Board 78: ILL Communication: Analyzing Five Years of Iowa State University's Print Interlibrary Loan Requests

Eric J. Schares

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Conference: 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Tampa, Florida
Publication Date: June 15, 2019
Start Date: June 15, 2019
End Date: June 19, 2019
Conference Session: Engineering Libraries Division Poster Session
Tagged Division: Engineering Libraries
Page Count: 17
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--32428
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/32428
Download Count: 391

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Paper Authors

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Eric J. Schares Iowa State University orcid.org/0000-0002-6292-8221

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Eric Schares is an Engineering & Physical Sciences Librarian at Iowa State University. He serves a liaison to the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering. Eric has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State, and an MLIS from Rutgers University. Prior to his current role at Iowa State, he worked at Intel for 10 years as an array reliability engineer on NAND flash memory.

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Abstract

Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a service offered by libraries to supply patrons with materials which are not immediately available for lending. This may be for many reasons; perhaps the library does own a copy but it is already checked out to another patron, or the assignment of a required but expensive textbook spurs high demand for a particular title.

Analysis of historical ILL request data is a useful exercise to undertake as each request represents a patron with an information need which was not able to be immediately filled by the library's collection. Each ILL request comes with a guaranteed circulation of at least one interested patron, and the request information is compiled in a dataset and preserved. Loans which are not able to be filled are still recorded and included in the dataset. Investigating trends and tendencies of a user base through this data can lead to more informed collection development practices, and understanding these data sets can reveal gaps in coverage or highlight areas where the user community may find the collection lacking.

This study is an analysis of five years worth of University X's ILL requests of print books, spanning calendar years 2013-2017. 18,841 borrowing requests were analyzed, and monograph title data available for conducting this analysis include loan author, title, year, publisher, edition, and lender library. Patron information includes department affiliation and status; no further identifying information is recorded in the dataset used here.

This analysis focuses mostly on engineering departments and analyzes trends over time by constructing visualizations to look at: -the most active academic departments and their request activity over time -the most heavily requested titles %and their presence on the list over time -requests by patron status (undergraduate, graduate, faculty, staff, unaffiliated) -the total number of requests made over time This work focuses on requests for print books only; the scope does not include electronically delivered PDF journal articles, book chapters, or conference proceedings.

The analysis is done in the statistical software JMP, and the procedure to automatically create the plots which appear in this paper has been coded, saved, and uploaded for others to use or adapt to their home institution's ILL data sets. This study is intended to illuminate the ILL request activity at a large, public, land-grant university in the United States, demonstrate the tendencies and trends of the campus community, and discover where users' information needs are not immediately being met through the print collection. This work can also inform future collection development activities not only at the local institution but at other universities worldwide.

Citation
Format

Schares, E. J. (2019, June), Board 78: ILL Communication: Analyzing Five Years of Iowa State University's Print Interlibrary Loan Requests Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32428

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a service offered by libraries to supply patrons with materials which are not immediately available for lending.  This may be for many reasons; perhaps the library does own a copy but it is already checked out to another patron, or the assignment of a required but expensive textbook spurs high demand for a particular title.

Analysis of historical ILL request data is a useful exercise to undertake as each request represents a patron with an information need which was not able to be immediately filled by the library&#39;s collection. Each ILL request comes with a guaranteed circulation of at least one interested patron, and the request information is compiled in a dataset and preserved.  Loans which are not able to be filled are still recorded and included in the dataset. Investigating trends and tendencies of a user base through this data can lead to more informed collection development practices, and understanding these data sets can reveal gaps in coverage or highlight areas where the user community may find the collection lacking.

This study is an analysis of five years worth of University X&#39;s ILL requests of print books, spanning calendar years 2013-2017.  18,841 borrowing requests were analyzed, and monograph title data available for conducting this analysis include loan author, title, year, publisher, edition, and lender library.  Patron information includes department affiliation and status; no further identifying information is recorded in the dataset used here.

This analysis focuses mostly on engineering departments and analyzes trends over time by constructing visualizations to look at:
    -the most active academic departments and their request activity over time
    -the most heavily requested titles %and their presence on the list over time
    -requests by patron status (undergraduate, graduate, faculty, staff, unaffiliated)
    -the total number of requests made over time
    
This work focuses on requests for print books only; the scope does not include electronically delivered PDF journal articles, book chapters, or conference proceedings.

The analysis is done in the statistical software JMP, and the procedure to automatically create the plots which appear in this paper has been coded, saved, and uploaded for others to use or adapt to their home institution&#39;s ILL data sets.  
This study is intended to illuminate the ILL request activity at a large, public, land-grant university in the United States, demonstrate the tendencies and trends of the campus community, and discover where users&#39; information needs are not immediately being met through the print collection. This work can also inform future collection development activities not only at the local institution but at other universities worldwide.
AU  - Eric J. Schares
CY  - Tampa, Florida
DA  - 2019/06/15
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Board 78: ILL Communication: Analyzing Five Years of Iowa State University's Print Interlibrary Loan Requests
UR  - https://strategy.asee.org/32428
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--32428
ER  -