Erasmus Staff Training Week @ ULiège Library

Presenter: Léa Bouillet, Head of Public services department (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France)

Abstract:

The postal exemption, which until 1996 allowed documents to be sent free of charge between public institutions in France, established a tradition of free delivery within interlibrary loan services. This was called into question at the end of the 1990s when French institutions were faced with postal charges.

The University Toulouse Jean Jaurès, which has always positioned itself as a social university, chose to provide free service to its users at that time by subsidising 100% of the costs of supplying monographs. This service policy raises questions: to whom does the free service apply? Are there limits on the use of the service? Do we subsidise all requests? And above all, how can the costs be reduced so that the financial impact of this subsidy is kept to a minimum?

In order to answer these questions, the ILL service of the UT2J has set up its operating framework to ensure that documents stay free of charge for the public: accessible to all registered users without discrimination (students, teachers, external users) but with a limit on the number of documents requested each week, invoicing of the user for documents coming from abroad, etc.

In order to control costs, the service has chosen to implement a principle of reciprocity for supplier ILL: I provide you with my documents free of charge if you provide me with your collections without charging me. This network of institutions practicing reciprocity expanded in the 2000s, and by 2021 410 libraries were involved in France.

Thus, the end of billing to a majority of supplying libraries allows a drastic reduction of costs on requesting ILL: from a cost of 36 500€ per year to only 2 600€ in 2019, for the same number of requests. Reciprocity on supplier ILL leads to an almost complete disappearance of income, but also of expenses, and a considerable saving of working time since it is no longer necessary to edit, control or pay invoices. 82% of the service’s expenses are thus linked to the cost of sending documents to the requesting or supplying library, and only 18% (i.e. approximately €2,600) are costs linked to the invoicing of loans by certain institutions that do not practice reciprocity.

The introduction of reciprocity between suppliers and subsidies for users means that the unit cost of a document supplied can be reduced from €5 to €2.77, financed by the service.

Beyond the financial logic, the introduction of free access for users allows the entire university population, including the least fortunate students, to have access to the same documentation. It is also an asset in terms of image and communication. The complementarity of the service with the collections acquired by the UT2J libraries is reinforced by this subsidy policy, since the service becomes accessible at no extra cost, simply by registering with the library, same as for borrowing the rest of the collections.

The aim of this proposal is to present a method of introducing free access with a strong emphasis on cost control, which is a growing demand from management, and the ultimate goal of improving the quality of service for the user, which is every library’s goal and mission.

LINK: https://view.genial.ly/62751344d905740018599555/interactive-content-staffweekv2