Interloans overview
Prosentient's inter-library loans module provides an online union list for journals. Interloans is a full-feature inter-library loan system developed to meet the needs of libraries who face the administrative and cost pressure of existing ILL arrangements.
Libraries can request journals from other libraries in the network by searching an aggregated catalogue of holdings. A load-balancing algorithm distributes the request workload across participating libraries to ensure that all libraries contribute equally.
Prosentient Systems has developed a practical web-based product that provides an document exchange system for collaborating institutions to share their document or subscription holdings, and using intelligent automatic ranking and workload distribution.
Interloans features include:
- librarian can raise interlibrary loan request by email or by fax
- automatic intelligent workload distribution and ranking of requests
- automatic processing of citations into ILL requests
- bulk holdings upload and management
- a sophisticated and fast search engine
- links to electronic resources
- optional gateway to the Fulltext full text database resources with a federated search interface
Seven library networks catering for different library specialisation have more than 400 library members in the Asia-Pacific region. These networks and their library members are identified on the Interloans menu.
The web-based service has enrolled over 300 libraries across the seven separate library networks since 2007. Its success rests on distributing the workload among the participating libraries and providing a very low cost infrastructure for participating libraries. The annual subscription for the service costs less than a single journal subscription!