Spilling Out of the Funnel: How Reliance Upon Interlibrary Loan Affects Access to Information

Abstract

Academic libraries that cancel serials titles typically offer interlibrary loan (ILL) as an alternative means to access these titles.This study examines how serials cancellations affect ILL usage and how reliance on ILL affects patrons’ access to content. By analyzing the number of ILL requests from canceled titles, the authors found that cancellations have a very small effect upon overall ILL usage. With the help of Google Analytics, the authors counted patron requests for link resolver access that were converted to ILL requests. When the link resolver was unable to generate a link to full text, it displayed a message to that effect on a link resolver landing page and presented the patron with a choice to request the title through ILL. Google Analytics recorded traffic to and from the link resolver landing page and generated a data set for this study. Analysis of collected data, including ILLiad records, shows that after patrons identify desired articles that require ILL, they only submit ILL requests 31 percent of the time. This means that for every successful ILL request, there are at least two articles desired that are never requested. Implications for collection development are discussed.