In my limited experience, many reports and in depth analysis need to be undertaken to get a clear picture.  The J2 reports can be misleading if a patron is trying to access backfile articles(so I run a seperate report on that journal to see what years the articles that were requested came from- JR_5?) , and the abstracts can be misleading if the reason the patron did not download was that they did not think the content of the article was what they were looking for in their research.

That being said, we feel that part of the reason patrons do not bother to ILL is that they are crunched for time, and just move to a different article.  

I am interested in doing a survey on our campus to try to determine the underlying reasons that researchers may "move on" - mostly because we are looking into the "pay-per view" options that some providers now offer.  Since we are a small/mid-sized institution, it does not always make financial sense for us to subscribe rather than ILL, but we are committed to trying to provide, as quickly as possible, access to scholarly material.

Patricia McGarry
Acquisitions~Periodicals Associate
Knight-Capron Library
University of Lynchburg
Lynchburg, VA 24501



On Wed, Oct 31, 2018 at 9:06 AM Melissa Belvadi <mbelvadi@upei.ca> wrote:
Hi, all.

I occasionally see an article in our professional literature about how well ILL article request data does (not) reflect likely demand, and that definitely seems to reflect our own experience from my somewhat informal analysis of our own data.
But I seem to have trouble persuading my colleagues here about this.

For example, I'll present JR2 turnaway data and "abstracts viewed" in EBSCO and Proquest as evidence for adding a subscription, but they'll respond that :"if they didn't bother to ILL it, then they don't really need it".

Has anyone done, either for publication or for internal use that you can share with me, some kind of "systematic review" on this issue?

Or even if you have a clear and concise explanation of why that "they didn't bother" reasoning is not an appropriate conclusion to draw, I would appreciate that too. I haven't found the right way to articulate why I think that's wrong.
Or if you agree with my colleagues, tell me that too!


Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi@upei.ca 902-566-0581
Make an appointment via YouCanBookMe




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