE are the Administrator, the Assembly of NILDE subscribers and the Committee of NILDE Libraries (CBN). Moreover, there are the following working groups, open to all members of the community: Communication, Promotion, Internationalization, Education, ALPE (management of the public archive of licences of electronic journals).

Since 2020, the year of the pandemic, there have been critical and problematic issues in the provision of interlibrary services, such as the accessibility of paper resources and the impediments due to regulations and licenses regarding the electronic delivery of documents.

The cooperation between libraries has led to the formation of a group of volunteers from different parts of the world within the project IFLA RSCVD (Resource Sharing in Times of COVID-19) which have allowed access to resources that would otherwise be unavailable in the places most affected by the pandemic. Many libraries in the NILDE community have been actively involved in the project both as requesting libraries and as voluntary suppliers. NILDE CBN has also launched an appeal for the right of access to scientific knowledge in a state of emergency, addressed to publishers’ associations and the Ministries of Education, Health and Cultural Heritage.

In 2020, a project was launched to develop the new version of the software NILDE, available on mobile and with a user-friendly interface. The new software will provide greater integration with other systems, both ILS (Information Library Systems) and DD/ILL management systems, and will have more available functions for operators and users.

The design of the new software NILDE 6 is complex and ambitious. Only through dialogue and constant discussion with the libraries and institutions involved it is possible to design new functionalities and develop new modern and effective services. From this point of view, one of the the main goals is and will always be the strengthening of cooperation among the various national and foreign libraries, that are the essential elements for the entire NILDE community.