By Bonnie Robinson

In December 1998, OCLC expects to release an optional new service that will allow ILL staff to order ASCII full-text articles via OCLC ILL. The articles will be delivered directly to the library's or patron's e-mail address and be paid for through ILL Fee Management.

ILL Full-Text will be available to any OCLC ILL user willing to be billed through ILL Fee Management and who has access to e-mail for delivery. The service will be of greatest benefit to borrowing libraries with little or no full-text online available in-house and/or libraries that wish to provide speedy service.

ILL Full-Text is designed to be easy. Full-text suppliers will be assigned three-character OCLC symbols that will be attached to bibliographic records for serials. This will allow staff to enter their usual display holdings or union list commands and immediately see which supplier(s) have the journal title and, in many cases, what years are held. Since staff will not need to learn new procedures, the new service should fit smoothly into the regular borrowing work flow. Charges, including copyright royalty fees, will be paid through ILL Fee Management. The service will be entirely optional. Like constant data and custom holdings, staff may choose to use it as much or as little as they wish. Since no profiling or order forms are needed, staff may begin to use the service as soon as it is available.

ILL Full-Text is designed to protect libraries from unexpected charges. There are two built-in safeguards, one using the holdings display, the other the :MAXCOST: field. Full-text suppliers have three-character OCLC symbols that include dollar signs. These suppliers appear at the end of holdings displays, in a separate area labeled $$ (the state of Commerce). The dollar signs indicate that these suppliers charge. Once a supplier's symbol is included in a lender string, the system performs checks before routing the request to the supplier's message file. The system checks for an e-mail address, for all bibliographic data required by the supplier and for a :MAXCOST: field with a valid ILL Fee Management amount high enough to cover the supplier's charges. If any of these elements are missing, the request skips over the full-text supplier's symbol and goes on to the next potential lender in the string.

ILL Full-Text is designed to be fast. No extra steps are required when creating the request. When a request is filled by a supplier, the article is e-mailed to the specified address and the request is updated to Shipped. If the article is sent to the library, staff can either send a printout to the patron or forward the e-mail to the patron's desktop. For even speedier service, the patron's e-mail address can be put in the request. When the request is updated to Received, the library is billed through ILL Fee Management.

Users of the ILL Full-Text option will incur normal ILL charges for searches, holdings displays, produces and the ILL Fee Management administrative service. Prices for the full-text itself depend on the supplier. No additional charges are associated with the use of this service.

For more information, see the September/October issue of The Third Indicator. A technical bulletin and a new product page on the OCLC web site will also appear near the release date.