ILL Systems Evaluation

In 2024, BLC's ILL Systems Evaluation Working Group was charged with identifying a set of required and desired functionalities for resource sharing software. The goals were simple: identify the requirements of our consortial membership's resource sharing solutions and guide BLC staff on future vendor engagements in alignment with our strategic priority to enhance resource sharing systems. The resources below are the end-products of the working group's investigation:

• A set of practitioner-driven criteria to evaluate resource sharing software solutions
• The responses to a request for information (RFI) to prominent resource sharing software vendors detailing the functionality of their software.

We encourage you to review these resources, adapt the evaluation criteria to meet your local library or consortia's needs, and use the RFI responses to guide local decision making in choosing the most appropriate resource sharing software for your library.

A report detailing criteria to aid libraries and consortia in evaluating the functionality of their resource sharing software. Some features of the report include:

• A background on the development of the evaluation criteria, including a history of the past decade of activity for resource sharing software and how has BLC navigated a tumultuous landscape.
• An overview of the criteria categorization and prioritization method BLC used to develop our consortial knowledge base of resource sharing software needs.

The responses to BLC's RFI to prominent resource sharing software vendors. This page includes:

• BLC's RFI instructions & template vendor response spreadsheet
• Product & Organization information from responding vendors Vendor/Software information

• Detailed responses from vendors articulating the functionalities of their resource sharing software (adapated from the Evaluation Criteria for Resource Sharing Software)