It boggles my mind a little that loss of interlibrary loan services is so detrimental to academic library services that it can be cited over and over in an anti-trust complaint as a means of coercing business, and yet we haven’t made more of a stink about the non-lendable nature of the digital collections we’re all building with abandon. At my library well over 90% of our journals are electronic, as are a smaller but growing percentage of our books, and most of these things are not lendable. And we haven’t even gone as digital as a lot of libraries have.
What gives? Is it just because this is all so cool and future-y that we bend over and take our lashes like good little co-dependent gate-keepers? I guess we haven’t learned our lessons yet.
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If your ejournals aren’t lendable, either you’re misreading the license agreements or someone didn’t negotiate very well. Most of our ejournal license agreements allow for ILL. Books, not so much. But, I see some of that changing. For example, Springer has no DRM on their ebooks, offers them as PDF downloads by chapter to users, and allows chapters to be sent out via ILL.