It depends on the license agreement between the publisher and the lending library. Many publishers do not allow library ILL to simply download the PDF directly from their journal article page and send it to the requestor. A lot of publishers allow the lending library to download and print the article, and then send it to the borrowing library as paper copy. There are also publishers who allow to send article as print-scan-send. That is, we have to print out the PDF, scan it (back to the PDF), and send it as a file.
Do ask me why the publisher want that kind of silliness. That's what I'm told when I complaint about exactly the same thing. It is my understanding the scan-to-pdf is the problematic one; ILL unit will need to have OCR-capable scanner and that might add another burden to them if the OCR result is not good. YMMV. ranti. On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 4:18 PM, don warner saklad <don.sak...@gmail.com> wrote: > How do you request digital format for a pdf interlibrary loan journal > article where a digital format is available for the article?... not the > image format if available in digital. Guidelines for interlibrary loan > practices need to distinguish digital pdf from image pdf where journal > articles are available in digital format. > -- Bulk mail. Postage paid.