If you work in electronic access or resource sharing, you’ve likely seen the announcement that Get It Now will sunset on June 30. For many libraries, it’s been a familiar part of document delivery workflows for years.
A change like this can feel disruptive, but it’s manageable with a clear plan and a solid understanding of your established workflows. For many teams, it goes beyond simply replacing a service and requires adjusting processes that have developed over time.
The Short Version Of A Long Story
Get It Now launched in the academic space before much of today's document delivery infrastructure existed. It gave libraries a brokered, copyright-compliant way to order individual journal articles at discounted rates, bringing more structure to what had been a fragmented and inconsistent process.
Since that time, electronic access to published material has changed considerably. Open access has grown. Publisher negotiations have become more sophisticated. The document delivery landscape has matured, with several providers now offering academic-rate access, broader coverage, and tighter integrations with library management systems. Get It Now's sunset reflects broader shifts that have been reshaping how libraries access content for some time.
Even if you expected this change, that doesn't make the transition painless. If your library has journal titles set up in your link resolver and staff routines built around Get It Now’s ordering interface or related processes that have been in place for years, there's real work to do before June 30.
How Libraries Are Using It Today
Most libraries have Get It Now embedded in one of three ways: unmediated patron-facing access, staff-mediated ordering, or integration with ILL management systems like ILLiad, Rapid, IDS, or Rapido. In practice, these workflows are tightly woven into daily operations. Even small changes can create confusion if requests don't flow the way staff and patrons expect.
One distinction worth clarifying upfront: unmediated patron-facing access, where patrons place article requests directly without staff review, typically requires a licensed platform rather than a standard per-article document delivery account. That's an important consideration when evaluating replacements, and it's worth mapping out exactly which workflow your library uses before making any changes.
Any new system should support your existing patterns without introducing unnecessary friction.
Not All Document Delivery Services Are Built The Same
In this context, “document delivery” refers to transactional access to individual articles outside your library’s existing holdings. There’s no ongoing commitment, just per-article fulfillment when needed.
At a surface level, most document delivery providers look similar. The differences tend to show up where it counts.
One of the biggest factors is the scope of their publisher agreements. A service is only as useful as what it can deliver: how many publishers are covered, how deep that coverage goes, and what happens when the article you need isn’t available digitally.
That last scenario comes up more often than you might expect. A meaningful portion of requests involves older content, obscure journals, or materials that exist only in print and can’t be pulled from a publisher server. Not every provider can fulfill those requests, so it's worth understanding how each service handles harder-to-source materials as part of your evaluation.
Where Research Solutions Fits In
Research Solutions has been part of the academic document delivery landscape for many years, working directly with content providers to provide access to individual articles outside of a library’s existing holdings.
Libraries can set up a document delivery account at no cost, with no annual license requirement or minimum order commitment. Requests are handled on a per-article basis, allowing libraries to use the service as needed.
When pricing is available, it is shown within the ordering workflow. For more obscure or hard-to-source materials, pricing may need to be confirmed before fulfillment. Libraries can also set account-level price caps to help manage costs.
If your library already uses ILLiad, Rapid, IDS, Rapido, or similar systems, the service can work alongside those existing workflows. It can also be used independently if preferred.
In addition to standard digital fulfillment, the service can support requests for print-only or hard-to-find materials, which may be relevant for libraries working with older or less accessible content.
Making The Transition
Librarians often have a few concerns when they switch document delivery providers.
One of the biggest considerations is updating how article request links are routed. If your journal titles currently point to Get It Now in Alma, OCLC, or another system, those links will need to be updated. It’s familiar work for most teams, but worth doing carefully.
The next thing to think about is system integration. For most libraries already using established ILL systems, the change is more about replacing the fulfillment source in your existing setup than building something new. This typically means the adjustment is more incremental than it might seem at first.
The third area is institutional memory. ILL and electronic resources staff know their current workflows, including the quirks, workarounds, and edge cases. Changing services means relearning some of this, and that’s just part of the process. The good news is that a well-designed document delivery service should be easy to learn, and having helpful support during the transition really helps.
Before June 30, Here's Your Next Step
If you’re evaluating next steps or thinking through how this change fits into your current workflows, it’s worth taking the time to map out what you have in place today and what needs to change.
We’re always happy to talk through options or share what we’re seeing across other libraries working through the same transition.
