Beige on black, the light switches on the second floor of the State Library’s stacks banished the archival darkness. Halogen hummed to life, a substitute for the silence; narrow strips of light painted the shelves pale above the Library and Information Science collection. Stacks retrieval was nothing new to me, but it has always inspired a sense of wonder. Prior to joining the Indiana State Library as its new interlibrary loan specialist this January, I’d spent most of my career working in academic collections: first, as a student lender at Indiana University’s Herman B. Wells Library in Bloomington, and later, as local document delivery coordinator for the University of Michigan’s Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor.
Cover image: “What the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Service Means to Me.”
You might call it fate, then, to spy this volume, wedged between several monographs on digital resource sharing after a good few minutes spent distracted by a bibliography on four centuries of cat books. “What the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Service Means to Me: A Collection of Essays” (Z 713 .W43 1999) was published on the 20th anniversary of OCLC’s interlibrary loan service. The prompt for the volume was simple: in five hundred words or less, contributors – ranging from students and teachers to librarians and freelance writers – were invited to submit their thoughts on what interlibrary loan meant to them for a shot at a $1,000 grand prize. Roughly a quarter-century later, this collection of essays is a fascinating snapshot of resource sharing at the turn of the millennium. Even the cover, hearkening back to my childhood in a rapidly digitizing world, vaguely reminds me of the old DK/Scholastic children’s books on the “information superhighway.”
Robert Mathews’ crossword.
Particularly interesting in this volume is how various contributors interpret the genre of “essay” for the contest. Among the various traditional short essays include submissions in the form of a crossword – a rearrangement of letters and words from the title of the collection itself – and poetry like the “Song of the Happy Scholar.” Humorously, two contributors took an extremely minimalist approach to their submissions: “Job security,” reads one dryly. Another writes, using their best supervillain impression: “Now the WORLD is mine!” As a student of literature and creative writing, the shattering of expectations with form has always struck me as a compelling type of argumentation or storytelling. Beth Posner’s statement preceding her generated word list from the volume’s title seems to hint at this type of narrative subversion, too: “Maybe we can even learn to see OCLC in other ways by this list.”
Beth Posner’s generated word list from the volume’s title.
Over 25 years later, it’s a fun thought exercise to imagine the wide range of responses (and visual interpretations) to this question that OCLC would receive in 2025, given the advancements in technology since this volume was published. For me, the meaning of a service like interlibrary loan is not just about “permitting access” to materials requested through InfoExpress and Indiana Share. It’s about participating in a broader, patron-oriented collaboration with the many public and academic libraries throughout Indiana. From education to entertainment, I view resource sharing as a form of service to our Hoosier communities.
And, if asked to write my own minimalist contribution to this volume, it would be simple: “The joy of patron discovery.”
This blog post was written by Eric Altemus, interlibrary loan specialist at the Indiana State Library.