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- Title
Implementing Controlled Digital Lending with Google Drive and Apps Script: A Case Study at the NYU Shanghai Library.
- Authors
Qinghua Xu; Leon Lin; Xiaohan Wu
- Abstract
The unexpected outbreak of COVID-19 near the beginning of 2020 has significantly interrupted the daily operations of a wide range of academic institutions across China. As a result, libraries in China faced a challenge of providing their patrons access to their physical collections while the campuses may remain closed. As the outbreak became a global pandemic, the pressing demand for solutions became only more evident among academic libraries worldwide. Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) is an emerging concept that enables libraries to digitize a physical item from their collections and loan the access-restricted file to one user at a time for a limited time based on the "owned to loaned" ratio in the library's collections. 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. NYU Shanghai is a Sino-Foreign university located in Shanghai, Mainland China. This article describes our 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.
- Subjects
GOOGLE Workspace; LIBRARIES; ACADEMIC libraries; COVID-19 pandemic; CONTROLLED digital lending
- Publication
International Journal of Librarianship, 2021, Vol 6, Issue 1, p37
- ISSN
2474-3542
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.23974/ijol.2021.vol6.1.193