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

University Microfilms Incorporated

University Microfilms Incorporated began in 1938 as a resource for microform editions of rare books. Purchased by the Xerox Corporation in 1962 and subsequently by Bell & Howell in 1985, UMI expanded its collection to include serials (periodicals and newspapers), dissertations, and out-of-print books. UMI currently provides document delivery from nearly 25,000 periodicals in any subject field with particular strength in computer science, engineering, life sciences, medicine, business, education, humanities, and social sciences.

The Institute for Scientific Information

The Institute for Scientific Information was established in 1958 by Eugene Garfield who pioneered citation indexing for articles. The document supply service is an offshoot of its primary citation indexing service. The ISI collection covers 16,000 international journals, books, and proceedings in the sciences, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. ISI keeps recent periodicals (those published within the last five years) in-house for ready access. Older periodicals are housed off-site.

UnCover

UnCover is the database and document delivery service that has grown from the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (CARL). Begun in 1978 as an alliance of eastern Colorado academic libraries, it grew to encompass academic and public libraries, including those of the Colorado Western slope and Colorado State University. In 1993, CARL Systems joined with The Blackwell Group to form The UnCover Company, which was purchased subsequently by Knight-Ridder Information in 1995. The UnCover database includes over 16,000, mostly English-language, journal titles. Almost two-thirds of the titles pertain to science and technology.

Summary

Each supplier was contacted to obtain printed or electronic indexes to its periodical collection. The BLDSC sent us a CD-ROM copy of its serial collection; ISI and UMI provided their holdings information on diskettes. Indexes of CISTI and UnCover were searched via the WWW. All of the suppliers helped resolve ambiguous entries.

PERIODICAL ARTICLE REQUESTS

Approximately 8.5 million requests were processed through the OCLC PRISM ILL system between December 1994 and November 1995. OCLC samples 1 percent of ILL requests on a daily basis. From this 1 percent sample of ILL requests, 2,000 were randomly selected. The cataloging codes in fixed fields of matching bibliographic records in the OCLC World Catalog were used as filters to limit the sample to requests for articles from periodicals.

Figure 1 shows the distribution of the 2,000 ILL/DD requests by format. Requests for monographs, 47 percent, were removed. From the remaining 1,058 requests, monographic series and newspapers were eliminated. The technical definition of periodical includes annuals, semi-annuals, and irregular serials. In common usage, the term "periodical" usually refers to journals and magazines which are published at a regular interval several times a year. Because the serial crisis is most pronounced for "periodicals" as commonly used, requests which referred to annuals, semi-annuals, and irregularly published serials were further disqualified. The remaining 734 requests (approximately 37 percent of 2,000 ILL/DD requests) were for "periodical" articles.