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> I keep going back to this point. What type of "partner libraries" are > these? Are they part of a given institution, or consortium? Honestly, > I don't think ILL is the right solution, and as others have said on > this thread, implementing ILL (or even borrowing) is certainly > non-trivial. > > The "partner libraries" are patrons on the same level as borrowers (probably often the same people). I was only thinking that if any ILS had the ability to handle book lending, it would be through creative use of ILL, as no other common function has anything to do with a library borrowing a book. So, while looking through available ILSs, ILL was the functionality I was most curious about. And I agree that even creative use of ILL is probably not good enough. Out of curiosity, where does the difficulty of implementing borrowing come in? Creating databases of books linked to MARC records and borrowers with contact info is not difficult. using a script to mark books as checked out by a borrower in that database is not difficult. End of Day processing and sending emails requires some thought. A user interface could be difficult, but once all the scripts are done, if I eventually need a UI it could be done. I never considered the task trivial, and there will certainly be dozens of scripts over multiple files, but it seems to me just a matter of time and not brain crushing data processing. I do think that learning the code behind evergreen or another ILS and trying to tweak it to do something it was not intended to do would be more difficult and time consuming.