Feasibility of Analyzing Interlibrary Loan Requests to Determine Instruction Needs

Abstract

The Interlibrary Loan department at the University of Mississippi wished to examine interlibrary loan borrowing data dating back to the implementation of the ILLiad system in August 2001 in order to determine why the number of cancellations due to local availability continues to increase. The patron information was extracted in an attempt to determine whether library instruction should be targeted to patrons according to status, department, database, or frequency of ILL use. All 88,376 article and loan requests from 3,975 users were examined for similarities among request cancellations. The authors found that the fastest-growing reason for cancellation of an ILL request is availability in the stacks. The surge began soon after several subscriptions were converted from paper to electronic format. That, plus fill rate data according to the citation source, suggests that the design of certain databases can be a strong indicator of whether a patron will venture beyond an originating database or submit an interlibrary loan, assuming their request is not owned locally.