Getting books to patrons in a Flat World

While in Florida, I was discussing with Sean how delivery can provide service to Florida students. While he was grateful for what we have done for distance students. He asked if there might be ways to speed up the delivery of material.

Since that conversation I've been thinking about ways that libraries in general and Rolfing in particular may utilize Friedman's flatteners to more efficiently get our books into the hands of our students. Since then I've also come across Richard Akerman's post on the online library's role in discovering and delivering.

Some of my thoughts: We've talked about importance of providing access to information as opposed to collecting that information ourselves but what if we expand our ideas of providing access to include actually getting all material (including print) to the patron wherever they are.

What if the most important feature for to copy from Amazon is telling people how long it will take to have the book. Why can't we currently get our ILL system to predict that?

Sean suggested in Florida that perhaps we could give patrons an option of how they want material shipped and then bill them if they need it expedited. If they want to pay for it, in theory we could get them a book overnight. What would it take to implement this?

This makes me think what if libraries asked UPS to design and run an ILL network. What would that look like? Could CATLA, for example, use UPS to replace the current courier? Could we get ILL software to print out mail addresses (or maybe it already does)? What about tracking numbers?

Although I think WorldCat has made ILL a lot more efficient than it use to be, I think that changes in cataloging to get rid of multiple records for the same work could make it that much more efficient. Here we have to decide what is the acceptable trade off from precision, and local customization in cataloging records vs efficiency in exchanging books between libraries. Perhaps FRBR will help here. What if we saw one of the primary purposes of cataloging material, making ILL more efficient?

Whatever you may think of the above questions, I think the delivery of material from the library to distant users is going to be increasingly important and will require us to rethink how we operate. Also although I continue to use the acronym ILL, I suspect that we really need to be thinking about sending material directly to individuals without it being physically passed through a library.