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E-Book Lending: DRM E-Book ILL
Unlike the DRM-free approach, DRM e-book ILL has seen less exploration or adoption due to the technical challenges of file management and delivery, as well as the user reading experience. Though the less adopted track, the information on the vendors and libraries included below show some promise at the scalability of realizing more pathways to support DRM e-book interlibrary loan.
Occam’s Reader
Occam’s Reader is a DRM-management platform used to support e-book interlibrary loan and CDL workflows. Originally conceptualized in 2011 through the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA), the solution was developed by Texas Tech University in collaboration with GWLA and the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa to convert e-book and digital surrogate files into a secured database for users to view. Occam’s Reader is currently in use by 30 academic libraries in the United States.
🌐 Version 1.1 Software Documentation/Code
- While the original version of the software is open source, more recent versions of the software are now licensed through Texas Tech University.
📜 Florida State University - Lending Workflows for Occam’s Reader
ProQuest Pilot
Starting in November 2021, ProQuest launched an e-book ILL pilot with 6 publishers and 3 regional library cohorts to gain better insights into DRM e-book ILL practices and identify routes towards broader scalability for lending select aggregated collections.
The 3 participating regional cohorts included:
- Four institutions in the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL)
- Two institutions in the California State University (CSU) System
- A subset of State University of New York (SUNY) institutions, plus New York University and The New School
The 6 participating publishers included:
- Bloomsbury
- Brill
- Duke University Press
- New York University Press
- Oxford University Press
- Taylor & Francis
Joris Baeyens provides an succinct overview of the pilot’s workflow from their article “Four years of ILL service at the Faculty Library of Arts and Philosophy (Ghent University): Findings and challenges”:
“In a nutshell: when circulating an e-book through ILL, the lending library loses one licensed access during the E-ILL period. The patron of the borrowing library receives an E-ILL URL and has access to the e-book for two weeks via the ProQuest E-book Central platform. The borrowing patron can then make use of the e-book in accordance with the DRM restrictions of the e-book licence. These DRM restrictions can however put a damper on the patron’s user experience.”
The pilot was expected to end in Q4 of 2022, but was extended for another year. SUNY announced in Summer 2024 that the ProQuest pilot had ended with the anticipated launch of a commercial product by fall of that year. At the release of this toolkit, no announcements of this product have come to fruition. Though unconfirmed by pilot participants or Clarivate, the company’s decision to phase out one-time perpetual purchases of print and digital books may have impacted further development, given the change in sales model and access to ProQuest’s digital book collections.
While the future of the ProQuest pilot or broader efforts to scale DRM e-book lending are unclear, the resources below outline the program in more detail and describe the workflows used by different lending library cohorts.
Pilot Overview
▶️ Whole Ebook ILL: On the Road Toward a Scalable Solution, Charleston Conference - 2021
- An overview of the pilot launch, including perspectives from participating publishers and approaches to the pilot from several intra-lending cohorts.
▶️ Whole Ebook ILL Redux, Charleston Conference - 2022
- An overview of the first year of the pilot, including detailed transaction data and usage metrics, reflections from piloting libraries, and evolving perspectives from participating publisher partners.
Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL)
CARL’s approach involved editing MARC records in Prospector, the consortium’s union catalog, to identify lendable titles and utilized the catalog’s native requesting feature to request e-books.
🌐 Announcement - ProQuest/Prospector E-Book ILL Pilot with CARL
📜 ProQuest E-Book ILL Procedures - CARL
State University of New York (SUNY)
SUNY’s approach utilized their Alma Network Zone to activate eligible titles and a LibWizard form that directed requests to SUNY Office of Library Services (OLS) staff to fill requests rather than individual participating libraries.
This toolkit is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License.