10th Anniversary Resource Sharing Summary

In July of each year, I collate and summarize the resource sharing statistics from the IAMSLIC Distributed Library project. 2011/12 is a milestone, as it represents the tenth complete year of the resource sharing program. A total of 5215 requests were submitted during 2011/12, the second highest volume of activity recorded to date. A total of 38,701 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 25 countries receiving borrowing requests from 124 IAMSLIC libraries in 45 countries, similar to previous year’s numbers. 33 (44.6%) of those 74 lending libraries are in the United States and they received 64.1% of the total requests.  Libraries in Germany,  Mexico, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Bermuda and India collectively received 30.3% of the borrowing requests.

The Hatfield Marine Science Center of Oregon State University (U.S.) regained its status as the top lending library this year, followed by the Alfred Wegener Institut in Bremerhaven (Germany), Hopkins Marine Station (U.S.), the University of Hawaii (U.S.) , and the Pell Marine Science Library at the University of Rhode Island (U.S.) .

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. A growing number of EURASLIC libraries are active users of the system, both lenders and borrowers. 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. The volume of activity has increased significantly  in AFRIAMSLIC, both lending and borrowing, and remains 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 2011/12 numbers and will be glad to answer any questions you may have about the data.

Steve Watkins
California State University, Monterey Bay, Library
swatkins@csumb.edu