CCC, Librarians Ink Loans Permissions Pact

Late last month, the Danvers, Mass.–based Copyright Clearance Center announced an agreement to enable OCLC, of Dublin, Ohio, a nonprofit organization serving 41,000 libraries, to link its OCLC ILLiad Resource Management Software for interlibrary loan transactions directly through CCC's permissions gateway. As a result, librarians at all 278 ILLiad libraries,, will be able to bypass CCC's www.copyright.com Web site and receive loans permissions using their standard library software.

Speeding up interlibrary loans permissions has been a CCC goal for several years. Tracey Armstrong, CCC's director of business services, referred to last year's click-through licensing agreement with Docutek Information Systems Inc. as "our first toe in the water in this area. We're trying to reach out into new channels to make it easier for libraries to get permissions." Dokutek's Eres is a Web-based service that can clear copyrighted content and post it on electronic reserve.

The new OCLC ILLiad permissions gateway further streamlines the permissions process by enabling librarians to, in effect, enter CCC's Web site through the back door. "We created a series of modules and enabled others to embed those modules so that the process becomes more transparent," explained Bruce Funkhouser, CCC's v-p of business operations and international. "We hear it from both ends—rights holders and user customers—who say, 'I really like what CCC does, I just wish I wouldn't have to do it.' ILLiad is the first of many library automation vendors to use these modules. They shorten the distance between rights holders and users."