Resource Sharing Research: What We Learned from Analyzing and Reporting on North American Health Sciences Libraries' ILL/DD during the COVID-19 Pandemic
by Kristine Alpi (Associate Dean of Libraries & Information Sciences at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai)
Multi-institutional comparative studies reporting on interlibrary loan and document delivery (ILL/DD) are uncommon. During the early COVID pandemic, health sciences libraries (HSLs) had many questions about ILL/DD impacts. The research team from hospitals, private and public universities and study plan were previously reported. Findings from the survey of the HSL community informed the subsequent studies which analyzed data from a subset of HSLs using the National Library of Medicine DOCLINE resource sharing system and a smaller subset providing primary data from the ILLiad resource sharing system. This provided insights on monographs and document delivery, as well as changes in reporting reasons.
These open access studies provide methodological examples and baseline data for future research. The objective of this talk is two-fold: to share results and analysis from these studies, and introduce components available for research re-use such as survey questions, permission forms, and reporting instructions.
Presented at the 2024 Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference on September 18-20 2024.