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CISTI, a recognised leader in interlibrary loan and document supply activities both in Canada and internationally, is also a key player in resource‐sharing in Canada. This paper outlines the roles which CISTI has adopted in order to remain relevant to clients in the ever‐changing resource‐sharing arena.

In April 2007, the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), in collaboration with Ingram MyiLibrary, launched the eBook Loan Service. The paper describes the management of challenges associated with the project as well as the background and context of the aims to eBook Loan Service model. Conclusions and future activities by the partners with regard to e‐book lending are discussed.

The paper addresses two main topics: how the eBook Loan Service model was developed, the challenges and risks, the outcomes and benefits; and to evaluate whether a project stretching across boundaries of geography and time as well as between public and commercial partners can be managed successfully. Through a literature review, the context of the e‐book lending model for libraries is addressed, as well as the challenges of virtual project management.

The challenges and risks associated with implementing the new service were resolved and the project was a success.

The new service delivered by this project underlines the richness of new ideas emerging in the library community to improve access to scholarly literature in the digital age. With this model of affordable short‐term access to scholarly e‐books, libraries will be in a better position to serve the just‐in‐time needs of users in the electronic environment and end‐users will have better access.

The Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) undertook an in‐depth analysis of its current serial subscriptions to determine whether they were meeting the needs of internal clients at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and document delivery clients. The assumptions were that extended gaps existed in business literature needed by NRC clients and medical literature needed by document delivery clients. Seeks to address this issue.

The analysis was done from two perspectives: review and analysis of usage of the print serials subscriptions; and analysis of unfilled document delivery orders. The project team matched current serial titles with document delivery usage and then classified the titles by subject. Second, the team used data from unfilled orders to create a ranked list of titles not held at CISTI but for which clients were requesting articles. The ranked titles were validated by data from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) on titles requested by Canadian libraries and not widely available in Canada.

NRC users showed a need for more business titles and all client groups showed a marked need for medical titles. While 36 percent of titles in the collection were medical, they accounted for 57.2 percent of document delivery activity and for 64.6 percent of unfilled orders. As a result, CISTI purchased 135 new medical serial subscriptions and will update its collection development policy to allow for a broader collection in medicine and business.

The study shows that document delivery usage data can play a key role in supporting strategic collection decisions.

This paper looks at the first full year of the implementation of CISTI Source at the Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland. The paper comments generally on journal use by title and takes a close look at the level of ordering associated with a group of Elsevier journal titles cancelled in 2002. It looks at the difficulty of putting in place a mechanism to prevent the ordering of articles for which there are local holdings in both paper and/or electronic formats. It discusses the consequences of not having an adequate blocking mechanism in the context of the overall cost of CISTI Source versus savings garnered from journal cancellations. The paper looks at user uptake and reaction to the new document delivery service. The paper reports briefly on the trial delivery of colour articles by Ariel between CISTI and the Queen Elizabeth II Library.

Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI)’s history in resource sharing, both in Canada and internationally, was described in a previous article. This paper updates CISTI’s resource‐sharing activities in the intervening two years. CISTI, as a document supplier and publisher, continues to ensure that client needs are met in the electronic future.

Since November 1996, the Physical Sciences & Engineering Library at McGill University has established a new Subsidised UnMediated Ordering (SUMO) service for its users: the CISTI Source/SUMO service, a one‐stop shopping service where the patrons (faculty, staff and graduate students) can browse the CISTI Source Table of Contents database over the Web, order their articles and have them sent directly to their desktop by CISTI (Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information) without having to search McGill’s OPAC. A blocking mechanism is set in place so that currently owned journal subscription articles cannot be ordered. This service has proved to be a better alternative to the traditional acquisition of journals (both paper and online) and the interlibrary loan service. The CISTI Source/SUMO service has provided more pertinent journals, more quickly and more readily than before and in a much cheaper way than with any journal subscriptions. It is one of the best ways to cope with the rapid increase in journal prices.

This paper seeks to investigate the impact of the open archive initiative on the document supply of grey literature.

The article is based on a comparative survey of five major scientific and technical information centres: The British Library (UK), CISTI (Canada), INIST‐CNRS (France), KISTI (South Korea), and TIB Hannover (Germany).

All major document suppliers are quite deeply involved in the open archive movement, and this involvement has an obvious impact on the policy of acquisition, archiving and supply of grey literature (dissertations, reports, conferences etc.).

The paper is a follow‐up study of the survey published in 2006.

Reduced funding, global competition and technological change are forcing libraries and information centres to turn to new methods of providing services. Publishers of scientific and technical information expect printed journals to remain their primary product for several more years, despite the advent of electronic journals. Library collections will continue to be largely paper‐based, but clients will demand much faster document delivery services from them. Many libraries must also maximize the investment in their collections by expanding their clientele. Electronic scanning of documents coupled with transmission over high‐speed, high‐capacity networks offers a potential solution to these problems. For more than a year, CISTI has been using proprietary imaging workstations to supply documents to one of its branches. Much more flexibility is needed to reach the disparate receiving equipment used by a varied Canadian and international clientele. Describes experience with the Ariel Workstation, developed by the Research Libraries Group, and CISTI′s own work towards a generic imaging workstation, able to transmit to a variety of receivers including identical scanning workstations, other workstations, facsimile machines and microcomputers with facsimile boards. Ability to rationalize library collections is seen as an important consequence.

Interlending in Canada is affected by geographic, political and cultural factors. The population distribution complicates the provision of material services and new methods of document delivery are constantly under review. The political complexities are such as to make effective networking voluntary, informal or non‐governmental. A complex cultural background affects library collections and services. Interlending in Canada is vital as individual library collections are not yet fully developed. There are no central lending collections as such and interlibrary lending is largely decentralized. Location tools and services have changed radically over the last decade with the advent of automation. The introduction of air and truck delivery systems has solved many document delivery problems and they are developing rapidly. Interlibrary loan policies are based on a code which, amongst other things, promotes access to information as being in the general interest. Charges for interlibrary loans were reluctantly introduced in 1975 and caused temporary chaos. The issue has raised the question of the need for a national lending centre and this in turn raises the problem of copyright. A nationwide study of interlending in Canada was undertaken and the report submitted at the end of 1982. Other studies are being carried out at the provincial level. Interlending in Canada is in a very dynamic period: technology is moving towards the interlinking of a wide variety of systems better suited to the Canadian situation. In future, library collections may become smaller, and users will borrow from a central clearing‐house, or full‐text database. New technology will affect the traditional role of the library which will then concentrate on more sophisticated help to the user.

This paper discusses the implementation and delivery, at Ryerson University Library in Canada, of three consortially‐facilitated, user‐centered initiatives to enhance traditional interlibrary loan services. Through a collaborative purchase of approximately 4,000 NetLibrary ebooks, with the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) consortium and the Consortium of Ontario Libraries, the Library provides unmediated access to shared monographs. Ryerson's fully‐subsidized document delivery service allows users to order journal articles directly from the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI Source) database.