Abstract
The authors analyzed 2.48 million interlibrary loan (ILL) requests entered in the National Library of Medicine's (NLM's) DOCLINE system from 3,234 US and Canadian medical libraries during fiscal year (FY) 2005 to study their distribution and nature and the journals in which requested articles were published. Data from DOCLINE and NLM's indexing system and online catalog were used to analyze all DOCLINE ILL transactions acted on from October 2004 to September 2005. The authors compared results from this analysis to previous data collected in FY 1992. Overall ILL volume in the United States and Canada is at about the same level as FY 1992 despite marked growth in online searching, knowledge discovery tools, and journals available online. Over 21,000 unique journal titles and 1.4 million unique articles were used to fill 2.2 million ILL requests in FY 2005. Over 1 million of the articles were requested only once by any network library. Fifty-two percent (11,022) of journals had 5 or fewer requests for articles from all the years of a journal by all libraries in the network. Fifty-two percent of the articles requested were published within the most recent 5 years. The overall ILL profile in the libraries studied has changed little since FY 1992, notable given other changes in publishing. Small changes, however, may reveal developing trends. Total ILL traffic has been declining in recent years following a peak in 2002, and fewer of the articles requested were published in the most recent five years compared to requests from 1992.
Highlights
The last decade has been one of remarkable progress in information dissemination
Total DOCLINE requests and network use In FY 2005, 2.48 million requests were entered into the DOCLINE system by 3,234 health sciences libraries (Table 1)
The present study focuses on the journal requests, primarily on the 92% (2.2. million) that libraries were able to fill
Summary
The last decade has been one of remarkable progress in information dissemination. Beginning in the mid1990s, publishers began offering electronic versions of print journals online via the Web. In 1997, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) was funded to offer access to PubMed free of charge to users worldwide. New services such as Google Scholar broaden the scope and ease of knowledge discovery through free searching of scholarly databases (including MEDLINE via PubMed) in numerous disciplines, as well as from repositories, preprint archives, full-text resources, and many other types of sources [1]. In the United States, health sciences libraries are organized into the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM), through which they can share resources. In 1985, NLM, with the input of the major medical libraries, built the DOCLINE system for automatically routing requests for needed items to libraries that held the material. The system automatically finds a library that holds the needed item and sends the request to that library
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