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This article will consider seven commercial document suppliers and evaluate them according to criteria established early in the Documents Direct project. It will explain the criteria in terms of each supplier and assess their suitability regarding the project specifically. The Documents Direct project is a 12‐month project at the University of Leeds. Its aim is to assess the costs and benefits of on‐demand single article supply as an alternative to the Library’s established model of full journal acquisitions. The project offers unmediated document ordering and delivery to academics and research staff within the University. The project is funded internally and involves the Schools of Biology, Chemistry, Civil Engineering and Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

The Documents Direct project’s aim was to investigate the feasibility of offering user‐initiated unmediated requesting and delivery of documents, as an alternative to traditional periodical holdings and conventional ILL. The project’s initial user group involved four science and engineering schools at the University of Leeds. The project’s trial demonstrated, with both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the value of the service and the project became a trial service 12 months after its inception. This article examines the initial trial and evaluates the trial service.

The purpose of this paper is to describe Article Exchange – OCLC’s cloud-based document delivery service.

In this study, Article Exchange is described in detail.

Article Exchange has proved popular with OCLC users with more than 50,000 documents uploaded in January 2013 alone by more than 1,000 libraries.

The new service facilitates improved delivery of documents electronically.

This article is useful for all librarians who are concerned with delivering documents electronically in an increasingly complex technical and legal environment.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the historical development of interlibrary loan, identify key milestones such as the codification of ILL practices and development of new technologies to facilitate those practices, and assess the impact that changes in technology and publishing are having upon resource sharing in the digital age.

The authors conduct an extensive historical review of global developments in resource sharing and then conduct a PEST analysis of societal factors affecting present day resource sharing.

Resource sharing continues to grow but there is a need to work together to find solutions to problems of distributed knowledge bases, incompatible systems, and electronic formats which often prohibit sharing of materials between libraries. Librarians must work with publishers, politicians, and systems developers to ensure that there is the same or equivalent rights to electronic materials as there is to print publications and that resource sharing systems can support new models of sharing and acquiring materials in multiple formats.

This paper provides a global perspective on the challenges of library resource sharing in the digital age.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the UnityUK service and its benefits to the user community.

The paper takes the form of a factual review of the UnityUK service.

The paper finds that the UnityUK service is changing the way inter‐library loans work in the UK.

The paper shares experiences of the UK market with the wider community.

In September 2011 the authors presented a paper at the IFLA Interlending & Document Supply Conference in Chicago, Illinois, USA, which focused on resource sharing in the digital age. Following that, the authors felt a need to further challenge and/or validate some of the conclusions drawn: the aim of this paper is to do that.

The best way, in the authors' opinion, was to talk with thought leaders in resource sharing, interviewing each one to see what trends and concerns would emerge. The goal of the interviews was to ascertain: changes over the last five years; current trends and impacts; and future trends and possible effects.

While the result of these interviews is anecdotal, it did allow the authors to draw some conclusions worthy of librarians’ consideration as to the current and future state of resource sharing.

This paper gives a good overview of key issues libraries are facing with resource sharing and document delivery services.

The purpose of this paper is to communicate the Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative's goals and activities to an international audience of librarians concerned with using best practices and technology to make library resource sharing more responsive to user needs.

The paper provides a descriptive analysis explaining the Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative's mission and the activities it employs to fulfill it.

The paper explains how the activities of the Rethinking Resource Sharing Initiative contribute to improving the delivery of library information services.

The paper provides examples of innovative strategies, programs and activities designed to advocate for, inspire, and enable successful resource sharing.