Commercial document suppliers: how many of the ILL/DD periodical article requests can they fulfill? - interlibrary loan/document delivery; Resource Sharing in a Changing Environment

Library Trends, Wntr, 1997 by Chandra Prabha, Elizabeth C. Marsh

INTRODUCTION

Commercial document supply firms have served as an alternative to libraries for procuring copies of periodical articles for over twenty-five years. Given that photocopying technology was widely deployed only in the late 1960s, it is apparent that the private sector has been quick to find a market for document supply. Commercial document suppliers "generally operate for profit, do not support on-site borrowers, and are accessible in many ways, including online search services such as DIALORDER, bibliographic services such as OCLC and RLIN,..." (Hurd & Molyneux, 1986, p. 182). interlibrary loan (ILL) literally refers to the act of one library lending an item from its collection to another library in response to a request from the latter. Loaned items are then returned. Once photocopying became affordable, libraries began to send copies of requested articles instead of loaning the source periodical. Copies of articles are not returned. Thus, erroneously, we have for a long time continued to use the term "interlibrary loan" to refer to the request or supply of copies of periodical articles. Just in the last few years have we begun to see the use of the term "interlibrary loan and document delivery (ILL/DD)" which fully reflects the services rendered.

The explosion in the demand for ILL/DD service during much of this decade and the previous one has been well documented (e.g., Farr & Brown [1991]; ARL Annual Statistics). The resultant financial and organizational strains and the increasing awareness of the cost of the ILL process are all prompting the profession to reassess the current uses of ILL/DD services (Roche, 1993). Incorporation into the ILL/DD operation of recent developments in technology, such as e-mail and the World Wide Web (WWW), which allow patrons to present requests electronically, has portended questioning of the best application of library staff labor. Unmediated access (without the ILL/DD staff effort to identify and select a lending library for each request) goes a step further in programmatically choosing a lending library for the sought item. Where consortial arrangements have been made, patrons borrow (or check out) a book directly from an off-site library (e.g., ILLINET online or OhioLink libraries). If unmediated access is possible for books, why not for periodical articles?

Baker and Jackson (1993) envision a future when requests for mainstream periodical articles are directed programmatically to the most cost-effective supplier (p. 9). The library staff would specify or modify the criteria for this automatic redirection. The expectation is that the commercial document supplier may be a cost-effective alternative to libraries. The hope is that automatic routing of qualified requests to commercial suppliers might relieve the ILL/DD staff from the labor-intensive task of identifying libraries which have the wanted items, request by request, and then selecting those libraries which meet the guidelines developed by the ILL/DD units.

This study presents new data on the availability of periodical articles at five frequently used commercial document suppliers. The research is based on the premise that, before exploring the feasibility of developing software for the unmediated processing of article requests, we need to investigate whether commercial document suppliers can handle the range of article requests ILL/DD units routinely receive from sister libraries. Availability data become useful interpreted in terms of the characteristics of the article requests and of the periodicals in which the articles appear. Characteristics of article requests and of periodicals are therefore provided, along with characteristics of the libraries which requested the articles.

Since copies of articles are not returned, the term "request" instead of "borrow" is used in this article. This study focuses on requests submitted to the OCLC ILL PRISM service over a recent twelve-month period. With the exception of public libraries and those which support specialized programs, requests for articles comprise a sizable volume of the ILL/DD activity in many types of libraries. Equally important, what is generally referred to as the serial crisis is felt most with respect to periodicals. These factors led to the choice of article requests over requests for other types of library materials.

COMMERCIAL DOCUMENT SUPPLIERS

Recent literature has drawn attention to the role of commercial document suppliers. In their book Access versus Assets, Higginbotham and Bowdoin (1993) devote an entire chapter to cover in depth the nature, scope, and characteristics of commercial document suppliers. In the book Document Delivery Services: Issues and Answers, Mitchell and Walters (1995) likewise devote a chapter to discuss commercial document suppliers. A study by Arthur D. Little in 1979 noted that the volume of document delivery by commercial document suppliers was increasing at a higher rate than interlending among libraries (Miller & Tegler, 1988, p. 352). Special libraries routinely use commercial document suppliers. In a 1994 survey of its members, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) found that 87 percent of the respondents used commercial suppliers and 62 percent of respondents reported an increase in the use of document suppliers from the previous year (ARL, 1994). A slightly higher percentage of respondents projected a further increase in the following year. Even smaller community colleges are using commercial suppliers to either supplement or to completely replace libraries as suppliers, which is what the County College of Morris in New Jersey did (Kelsey & Davenport, 1993). Clearly the use of commercial document suppliers is on the rise (e.g., Leach & Tribble, 1993, p. 359).