Annual summary of resource sharing statistics
In July of each year, I collate and summarize the resource sharing statistics from the IAMSLIC Distributed Library project. 2009/10 represents the eighth complete year of the resource sharing program. A total of 4977 requests were submitted during 2009/10, the highest volume of activity recorded to date and an increase of 15% over 2008/09. A total of 28,176 requests have been submitted via the system since its inception in 2002.
The resource sharing program continues to be broadly international in scope, with 74 different IAMSLIC lending libraries in 23 countries receiving borrowing requests from 119 IAMSLIC libraries in 42 countries, very similar to previous year’s numbers. 35 (47%) of those 74 lending libraries are in the United States and they received 60.1% of the total requests, while Mexico, Australia, Canada and Germany collectively received 29.5% of the borrowing requests.
The Hatfield Marine Science Center of Oregon State University (U.S.) was the top lending library again this year, followed by the Alfred Wegener Institut in Bremerhaven (Germany), the University of Hawaii (U.S.), the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (Canada), and Hopkins Marine Station (U.S.).
There were no significant shifts from the past year in the proportions of lending and borrowing across the Regional Groups. The Latin American region continues to make active use of the resource sharing program while contributing a substantial amount of lending in return, including an significant percentage of requests filled within the region. EURASLIC still conducts much of its regional interlibrary loan activity via its discussion list, so the number of transactions via the Distributed Library does not reflect the full volume of resource sharing in the region, however a growing number of EURASLIC libraries are active users of the system. The volume of activity remains low in Africa and moderate in the Pacific region.
The complete set of data is available on the Distributed Library website via the Resource Sharing Statistics link at http://library.csumb.edu/iamslic/ill/. It includes a spreadsheet for each year that offers charts and additional analysis of lending and borrowing patterns. I encourage you to look at the 2009/10 numbers and will be glad to answer any questions you may have about the data.
Steve Watkins
California State University, Monterey Bay, Library
steve_watkins@csumb.edu
