November 16, 2007
ILL Fee Management: Should Your Library Participate?
Select BCR libraries may have recently received communication from OCLC regarding the ILL Fee Management (IFM) feature available in WorldCat Resource Sharing. If your library charges for interlibrary loan requests and you currently do not participate in IFM, you may want to consider it. Participation can save you time and money, with charges directly reconciled on your BCR invoice. OCLC has created a Web calculator to help in estimating your potential savings.
If your library has a WorldCat Resource Sharing subscription that has been in place for 12 months or more, there are no charges to begin using IFM. The service is included in your library's WorldCat Resource Sharing subscription. To begin using IFM, you can either select IFM on each request you place or set up constant data to apply to your transactions. Reports with details of your IFM transactions for both borrowing and lending are available via OCLC's Usage Statistics interface.
If your library is new to OCLC WorldCat Resource Sharing and has been using the service for less than 12 months, using IFM will incur a transaction-based administrative fee of $1.36 per use (IFM4572). After the initial 12-month probationary period, your borrowing activity will be re-evaluated, and your new subscription price will have this administrative fee rolled in. If you are unsure whether your institution is in a probationary subscription period for WorldCat Resource Sharing, please contact Regan Harper (rharper@bcr.org) for assistance.
For more information on ILL Fee Management, see OCLC's FAQ pages.
