InterLibrary Loan Transaction Information
InterLibrary Loan can generate two types of files containing requested items from other libraries and institutions that includes useful data for collection assessment.
The information comes from the Interlibrary Loan in-house management system. The report for books contains the following six categories, Department, Title, Transactions per patron, Author, Imprint data, and date. The journal report contains the following information, Department, Serial Title, Transactions per patron, and ISSN.
Since these reports are written in Excel files, they can be manipulated and sorted in various ways i.e. department,
title, transactions (frequency of request) etc. Reports cannot be generated for each department rather a comprehensive
list is generated for all request made for the period requested.
Recommendations from ILL:
Upon request in advance the Interlibrary Loan Department can provide reports for a one-month period. These Excel
files will be stored in the Collection Management folder in the l drive. ILL recommends the best periods to generate
these files are, October, November, March, and May since these are peak months for ILL transactions. However, requests
for other months can be provided with advance notice.
Possible errors in reports:
It should be made clear, however, that the Department field is far from precise. When requesting material the patron mainly determines this information. For example, a graduate in the Graduate School of Education may declare their campus affiliation in any of the following manners: ED, EDU, EDUCATION, GSE, Grad. School of Education, Other, or leave it blank. Moreover since the implementation of the Patron Initiated Request (PIR), patrons are not required to declare their department affiliations.
While these reports can not give an accurate representation of interlibrary loan transactions by UCSB patrons, for reasons stated above, they nevertheless could help inform collection managers in their collection development.
Below is an example of an Interlibrary loan report for requested books.