Changing Tools, Changing Habits, Changing Workflows – Recent Evolution of the Interlibrary Loan Service at the University of Liège

Over the last few years, the ILL service of the University of Liège has evolved considerably, both in terms of habits and workflows. In this presentation, we will explain the main stages of this evolution: first reduction of the number of ILL services (from 8 to 5) and involved operators (from 15 to 10) within the homemade ILL solution (2015); use of the Resource Sharing functionality in the new Alma library management system (2015); second reduction of the number of ILL services (from 5 to only one) and involved operators (from 10 to 6) (2015); new subscription to an international broker ILL system (RapidILL) for electronic and digital materials and its integration within Alma (2020); (temporary) free ILL service to all University users (2020); implementation of peer-to-peer resource sharing for print materials between Alma instances of university and research libraries in Belgium (2022). The aim of this evolution is to harmonise the practices of the operators in charge of ILL activities, to reduce the quantity of manual operations and tasks devoted to ILL and to supply the documents we don’t have in a more fluid, fair and faster way. All those changes have been implemented little by little, sometimes but not always in a collaborative approach with the ILL operators.