EFTS Questions You May Have
Jola Sliwinski
EFTS Program Coordinator
University of Connecticut Health Center Library
Farmington, CT
EFTS, the Electronic Fund Transfer System used to debit and credit member accounts for the cost of interlibrary loans, was started in 1996 and currently has over 1200 participants. There are now EFTS libraries in each of the 50 states, Canada and Mexico. In developing this service over the past eleven years, EFTS staff has had the opportunity to listen to many librarians who have raised questions, issues and concerns regarding EFTS. Here are some of the more common questions, concerns and answers about EFTS:
Has the use of EFTS eliminated or reduced the work associated with overdue bill collecting?
Yes; EFTS takes responsibility for making sure bills are paid. Large EFTS net loaners find that staff committed to billing and collections can be redeployed into other work areas.
We do not have staff to upload transaction files to EFTS.
You may be surprised at how little time it takes to create the transaction files. Many third party ILL management programs like QuickDoc, Illiad, Clio and DOCLINE file builder already support the creation of EFTS files. You may also enter the transaction data directly into the EFTS system. Remember that only transactions for which a loaning library has charged a fee have to be uploaded. The borrowing library doesn’t need to do anything. Transactions can be uploaded at anytime and are processed immediately.
How can a library that is part of an institution that does not allow deposit accounts join EFTS?
This is a matter of perspective. One view some members have taken is that a journal subscription is a form of deposit account. Money is pre-paid for a product to be received in installments over time. Questions are not raised about the financial appropriateness of library subscriptions. Another view is that EFTS is a bill reconciliation service. Sufficient funds have to be kept on account to cover the cost of a library’s ILL transactions. If a library is a loaning library, income from loaned transactions often covers the cost of that library’s borrowing.
Why does EFTS charge a service fee to only the loaning library and not the borrowing library?
EFTS eliminates the need for invoicing on the part of the loaning library. The service fee is intended to replace the cost of invoicing. The expense of the latter includes not only sending the actual invoice but also following up on aging unpaid accounts. Additional costs for getting an article, unfortunately, may be the deciding factor in some cases as to whether or not the request is ever made. Therefore, no service charge for borrowing encourages resource sharing, which translates into more income for the loaning libraries without invoicing.
Efforts to expand our participant group are in full force, and we continue being committed to providing the best service possible to our membership. If your institution isn’t already a member of EFTS, it should be. Please visit the EFTS website at: https://efts.uchc.edu.
