Why Requests Fail: : Interlibrary Lending and Document Supply Request Failures in the UK and Ireland. A report to the Circle of Officers of National and Regional Library Systems

Citation

Line, M.B. (1998), "Why Requests Fail: : Interlibrary Lending and Document Supply Request Failures in the UK and Ireland. A report to the Circle of Officers of National and Regional Library Systems", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 54-55. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.1998.26.1.54.1

“In the ten years to 1995 the number of interlibrary loans made in the UK and Ireland grew by almost 17 per cent, and in the same ten years unsatisfied requests rose by almost 25 per cent. In 1995/96 over 91,000 requests were unsatisfied. Failed requests are costing members of the Regional Library Systems considerably in excess of £500,000 a year.” Such is the dramatic beginning of the Executive Summary of this report, in a section labelled “Background”. But the true background is that some 4 million remote document requests (a better term than interlibrary loan or document supply) are made by British and Irish libraries together each year; that (as the report points out) these represent only 0.12 per cent of public library loans and 2.3 per cent of academic library loans; and that therefore these 91,000 “failures” represent at the most a mere 0.001 per cent of all loans.

Also, “failure” is to a very large extent a function of the perceived performance of the supply system; a bad system will attract few requests, and even fewer “difficult” requests, so that it may achieve a high “success” rate. It appears that the British system inspires a great deal of confidence, so that “failures” are bound to occur. If it improved further, confidence would presumably increase further, and while the number of requests would grow the proportion of failures would not decline. This is in fact what has happened over the last 20 years: the British Library’s document supply collection became ever more extensive, demand grew (for a variety of reasons), but the percentage of “failures” hardly changed. At the same time, as local libraries become less and less self‐sufficient, one would expect there to be an increase in the proportion of requests represented by items that are relatively common and therefore likely to be in demand by a number of libraries at the same time; this would also tend to lead to “failure”.

Not only do remote document request failures need to be seen in a national context; the international context also needs to be taken into account. Ideally we should be given comparative figures for other developed countries, the figures to include not only failures but total number of requests per head of population. I would expect the UK to show up very well in both respects in comparison with almost any other country, though the Dutch system Pica would run it close. Unfortunately, few countries have good figures (one exception is in fact The Netherlands).

Further, “failures” are defined in the report to include requests that are abandoned, for whatever reason ‐ not only because they are too late for the user.

None of the above is intended to dismiss “failures” as unimportant ‐ some may be very important to the requester; but they have to be seen in context, and figures have to be carefully interpreted. Fiction failures are high; but are they as “important” as articles from scientific journals, which have a very high success rate? How much effort is it worth putting into improving the supply of fiction?

The question of cost is not dealt with at all thoroughly in the report. Unless I missed it, there is no explanation of how the estimated cost of £500,000 to members of the Regional Library Systems (why only them?) was arrived at. There is also no attempt to compare the cost of improvement with the cost of failure (which is incidentally only about 2 per cent of the total cost of document requesting and supply), though this does not matter much because the cost of implementing most of the recommendations is low.

Within its limitations, the report is a good one ‐ certainly the best attempt that has been made to identify reasons for “failure”. The research has been thoroughly done, and the findings are probably not far from the reality. There are no real surprises: the main causes of “failure” are poor bibliographic information, lack of locations, incorrect location data, and item already in use or unloanable. Delay in supply is a major reason for cancellation. Serials have a far higher success rate than monographs, conference proceedings and reports. Unfortunately, no distinction is made between British and foreign monographs or between English‐language and foreign‐language monographs; the success rates are very different.

I found some of the detailed tables rather confusing; several could have been more clearly presented in graphic form. A Pareto chart putting causes of “failure” in order of frequency of occurrence would have been particularly useful.

The most important part of the report is the section of recommendations. Some of these would certainly help to improve performance: the automation of unautomated catalogues, the acceptance by libraries of responsibility for deleting from union lists material they no longer possess and also for lending material they do possess if they possibly can, and the general use of relevant technical standards. The first is the most expensive to implement, but it needs doing for other reasons, and it will almost certainly get done eventually, but not quickly. Other recommendations would have less impact, but would also cost little to implement. I am doubtful of the usefulness of national co‐ordination of acquisition, though not of retention. However, too much should not be expected of implementation. Few of the measures suggested would make more than a small difference to “failures”, for two reasons: the contribution each would make is small, and as noted above an improved system would lead to increased demand, including demand for material that is currently hard to get.

Two reasons for the cancellation of requests are the cost and delay involved in obtaining items from abroad when they are not in the UK or Ireland. It is largely these factors that underlie attempts at national self‐sufficiency, a goal that the report seems to accept implicitly as a necessary one. But not only is national self‐sufficiency as impossible as local self‐sufficiency: it is becoming unnecessary as access across national boundaries improves, slowly but dramatically. With the increasing use of telefacsimile and electronic transmission, for serial articles there should soon be no difference in speed between national and international supply, and perhaps little in cost, and it is already as quick to obtain some books from the USA via OCLC as from UK libraries. I would add another major recommendation to those in the report: to do everything possible to further the measures already being taken to improve international access. This would do more in the long run than any of the measures proposed, worthy though they are.