Guidelines for Distance Learning and Interlibrary Loan: Doomed and More Doomed

The Conference on Fair Use (CONFU) was a useful forum for discussions among librarians, educators, and users on one side and the content providers on the other. Two particularly thorny issues were distance learning and interlibrary loan. Although the end result was the same in each area—no widely accepted guidelines—the process and intermediate results were very different. Distancelearning guidelines were produced after considerable negotiation, but they did not garner sufficient support to be accepted as CONFU guidelines. Interlibrary loan proved even more difficult, and no agreements were reached except that it was too early to develop guidelines on digital interlibrary loan. Thus, no interlibraryloan guidelines were drafted as a part of the CONFU process.