Strategies and Alliances into Action to Improve National Collaboration

The Italian NILDE network of libraries continues to grow through the use of the NILDE system and currently comprises more than 600 Italian librarians and about 10.000 registered end-users.The system allows to daily manage and to record all the Inter-Library-Loan (ILL) operations, with a high national coverage. This paper presents the NILDE network governance and evolution and the strategies that have been put into action to improve collaboration in resource sharing among the participants. These strategies include: release of best practices and worst practices; activities to promote the knowledge about the network; cooperation with the Italian national catalogs and consortia; data analysis about ILL and its performance, related to: turn around time, reciprocity factor, requested/supplied documents imbalance analysis, analysis of ILL requested serial titles and their relationship with consortial e-only acquisitions. The availability of such a high volume of ILL data has allowed for the first time to analyze the trends and gaps of ILL and to help future cooperative acquisitions planning.