The Sherman Fairchild Foundation has awarded $55,000 to the Research Libraries Group, Inc., for a pilot project to support interlibrary loans using telefacsimile equipment. Six RLG institutions will participate in the one-year project, scheduled to begin in October. The participants include Cornell University, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, the University of Iowa, Brigham Young University, and the University of California, Berkeley. Together these institutions account for 35 percent of RLG's interlibrary loan activity. RLIN, RLG's bibliographic utility, provides an ILL subsystem that enables RLG members to transmit their interlibrary loan requests electronically. Requests may be made for the loan of books or for photocopies of briefer materials (a chapter in a book or a journal article). The RLG telefacsimile project will evaluate the use of electronic transmission of such materials to replace mailing actual photocopies from one site to another.
The fax project has been designed to analyze the workflow and procedures involved in interlibrary loan activities, and to monitor the effect of telefacsimile equipment on the time it takes to deliver photocopies of requested materials from one institution to another.
[Contact: Barbara Brown, The Research Libraries Group, Inc., Jordan Quadrangle Stanford, CA 94305, (415) 328-0920.]
