Opinion paper: the availability of monographs through ILL – the need for a national strategy

Abstract

Discusses the need for a national access policy for monographs in public libraries and the role of networking in the future of resource sharing. Suggests the need for the newly‐created Library and Information Commission to produce a blueprint of guidelines for national strategies to cover resource sharing and the need to co‐ordinate elements of the situation in which the public libraries no longer have a single monograph national database but two unconnected systems, and the academic libraries have yet another separate database. Introduces the EARL project (electronic access to resources in libraries) as a new model, and emphasizes the need for a genuine partnership approach.