ALPE: an Italian project for sharing and checking interlibrary loan permitted use in e-resource licenses

This paper describes the current state of ALPE (Archivio Licenze Periodici Elettronici) a pilot project aiming to improve understanding of the issues raised by license agreements of electronic resources in Inter-Library Loan Services and to support librarians in the implementation of the correct policies. The project is led by the National Research Council (CNR) Bologna Research Area Library. ALPE will enhance levels of knowledge about allowed usage, limitations and rules defined in e-resource licenses both from technological and organizational points of view: 1. From the technological point of view, the ALPE archive has been developed to allow insertion of ILL clauses included in various licenses. These may have been negotiated with publishers, as usually occurs in consortia agreements, or be standard licenses, as shown on publisher or individual journal web sites. A shared schema for describing ILL clauses has been drafted by the ALPE working group, in order to standardize clause text content and its implementation. Such a schema has been designed for several purposes: to populate, harvest and query ALPE content from other systems, such as ERMs or ILL automation software, such as NILDE. 2. From the organizational point of view, a national working group has been formed from consortia negotiators and librarians from the major Italian universities and public research organizations. Working group tasks are, besides populating the archive in a cooperative way, to provide shared guidelines, best practices and supporting tools such as FAQs, Glossary and online help. The paper also analyzes possible future developments and international perspectives of sharing best practices in ILL licensing and supporting librarians in their knowledge and application of the correct policies.