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Borrow direct: impact of an innovative reader-initiated
borrowing mechanism on service quality
Danuta A. Nitecki and
Carol L. Jones
Abstract | Paper in
Portable Document Format (PDF) Presentation in Microsoft® PowerPoint®
format
Traditionally, interlibrary loan
(ILL) services have been valued for providing critical access to research
resources, but also have been considered expensive and slow to deliver. The
quality of ILL services has been gauged by customer perceptions as well as by
technical adherence to specifications for speed of response time, fill rate,
and transaction costs. Librarians at three large universities wanted to lessen
readers' inconvenience and reduce processing costs associated with gaining
access to materials not owned locally. They successfully developed a
reader-initiated borrowing model of interlibrary resource sharing, known as
Borrow Direct, that now operates among seven major academic libraries in the
United States. The underlying software allows the reader to perform a virtual
broadcast search of members' online catalogs and then, using item status
information from screen displays, directs a loan request to a library that has
a high likelihood of the item being on the shelf and available for circulation.
Automatic electronic notification to readers and elimination of some staff
processing has resulted in major service improvements as assessed by both
customers and managers.
The authors will share insights
gained from working at Yale University, one of the institutions instrumental in
the initial development of Borrow Direct. They will describe the history of the
initiative to reach technical goals of delivering loans within four days of
request submission and doing so for less than $10 per transaction. They also
will summarize results of a survey of the perceptions of faculty, students and
staff who use the service. |