Charting a Way Forward for Ebook Interlibrary Loan

In June 2024, the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) published the report E-Book ILL Roadmaps: Charting Pathways for Broader Adoption of E-book Interlibrary Loan. In March 2025, the working group behind this report received the STARS Publication Recognition Award from the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association.

We wanted to learn more about the report, as well as the broader landscape for the interlibrary lending of whole ebooks. On June 25, 2025, Michael Rodriguez, a member of Katina's editorial team, spoke via Zoom with the co-chairs of the BLC working group that produced the report: Marc Hoffeditz, the resource sharing program manager for the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), and Molly Dupere, the resource sharing librarian at Snell Library at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What motivated the Boston Library Consortium to develop the E-Book ILL Roadmaps report?

Molly Dupere (MD): The topic of ebook sharing had been floating around for years in the BLC’s resource sharing community of interest. Everyone was interested, but nobody was coming forward to take those first steps into organizing a group. Marc and I decided, let’s just go for it. So we created a proposal and gave it to Charlie Barlow, the executive director of the BLC.

Marc Hoffeditz (MH): At this time, I wasn’t working for BLC. I was at one of the member libraries of BLC and was participating in the BLC Strategic Planning Steering Committee. We heard that there was an interest in better understanding ebook interlibrary loan, so forming this working group felt very much in alignment with what we were hearing from the BLC library community.

Once you published the report, what sort of response did you get from the community?

MH: In terms of the library community, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Some of our working group members took the report back to their institutions and started the process, and they are now lending ebooks. We’ve also had a couple of informal meetings with other library consortia to talk about how they could apply what’s in the roadmaps. We haven’t heard a ton from the publisher or software vendor community, but we are always happy to be in conversations with them, to figure out how we can realize the ideas that are in the report.

MD: To toot our own horns, we won the RUSA STARS Publication Recognition Award, which we were absolutely chuffed and thrilled about, and I have seen this roadmap cited in a lot of places, including in an article in The Serials Librarian, which is really exciting to see.

MH: We did a slate of presentations at the Access Services Conference, the Northwest Interlibrary Loan Conference, and the New England Library Association Conference, and then it popped up at the Southeastern Resource Sharing Conference, which neither of us attended. So it’s exciting to see that it is getting broader visibility within the resource sharing community.

MD: We do consider the report a living document. It may be one of the first of its kind, but we’re hoping it gets developed, as systems are constantly updating and changing.

MH: I just updated it last week. So, 2025 edition!

Why is it so important for libraries to be able to lend ebooks to other libraries?

MD: Northeastern University is rapidly growing, and we are a truly global institution, with 13 campuses across three countries. A lot of these locations and patrons don’t have direct access to our print collections. In an effort to offer equitable access, we have a very robust e-collection. Where we have gaps, we look for electronic copies of books so that our patrons, regardless of where they are located, can access that information.

MH: From a consortial perspective, BLC is trying to empower libraries. Ebook interlibrary loan speaks to the ability to build digital collections and then be able to share those collections in consistent and practical manners. As collections grow increasingly digital, those resources are a lot less equitable than their print counterparts. There are issues such as restrictive licensing, inconsistency with vendors and their software interfaces, challenges with interoperability and discoverability. Trying to tackle those issues in support of lending ebooks is really important.

MD: During the pandemic, a lot of libraries shifted to e-preferred collection development because no one was able to access print. It can be difficult even to find a print copy to borrow, and it can be difficult even to acquire print books for some more recently published titles.

Tell us about the roadmap and recommendations that you lay out in your report. What are some of the common roadblocks that libraries face when they want to lend ebooks?

MH: We broke down the recommendations into a section called, “Where do we go from here?” First, we focus on how our resource sharing systems need to be enhanced to be able to lend these resources. We need broader adoption of ISO [International Organization for Standardization] 18626 as a resource sharing standard, and we need ebooks to be handled as their own format type. There are so many other file formats that exist in the world that we should be able to share, but our systems aren’t capable of doing that currently. We touch on some of the paths that we would ideally like to take with advocacy and partnerships, such as engaging with prominent vendors like OCLC, Atlas, and Ex Libris and advocating for publishers to allow for interlibrary loan rights in our licenses.

Many practitioners and libraries are less inclined to share ebooks that are hosted chapter by chapter. The ability to download a whole resource makes it much easier for staff to share.

MD: We’re looking at you, conference proceedings and encyclopedias. I do not have two hours to put you back together again.

MH: A big issue we still run into is the discoverability of ebooks and the ability to actually lend them. You know, a catalog might say that, hey, I have this ebook. But it doesn’t tell you anything specifically about ILL rights. So BLC recently became the host of a new resource called the Ebook ILL Lender Tracker, which was originally created by Dev Singer of Brandeis University. It’s a self-reporting tool for libraries to share from which collections they can share ebooks through interlibrary loan. The response has been really positive, and we’re honored to host it on behalf of the global resource sharing community because it’s everybody’s resource.

You’ve highlighted some of the technological and contractual barriers and workflow challenges to ebook lending. Have you encountered any cultural barriers?

MH: My experience as a former ILL practitioner is that we like to be in the background doing the things. We’re not always putting ourselves out there. A lot of libraries are lending ebooks, but they don’t talk about it. So just getting ourselves out there and saying, “Hey, we are doing this, this is what works, this is what doesn't work,” is really, really important.

Culturally? Vendors are not always willing to work with one another. Interoperability is the rallying cry of resource sharing practitioners. We need our systems to work better together, and that means we need our vendors to work better together. Collaboration, exclamation point!

MD: Being open and listening to each other is very important.

What are the differences between ebook lending and controlled digital lending (CDL)?

MH: On page 4 of the roadmaps there’s a handy-dandy chart that helps break down some of the different approaches to ebook interlibrary loan, and also contrasts it with controlled digital lending because they are often conflated. But they are not the same thing. They’re more like cousins than they are identical twins. The difference boils down to the origin of the content and whether license negotiation is required to share that content. With ebooks, the content is born-digital, but with CDL, you’re taking a print resource and making a digital surrogate. The majority of the time for ebooks, you are negotiating licenses to be able to share them, but with CDL, you’re relying on different legal frameworks to be able to share those resources, not on licenses. In the scope of these roadmaps, we focused on DRM-free ebook interlibrary loan.

MD: A lot of people assume that CDL and ebook lending are the same. We’d hate for people to be fearful of pursuing ebook sharing because they are comparing it to CDL, which is going through a lot of legal challenges. So we made that distinction very early on in the roadmap.

What does BLC plan to do next?

MH: BLC received an IMLS [Institute of Museum and Library Services] grant in 2023, focused on our work in controlled digital lending. As the legal landscape has shifted, we’ve shifted the scope of that work into digital lending more broadly. So there are two projects coming this year, the first of which will be a digital lending toolkit, which gathers informational assets for different types of lending scenarios, from ebook interlibrary loan to controlled digital lending to media lending, and hones in on the different systems that allow us to share those resources. That toolkit will be coming out hopefully at the end of July 2025. Then we will be hosting a digital lending summit in the fall of 2025. This will involve a bunch of different stakeholders—librarians, publishers, software vendors, end users—coming together to talk about digital lending strategies and how we can scale this work more broadly. We’re excited to think about digital lending as a larger concept with different approaches, requiring nuance and care to execute, facilitate, and grow.

Is there anything else you wish to share?

MD: When I first started in ILL about seven years ago, I was told, point blank, that it is impossible to share ebooks. The pandemic forced us to open up to the possibility of more sharing. Look, ebook lending can be scary. It involves a lot of collaboration and work from a lot of people in different departments. But go for it. The roadmap we published can be a tool to get you going. We want people to use it and implement it and reach out to us with any questions or comments. As we said earlier, the report is a living document. We don’t want it to stay as is.

MH: Just a reminder that this work is for all of us. It’s not just for ILL practitioners. It’s not just for people that are managing licenses or systems. We tried to build the roadmap in a way where anybody could take it back to their library, wherever they worked, to say, “Hey, here’s this thing that I want to do. Let’s do it.” If you want this to happen, you need to rally your colleagues to realize why it's important and to make it happen. This is for all of us.