The report gives detailed data from a survey of 31 higher education libraries about trends I their use of interlibrary loan, including but not limited to: growth in interlibrary loan services, mean turnaround time for various materials, use of technology, budgets, staffing, for fee revenues, shipping costs, impact of digital repositories, means of materials transfer, methods of promoting the ILL service and much more. The report also covers materials contract provisions for ILL, use of eBooks in ILL, and other issues of interest to administrators of ILL programs in academic and research libraries.
Just a few of the findings from this 145+ page report include:
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Thirty-two per cent of libraries sampled had performed a user survey of their ILL services in the past four years.
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The mean turnaround time for article provision requests was 1.79 days for research universities in the sample.
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The mean turnaround time for video lending requests was 4.18 days.
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Twenty-three per cent of libraries assigned ILL to the circulation department. This was most common at four-year colleges and MA/PhD granting colleges.
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Articles from institutional digital repositories accounted for 5.69% of the articles provided through interlibrary loan.
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Libraries reported that a mean of 2.45 course pages contained links to ILL services. The maximum was 25% and the minimum was zero.
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In 2014-15 the percentage of ILL requests for books fulfilled through eBooks was 3.25% with a range of 1% to 5% for those libraries that tracked this data. This rose to 4.5% in 2015-16 and is expected to rise to 5.43% in 2016-17.