Library of Congress has record year for interlibrary loans

Citation

(1999), "Library of Congress has record year for interlibrary loans", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 27 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.1999.12227bab.008

Library of Congress has record year for interlibrary loans

Library of Congress has record year for interlibrary loans

Keywords Interlending, Document supply, Libraries

For the second year in a row, the Library of Congress' Loan Division responded to more domestic loan requests than ever before, answering a total of 53,045 requests. Library of Congress (LC) provides this service as a last resort for US libraries. In addition, the division responded to 1,891 requests from 13 foreign libraries requesting under a limited borrowing arrangement.

Thanks to a new statistical programme LC also know what kinds of libraries are requesting their material. Of the requests, 57 per cent came from academic libraries and over 20 per cent came from public libraries across America. The remainder came from government and special libraries, largely in the Washington area. The impression is that the service to public library clients is growing, perhaps stimulated by public awareness of LC's collections through their Web catalogue.

More than 90 per cent of incoming interlibrary loan requests came via OCLC (72 per cent) and RLIN (20 per cent). It is more efficient to manage requests coming through these bibliographic networks' interlibrary loan systems, so everything possible is done to encourage libraries to use them. It is hoped that within a few years it will be possible for local library systems to receive and manage incoming network requests automatically.

Late last year LC announced it was purchasing Endeavor Information Systems' Voyager integrated library system (ILS) software. The new LC ILS is scheduled to be fully operational by 1 October 1999. Once the ILS is running smoothly, it is hoped to have processes in place that would allow the LC system to accept protocol-compliant OCLC and RLIN requests, attempt to match them to bibliographic records, and, where successful, automatically send a stack request for the items.

Source: Press release