A common infrastructure In 2021 NHS England (then Health Education England) launched the NHS Knowledge and Library Hub (
www.library.
nhs.uk, aka the Hub) as an entry point to library services based around a powerful discovery tool and a link resolver knowl- edge base. The Hub provides direct access for NHS staff to a wide range of evidence including ejournals, evidence summaries and books. The KLS network is supported by a central Hub Service Desk trouble shooting issues and maintaining details of national collections. KLS teams are responsible for updating the details of their electronic subscriptions in their own Hub instance.
NHS England uses a suite of products produced by Third Iron to enhance access to e-resources in the Hub and more gen- erally across the web. LibKey links save NHS staff time by smoothing the login experience across multiple interfaces while also surfacing the open access versions of journal articles that are an increasing fea- ture of scholarly publishing. The holdings data held in the network of Hub instances is transferred regularly to Third Iron who use it to create a system wide dataset enriched with their knowledge base for open access materials.
A final key enabler for document supply is the NHS CLA Licence Plus agreement. This adopts a broad and inclusive defi- nition of the NHS in England including both NHS bodies and a range of other bodies working for the NHS. Under the licence eligible bodies are treated as one organization and this allows for copying from almost all owned and subscribed materials without the need for copyright declarations. Checks are incorporated into requesting processes to cover potential copyright exemptions, but these rarely apply in practice.
From idea to design
The case for change was clear and funds were identified to support the develop- ment of a tailored tool.
To increase the chance of successful delivery we sought to engage the deep knowledge of the KLS network to help build a system informed by experience of what works. Development was informed by consultation through the Strategic Inter Network Collaboration (SINC) group that brings together representatives across the interlending and document supply networks in the NHS in England and the national Resource Discovery (RD) Reference Group. SINC group members
as subject matter experts were invaluable in preliminary work and then in iterative testing of the developing solution. The aim of INCDocs is to provide a system that is as frictionless as possible while retaining helpful features of the existing arrangements. Critical is securing value for money by including the broad- est possible visibility of titles in a single tool saving staff time and efficiently using the shared collection. The use of Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to lookup articles in INCDocs reduces time spent rekeying data and spots reference errors before a request is sent by rapidly populating accurate bibliographic details or flagging mistakes.
The system is designed to balance the load on teams by randomly assigning a supplying library from within the pool of those who hold a particular article. Applying knowledge from existing systems a provision is made for services to suspend their participation due to temporary local issues and for very small services to be able to request without being required to reciprocate.
The SINC group feedback informed changes to support better integration into library workflows and make requesting processes flexible without compromis-
Spring 2025
INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 17
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