Ownership versus access: the CISTI source/SUMO experience at McGill University

Abstract

Since November 1996, the Physical Sciences & Engineering Library at McGill University has established a new Subsidised UnMediated Ordering (SUMO) service for its users: the CISTI Source/SUMO service, a one‐stop shopping service where the patrons (faculty, staff and graduate students) can browse the CISTI Source Table of Contents database over the Web, order their articles and have them sent directly to their desktop by CISTI (Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) without having to search McGill’s OPAC. A blocking mechanism is set in place so that currently owned journal subscription articles cannot be ordered. This service has proved to be a better alternative to the traditional acquisition of journals (both paper and online) and the interlibrary loan service. The CISTI Source/SUMO service has provided more pertinent journals, more quickly and more readily than before and in a much cheaper way than with any journal subscriptions. It is one of the best ways to cope with the rapid increase in journal prices.

Interlending and document supply: international perspectives in a New Zealand context

“…Funding options that libraries can consider include:library funded with no limits;library allocation to “departments” – with limits;library pays for free unlimited access to particular titles in lieu of subscriptions;“departmental” allocation from an “acquisition” budget; anduser pays (therefore no patron authentication required).There are many well‐documented studies that attest to the economies of providing a free or subsidised unmediated document delivery to patrons. Three such studies are the University of Sydney, McGill University, and the University of Leeds Document Direct Project 1999‐2000 (de Saxe, 2001; Houle, 2001)[14].…”

Management and the management of information and library services 2000

“…Two papers discuss the question of ownership versus access to journals. McGill University has introduced a Subsidised Unmediated Ordering system which provides users with a one step service enabling them to search for, order and receive journal articles without any mediation from the library staff (Houle, 2000). The Library for Natural Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences has examined the relative costs of ownership versus access, developing a model based on estimating the cost per use of journal subscriptions, and comparing those with ILL loan costs (Kingma and Mouravieva, 2000).…”

Pay-per-view article access: a viable replacement for subscriptions?

“…Throughout the literature, a number of different terms are used to refer to end-users requesting articles directly and paying by the article: unmediated document delivery 1 or unmediated document ordering 2 , user initiated document delivery 3 , the 'just-in-time model' 4 , end-user document supply 5 , articles on demand 6 , and payper-view (PPV) 7 . Beginning in the 1990s, libraries began to experiment with PPV as an alternative to traditional forms of inter-library loan (ILL).…”