Interlibrary cooperation: from ILL to IAIMS and beyond.

A recent solicitation over the MEDLIB-L e-mail discussion list revealed over thirty diverse examples of hospital library-based interlibrary cooperative initiatives currently underway. Many are familiar and have been featured in the professional literature. Most go unreported and unrecognized however, comprising invisible resource-sharing infrastructures that hospital librarians painstakingly piece together in order to provide their clients with expanded service options. This paper, drawing from the MEDLIB-L survey as well as descriptions in the published literature, provides a broad overview of such recent interlibrary cooperative efforts. Examples include interlibrary loan networks, collective purchasing initiatives, holder-of-record or union catalog access agreements, arrangements to provide e-mail and Internet access, and consortia to share electronic resources. Examples were chosen based on the initiatives' diversity of participants, and represent a wide range of locations across the United States. Such initiatives focus on local, statewide, or regional collaboration, and several involve partnerships between academic medical center libraries and regional hospital libraries. An early example of a hospital-based interlibrary cooperative IAIMS effort is described, pointing to future possibilities involving the Internet and regional hospital system intranets.