Subsidized Unmediated Ordering (SUMO) service, ILL, journal ownership: Which way to go?

Louis Houle

Head Serials – ILL/Document Delivery

McGill University

Louis.houle@mcgill.ca

ABSTRACT

In 1996 the McGill University libraries introduced a Subsidized UnMediated Ordering (SUMO) service for its users: the CISTI Source/SUMO service. In its sixth year now, this one-stop shopping service has become very important: more than 100,000 articles have been delivered directly to the users in an average turnaround time of 6 to 24 hours.

This paper describes how such a system can be set up: access (accounts, who is eligible for the service), different delivery options available, subsidized or not, unmediated or with different degrees of mediation and other options (blocking with local holdings, level of service, maximum cost). Questions such as the following will be answered: why such a service was set up on the first place? What kinds of feedback were received from our users?

Finally, an evaluation of the performance of this service, both at the cost efficiency and service level, is also described.

INTRODUCTION

While journal subscriptions are cancelled, the buying of monographs is reduced, students and faculty are borrowing through ILL more and more documents. As it can be seen from the 2000-01 ARL annual statistics (http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/index.html), the libraries continue to spend more and more for their serial collections (+210% since 1986) while buying fewer titles (-5% since 1986). At the same time more and more documents are borrowed through ILL (+206% since 1986). Operating an ILL office can be very costly since the average borrowing unit cost from the ARL/RLG ILL Cost Study in 1992 was 18.62$us and 18.35$us (for research libraries) from the ILL/DD Performance Study in 1996.

SUMO is not a database, nor a famous japanese wrestler but more a type of service whereby the patrons have total control of their article needs. The users can bypass the ILL office totally with this type of service: the ordering and the receiving of the articles are done without any interventions from the ILL office. The ideal situation is that the service is totally subsidized by the library so that the users do not have to spend anything for the service. SUMO goal is to be a one-stop shopping free service to the users so that they do not have to search any other databases or OPAC (local holdings block) when they are searching and ordering their articles. Over the last eight years different terms have been used in the litterature to describe such services with different variables: do-it-yourself document delivery, end-user document access, end-user document delivery, end-user document supply, non-mediated document delivery, outsourcing document supply, patron initiated interlibrary loan, unmediated document delivery and user initiated interlibrary loan.

Why such a service? At McGill, like in many other academic libraries all over the world, we have been cancelling hundreds of journal titles (mainly in the Scientific, Technical and Medical fields – STM) over the last decade and we have been hit year after year with the escalation of journal prices. We were buying fewer and fewer journal titles with the same serials budget and the arrival of the online journals did not help more since we could not afford both versions. So McGill decided to offer an alternative to both journal ownership and ILL to its users: the CISTI Source/SUMO service. McGill wanted to offer a better and more cost efficient service than the traditonal ILL and journal ownership.

We opted for the CISTI Source database which is distributed by the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI). Why CISTI Source? We had many years of experience prior to CISTI Source with CISTI for our need of STM documents in our ILL offices. We have always been very satisfied with their ILL services: turnaround time, filling rates and the depth of their collection. Since our provincial consortium, CREPUQ (Conférence des Recteurs et des Principaux des Universités du Québec), signed an agreement with CISTI and CISTI Source in 1995, it was to our advantage to join in and to benefit from it: prices in canadian dollar, large volume discount, good coverage and content of CISTI Source. So this is why that in November of 1996 the CISTI Source/SUMO service was set in place at McGill. This paper will describe this service at McGill, its evolution over the years, its impact on ILL and journal ownership and some data about the efficiency of such a service.

MEDIATED/UNMEDIATED

An end-user service can be set up with many different variations depending on the library resources, level of service you want to give to your users and the seriousness of the library’s desire to offer a better and an alternative service to ILL and journal ownership. An end-user system can be a complement to the existent library services or it can simply replace some of them. Basically, there are three major categories where you can have different type of combinations of variables put in place:

1.      Mediated – not subsidized

This is a service where the users’ requests are filtered through the ILL office. Both the sending of the requests and the receiving of the articles are done through the ILL office. There is also an article fee imposed on the users. This service recreates a parallel and identical system as the one in ILL. Why creating an identical system as ILL? There is not much interest in such a service unless for those who are “control freaks”!

2.      Mediated/Unmediated – subsidized or not

This is a service where the users’ requests are sent directly to the commercial provider thus bypassing the ILL office. But the receiving of the articles is still being done by the ILL office. An article fee can be applied or not. Of course a subsidized system is much better. This is an hybrid system between ILL and SUMO which is not to convincing nor interesting.

3.      Unmediated – subsidized or not

Here the users’ requests are not only sent directly to the commercial provider but the receiving of them is done at their desktop, thus bypassing the ILL office totally. An article fee can be applied or not but a subsidized system is more efficient. This is the ultimate end-user system when it is set up with, of course, no article fees.

Which one to use?

SUMO! Why? It is one of the best set up there is which will accomplish all of the following:

Convenient for the users:

• The service is available to the end-users wherever they are in the world and also whenever they needed it. It is a 24 hrs/day and 365 days/year service.
• Bypassing the Library, thus the ILL office.
• Faster turnaround time for the users since they no longer have to wait for the ILL office.
• A one-stop shopping service thus removing all of the other steps normally involved in acquiring an article: other databases verifications, OPAC verification, etc.
• Subsidized by the Library so the users will not be penalized by the different ILL policies: maximum number of requests, absorbing part or all of the ILL fees, slower turnaround time, etc.

Convenient for the Library:

• More cost efficient than ILL and journal ownership (see Table 2 and 3)
• Passing along to the users other indirect costs such as:
• Cost of the paper
• Cost of the toner cartridge
• Cost of equipment (printers, PCs, etc.)

• It is an easy service to sell to Faculty when you are faced with journal cancellations. It is a very good trade-off.

The accounts can be set up in different ways. The model you choose will affect not only the handling and the distribution of the accounts but will also impact on the type of service you want to introduce (mediated, unmediated, subsidized or not, etc.). So, depending on the type of service you want to introduce you can have the following different accounts:

• One site account:                                                                             This can be applied for an institution who wish to have a mediated approach: i.e. the articles and the requests are going through the ILL office. The same account is shared with all the users.
• Departmental accounts:                                                                 They can be used in different type of settings such as: unmediated subsidized or not, mediated/unmediated subsidized or not, mediated.
• Personal accounts:                                                                       They can be used in different type of settings such as: unmediated subsidized or not, mediated/unmediated subsidized or not, mediated. They are ideal in a situation where you are charging an article fee (easier to track down the user).
• Mix of personal and departmental accounts:                                 These accounts can be used in the same type of settings as in the personal ones above. In a SUMO service the ideal type of accounts are the departmental ones: the same account shared with dozens or hundreds of users. It is more efficient than managing hundreds or thousands of personal accounts.

CISTI Source

CISTI Source is an integrated current awareness and document ordering service. It is a table of contents (TOC) database consisting of over 17,000 journal titles from 1993 and onward in every disciplines: 52% in STM (16% in engineering, 18% in medical sciences and 16% in pure sciences), social sciences (21%), economics and business (9%), arts and humanities (5%). CISTI, which is the information branch of the National Research Council of Canada and located in Ottawa, is the document supplier for the STM articles. The database is searchable by author, article title, journal title, ISSN, publisher, publication year and by abstracts (1,500 journal titles in the life sciences do have the article abstracts searchable from 1996 and onward. These abstracts can also be viewed from the article display screen). The articles can be send by fax, Ariel or email (only to libraries’ email). The average turnaround time is within one to two working days: 88% of articles are sent within 24 hours and 94% within 48 hours. In August 2000, the actual average turnaround time for articles requested through the CISTI Source/SUMO service at McGill was 15 hours.

CISTI SOURCE/SUMO SERVICE AT MCGILL UNIVERSITY

• 1996 – The set up

In 1995, the first three year consortial deal was signed between CISTI and CREPUQ for the supply of articles at a special rate through the CISTI Source database. In 1996 the CISTI Source/SUMO service was introduced to the Schulich Science & Engineering Library (serving 13 departments). There has been some discussion with the faculty about the new document delivery service. A pilot project was initiated in November 1996. The service was available to the faculty, the graduate students (master and doctorate) and staff. As an incentive for the success of the service, it was decided that the Library would absorb all the article costs and if the users decided to use the ILL service instead then they would pay the normal ILL fee of 5$cad/article. Initially a maximum cost of 12$cad/article (which was enough for an article of 100 pages long: 1 unit for the first 50 pages and so on) to prevent the users from ordering articles where the copyright fee were prohibitive such as with the Gordon & Breach – Harwood publisher: a supplementary of 35$cad/article of copyright fee alone had to be paid from their journals. For the first six months the Schulich Library received a special funding from the Director’s office: 10K$cad from the Library’s acquisition budget. 

In total, 50 accounts had to be distributed among the thirteen sciences and engineering departments that the Schulich Library was serving. Since  the distribution of the accounts was done before the Library had received any special funding, mainly individual accounts (31 in total to faculty with at least one representative from every department) were distributed. This was the only type of accounts since it was planned that a flat article fee would be imposed to the users. But shortly after, the funding came in and thirteen departmental accounts were set up while the remaining six were given to different libraries for their ILL services. These fifty accounts were all set up with the direct level of service which meant that only the STM articles within the CISTI Source database (1993 and onward) which were also available at CISTI could be ordered. CISTI Source has many different other type of services such as: link, global, urgent, clean, color and special.

A file is sent to CISTI which includes a list of current serials ISSN, location, full-text link owned at McGill. This file is indispensable since whenever a user is trying to order an article from any current own journal subscriptions at McGill he/she will be blocked and a link to the OPAC will show with a message containing the library location with the journal call number and, if we own an electronic copy of the journal, a link to the full-text version will also be there.

The articles are sent directly to the departments via their Ariel stations. The Library bought thirteen copies of the Ariel receiving version at a cost of 1,638$cad. The installation was done jointly by the ILL department and the lan/system manager from each department. Since the ILL department had gained previous experience with the Ariel software it was responsible for the troubleshooting at the beginning then it was mainly the responsability of each department’s lan/system manager.

• 1997 - 1998

The only thing to report during the 1997 year is that the funding came directlty from the Schluich Library’s serials budget. The Library by cutting an extra 4% from its journal collection had enough budget (40K$cad) to subsidize the service.

In May of 1998 the maximum cost of 12$cad per article had been removed. No more maximum cost barrier for the users. This was due mainly to some comments made by the faculty and graduate students that they were frustrated not being able to order some articles because of that maximum cost limit.                                  The first account with the link level of service was implemented for the department of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering. This level of service allows the users to order any journal and conference articles they need no matter the year of publication. They can order articles which are not in CISTI Source but at CISTI and also the ones which are not at CISTI since the second default supplier for this link level of service is the British Lending Document Service Centre (BLDSC) in the United Kingdom. The cost per article is more expensive than CISTI and a copyright cost is also added (which varies according to the publisher). The articles are sent directly to the department’s Ariel station.                                                

In the fall of 1998, the service was opened to departments and faculty outside of Schulich’s one: Faculty of Medicine. Funding came directly from the Director’s office since the service was now outside of just one library: 79,000$cad was then made available for the service. More accounts came with the license between CISTI and CREPUQ: 100 accounts were now included in the agreement.

ILL

While the CISTI Source/SUMO service was getting more and more popular the traditional ILL services at McGill were going through numerous changes: in June 1998 the centralization of the McGill ILL borrowing units came into effect. The Faculty of Arts, Education, Management, Music and Religious Studies merged with the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Science (except for the Biology department).                                                                                               In October  of 1998, the ILL borrowing fee of $5cad/article had been removed for everyone in every ILL units at McGill. Previously, in June of 1997, the ILL fee had been removed at the Schulich Library of Science & Engineering.

• 1999 – 2000

In 1999, the service was introduced to the Faculty of Agriculture and the Faculty of Education. Funding from the Director’s office was increased to 100K$cad. The original 31 CISTI Source personal accounts given to faculty at the implementation stage of the service in 1996 were removed away from them except for a few of them. This was done since most of these accounts had not seen any activity for the first two years. These personal accounts were needed so they were recycled for the set up of new departments.

In 2000, the service was introduced to the Faculty Arts and Management. These accounts were all set up with the link level of service since CISTI would not cover their subjects.  Funding from the Director’s office remained at the same level of 1999: 100K$cad.

The centralization of the ILL borrowing units continued with the merger to the main ILL department of the Faculty of Agriculture, Law and the Biology Library. Since then, only two ILL borrowing units remain operational at McGill: at the Health Sciences Library for the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry and at the McLennan Library for all of the other faculties at the University.

• 2001 – 2002

In 2001, the funding from the Director’s office increased up to 300K$cad so that it could keep up with the great success of the service. In fall of 2001, a new maximum cost limit was reintroduced to every accounts: the limit is now set to 75$cad/article. This was necessary mainly because of the articles coming from the BLDSC library and ordered through the link level of service. Some of the journals’ copyright cost exceeded the 100$cad level. Since more and more departmental accounts were opened with the link level of service something had to be done in order to get the most out of the CISTI Source budget. Since the maximum cost limit is quite high there hasn’t been any complaints from our users so far. In December of 2001, the first CISTI Source account was  set up for an undergraduate department: Biology. A request came from the McGill Biology Student Union to get a CISTI Source account for their article needs. An account was set up for them as a trial. Since then, there hasn’t been much activity: only 2 articles have been delivered.

In 2002,  the service is now offered to the Faculty of Music. There are now 115 CISTI Source accounts operational: 13 personal ones and 102 departmental ones. Many workshops have been given since 1996 both in the libraries and within the departments. The funding from the Director’s office was decreased to 240K$cad in an effort to maintain the expense of this service to a reasonable level. This will be achieved with the local holdings blocking file which is sent to CISTI on a regular basis: it now includes the hyperlink to the McGill full-text journals. Since January of 2002, the McGill libraries added close to 4,000 new online full-text titles to its collection. The update of this file will now be sent on a monthly basis.

Table 1 shows the level of filled requests received from the CISTI Source/SUMO service for the period of 1998/99 to 2001/02. After the first 69 months, a total of 109,086 articles have been supplied to the end-users through the CISTI Source/SUMO service with an average of 1,581 articles/month and an average fill rate of 92.5%. The average fill rate remained quite consistent throughout those years while the number of articles supplied and the average articles per month kept increasing from year to year. The average unit cost of those articles supplied since 1996 is 8.31$cad. This average unit cost remained fairly constant throughout those four years: 8.21$cad for 1998/99, 8.47$cad for 1999/2000, 8.22$cad for 2000/01 and 8.36$cad for 2001/02.

Table 1. Filled requests from 1998/99 to 2001/02.

What impact, if any, did the CISTI Source/SUMO service had on ILL for the  Schulich Library of Science & Engineering? If we look at the Schulich Library ILL made for its 13 departments and the requests made by those same departments through the CISTI Source service for the same period of time we can see the following (see Figure 1): a small decrease in the number of filled requests processed by the ILL office while the number of articles supplied through CISTI Source increased a lot. The distribution pattern for the ILL filled requests does not show a big decrease (see Figure 1) but if we compare the number of articles supplied by ILL over the ones from the CISTI Source/SUMO service we have the following ratio decreasing every year:

• 1998/99 = 23% from ILL & 77% from CISTI Source/SUMO
• 1999/00 = 16% from ILL & 84% from CISTI Source/SUMO
• 2000/01 = 12% from ILL & 88% from CISTI Source/SUMO
• 2001/02 = 8% from ILL & 92% from CISTI Source/SUMO

Figure 1. Impact of SUMO service on ILL.

Table 2 represents the CISTI Source/SUMO costs as opposed to the ILL costs for the period of 1998 to 2002. What would have been the costs of those filled requests, from the SUMO service, if the ILL office had processed them? For the comparison we take the average borrowing unit cost (for the research libraries) from the 1996 ILL/DD performance Study: 18.35$us. The average savings since 1998 by using the SUMO service instead of ILL has been 72%: it costs 72% less to supply the users’ articles from a SUMO service than having them processed through the traditional ILL service. We can see that the savings remained fairly the same throughout those four years: 70% in 1998/99, 72% in 1999/2000, 71% in 2000/01 and 73% in 2001/02. ILL is a labor-intensive operation thus very costly to maintain. It is obvious that a SUMO service can supply articles at a fraction of the cost of traditional ILL service.

Table 2. SUMO costs versus ILL costs from 1998 to 2002.

Now what about the journal ownership versus the pay per view approach: the just in case versus the just in time dilemma. Is it more cost efficient to acquire journals or to get the articles through the CISTI Source/SUMO service? In table 3 there is a comparison between the CISTI Source/SUMO service and the journal subscription costs for the period of 1998 to 2001. The table represents the subscription costs of journals that supplied the articles through the CISTI Source/SUMO service. The savings again from the SUMO service are great: they are ranging from 91% to 94%. The SUMO service only costs a fraction of the subscription costs for all three years: ranging from 6% to 9%.

Table 3. CISTI Source/SUMO costs¹ versus journal subscription costs¹ at McGill        between April 1998 to March 2001.

1.      Costs are in canadian dollar.

The huge success of the CISTI Source/SUMO at McGill can be seen by the increase of the number of articles supplied over the years (see table 1) and also by the increasing cost of the service since 1996: the service costs 27,194$cad in 1996/97, 33,156$cad in 1997/98, 66,390$cad in 1998/99, 146,695$cad in 1999/2000, 262,838$cad in 2000/01 and 303,594$cad in 2001/02.

CONCLUSION

The CISTI Source/SUMO service at McGill University is now six years old. It turned out that this service became very popular and successful throughout the institution over the years. It was introduced in 1996 as a new service to our users in a reaction to the massive journal cancellations at McGill. It became obvious that the service has proved itself by beign better (in terms of access, turnaround time and convenience) and more cost efficient than ILL and journal ownership. Depending which model you want to introduce (unmediated/mediated, unmediated, subsidized or not), an end-user service can be a good complimentary service to ILL and journal ownership. It can also help in coping with overloaded and understaffed ILL departments.