Challenges facing high-volume interlibrary loan operations: Baseline data and trends in the CIC consortium

College and Research Libraries

Volumn 67, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 63-84

  Beaubien, Anne K ^a   Kuehn, Jennifer ^b   Smolow, Barbara ^c   Ward, Suzanne M ^d  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

^b OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d PURDUE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 32244442579     PISSN: 00100870     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5860/crl.67.1.63     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. The CIC is a consortium of major midwestern research universities, composed of the members of the Big 10 athletic conference and the University of Chicago, stretching from Iowa to Pennsylvania. (See appendix 1.) It coordinates many cooperative ventures among its members, including the CIC Center for Library Initiatives (CLI). The CLI serves the thirteen research libraries of the CIC and supports library-related collaboration ranging from archives to digital collection development, including reference services and e-journal subscriptions (www.cic.uiuc.edu). Among the CLI's activities is the facilitation of an active group of the CIC's ILL directors. (See appendix 3.) This group communicates eight to ten times a year via conference calls and in person at the ALA's midwinter and annual meetings. Our institutions have enjoyed a long history of no-charge reciprocal interlibrary borrowing and lending. Since 1998, the CIC has used a courier delivery service (Lanter) to move returnable materials among our libraries, separated at the widest point by 775 miles, usually within two days. Although all CIC libraries also participate in other consortial groups, notably in-state initiatives, we all regard our CIC sister institutions as major resource-sharing partners.
2. After much discussion, the authors decided to count the flagship campus libraries only, not the regional or branch campuses or the separately administered libraries. This decision facilitated the "apples to apples" comparisons the authors had hoped to make. CIC library directors generally administer only the flagship library systems, not the regional and/or specialized libraries, and the full CIC reciprocity agreements extend to the flagship library systems only. A question might arise about the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Illinois, Chicago, campuses, but one is not a branch of the other. Instead, the University of Illinois is the only CIC institution with two ARL libraries. The only exception was for the University of Minnesota; when the report was written, its St. Paul campus library had a separate OCLC code and filled a significant number of borrowing transactions for the other campuses. Because the subject areas covered by the St. Paul campus library were included under all the other libraries' flagship OCLC codes, the authors wanted to show the full picture for the University of Minnesota. Since the report was published, the materials in this library have been transferred to Minnesota's flagship OCLC code.
3. Mary E. Jackson, Assessing ILL/DD Services: New Cost-Effective Alternatives (Washington, D.C.: ARL, 2004). The study results found that in 2002 the average ILL transaction cost for participating ARL libraries was $26.78 ($17.50 spent by the borrower and $9.28 spent by the lender). This publication mentions two CIC libraries, the University of Minnesota and the University of Illinois at Chicago Health Sciences, as high-performing lending operations.
4. Table 3 reports the CIC borrowing turnaround statistics in calendar days between July 2003 and March 2004. Northwestern University and the University of Illinois, Chicago, use Clio as their ILL management system and were able to use that software's system provided report to obtain these figures. The rest of the CIC libraries use ILLiad. IT staff at the Purdue University Libraries wrote a custom query that all CIC libraries using ILLiad ran against their data. Most CIC libraries had moved to ILLiad during the year or two before July 2003, so this table captured only nine months of data. Obtaining and then merging turnaround data from the old system (Clio) and the new one (ILLiad) would not only have been tricky and time-consuming, but also might have introduced elements of inaccuracy or inconsistency.
5. Cathy Kellum, "A Little SOUL Increases ILL Fill Rates," OCLC Newsletter (Nov./Dec. 2000): 33.
6. Anne Donohue, "ILL Fulfillment Study Focuses on Improving Fill Rates," OCLC Newsletter (Nov./Dec. 2000): 34-35.
7. An unpublished study at the University of Michigan showed that 95 percent of all borrowing requests are filled within the first three libraries listed in the OCLC lender string, 1988.
8. Available online at http://www.ala.org/ala/vrt/pubguidelines/ guidelinesinterlibrary.htm.
9. Available online at http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/programs/ CLIConsortialAgreementProgram/archive/BestPractice/ StandardizedAgreementLanguageDec02.pdf.
10. E-mail communication to Susan Singleton, October1, 2004.