At the CUNY mobile libraries discussion group last week, the question came up as the whether libraries were lending out ipads and if so why? I think Stephen Francouer brought up the suggestion that we could lend ipads loaded with an ILL book request. Very interesting to consider.
This article on ebooks and ILL is also worth a look:
“Ebooks and Interlibrary Loan: Licensed to Fill?”
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1072303X.2011.585102
The authors survey librarians and write:
“From this set of responses, it seems clear that one of the major barriers to the interlibrary loan of ebook chapters or even complete ebooks is the lack of knowledge about license permissions, both at the borrowing library and at the lending library. This gap, combined with technical and platform
issues and a lack of internal workflow, signifies the need for discussion to be held in libraries and with publishers to accommodate emerging ebook formats.”
Beth