Challenges Facing High-volume Interlibrary Loan Operations: Baseline Data and Trends in the CIC Consortium

Interlibrary loan managers of a consortial group of large academic libraries presented a comprehensive report of their collective activities to their library directors to provide a better picture of their libraries’ resource-sharing activities, issues, and trends. The report covered three years of data and addressed trends in overall volume, turnaround time, serials-holding data in OCLC, lending audiovisual materials, reasons for unfilled lending requests, and resource-sharing aspects of electronic licensing. The study documents the importance of technical service’s role in maintaining accurate OCLC holdings and in facilitating union listing, two activities that have a tremendous impact on ILL effectiveness and efficiency. It also demonstrates that presenting common issues collectively to top administrators resulted in changes that might not have been achieved so easily at single institutions. This paper summarizes the report on consortial resource sharing, lists the report’s four recommendations, and reviews the positive changes in the participating libraries’ resource-sharing practices six months later.