Abstract
The unexpected outbreak of COVID-19 near the beginning of 2020 has significantly interrupted the daily operation of a wide range of academic institutions worldwide. As a result, libraries faced a challenge of providing their patrons access to physical collections while the campuses may remain closed. Discussions on the implementation of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) among libraries have been trending ever since. In theory, CDL enables libraries to digitize a physical item from their collections and loan the access-restricted file to one user at a time based on the “owned to loaned” ratio in the library’s collections, for a limited time. Despite all the discussions and enthusiasm about CDL, there is, however, still a lack of technical infrastructure to support individual libraries to manage their self-hosted collections. With COVID-19 still very much a presence in our lives, many libraries are more than eager to figure out the best approach to circulating materials that only exist in print form to their users in a secure and legitimate way. This article describes the author's temporary but creative implementation of CDL amid the COVID-19 pandemic. We managed to work out a technical solution in a very short time, to lend out digital versions of library materials to users when the library is physically inaccessible to them. By collaborating with our campus IT, a Google Spreadsheet with Google Apps Scripts was developed to allow a team of Access Services Staff to do hourly loans, which is a desired function for our reserve collection. Further, when the access to a file expires, staff will be notified via email. We hope our experience can be useful for those libraries that are interested in lending their physical materials using CDL and are in urgent need for an applicable solution without a cost.
Highlights
Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) is “an emerging method that allows libraries to loan print books to patrons in a ‘lend like print’ fashion ” (Main Page | Controlled Digital Lending by Libraries, n.d.), when there are no alternatives available in the ebook licensing market
With COVID-19 still very much a presence in our lives, many libraries are more than eager to figure out the best approach to circulating materials that only exist in print form to their users in a secure and legitimate way
We found we were among the first few small libraries to adopt a CDL-flavored approach to the problems we were facing amid the COVID-19 crisis
Summary
Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) is “an emerging method that allows libraries to loan print books to patrons in a ‘lend like print’ fashion ” (Main Page | Controlled Digital Lending by Libraries, n.d.), when there are no alternatives available in the ebook licensing market. For materials that exist only in print, a library can choose to loan a digitized copy of a book it owns, only to a single user at a time, in place of the physical item. The corresponding physical copy should be removed from the collection and be placed in storage while the digital version is shared with a patron. NYU Shanghai is China’s first Sino-US research university and the third degreegranting campus of the NYU Global Network, located in Shanghai, China. Our student body currently consists of nearly 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students. No one had expected that we would not be able to return to campus for almost three months due to the unexpected outbreak of COVID19
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