2012-13 Summary of Resource Sharing Statistics
In July of each year, I collate and summarize the resource sharing statistics from the IAMSLIC Distributed Library project. 2012/13 represents the eleventh complete year of the resource sharing program. A total of 4322 requests were submitted during 2012/13, an overall decrease of 17% from the previous year. A total of 43,023 requests have been submitted via the system since its inception in 2002.
The resource sharing program continues to be broadly international in scope, with 75 different IAMSLIC lending libraries in 26 countries receiving borrowing requests from 124 IAMSLIC libraries in 45 countries, similar to previous years’ numbers. 33 (44%) of those 75 lending libraries are in the United States and they received 68.2% of the total requests, the highest percentage since 2004/05. Libraries in Germany, Australia, Mexico, Canada, India, Argentina, the Philippines, Belgium and Colombia collectively received 27.9% of the borrowing requests.
The Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University (U.S.) regained its status as the top lending library this year, followed by Hatfield Marine Science Center of Oregon State University (U.S.), the Alfred Wegener Institut in Bremerhaven (Germany), the Pell Marine Science Library at the University of Rhode Island (U.S.), and the University of Hawaii (U.S.).
Overall activity across the Regional Groups is more balanced than in recent years, although EURASLIC and SAIL still conduct much of their regional interlibrary loan activity via their discussion lists, so the number of transactions via the Distributed Library does not reflect the full volume of resource sharing in those regions. 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. Of particular note is the increase in activity in the Pacific region where members from 6 countries constituted 20.3% of all borrowing, while members from 3 of those countries contributed 8% of overall lending. (Note that these numbers include India and Malaysia which are not part of the formal geographic boundaries of the Pacific Islands Regional Group).
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 2012/13 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
