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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 48| December 2000
Either a borrower, or a lender be
William Shakespeare may have penned the words neither a borrower, nor a lender be but Australias libraries have recently decided its time to take a long, hard look at loan services and the needs of borrowers.
Libraries from national, State, Territory, tertiary, special and public sectors are participating in the study designed to review the effectiveness of the current interlending system.
In October and November this year, staff from more than 100 libraries reviewed their interlibrary loan and document delivery (ILL/DD) services, covering performance measures such as turnaround time, direct costs and patron satisfaction.
The National Resource Sharing Working Group (NRSWG) is undertaking the ILL/DD Benchmarking Study with assistance from the National Library. The National Library established the NRSWG last year with support from the Australian Library Information Association (ALIA), the Council of Australian State Libraries (CASL) and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL)
This is the largest study of ILL/DD undertaken by Australian libraries and is based on the successful Association of Research Libraries (ARL) study, Measuring the Performance of Interlibrary Loan Operations, conducted by Mary Jackson with North American research libraries. Mary spoke about the results of the US Study when she spoke at the National Library in October last year.
Information gathered through the study will be a key tool for improving the ILL/DD performance of individual libraries and also the overall system in Australia.
The Chair of the NRSWG, Susan Magnay, reports that the high level of participation from Australian libraries is a testament to the commitment of library staff to their patrons and to improving services through co-operation.
The study is currently progressing well. Almost all data has been received from participating libraries with data input expected to be completed early next year (there will be around 25 000 pages of data to input and analyse). The Working Group will produce a report in the second half of 2001with the findings to be used to develop training and other strategies for improving the performance of ILL/DD operations in Australian libraries.
Information about the ILL/DD Benchmarking Study and the NRSWG is
available from the NLA web site at: www.nla.gov.au/initiatives/nrswg/
or you can contact Susan Magnay on (02) 9273 1557 or Kristen Ritchie, the
Study Coordinator, on (02) 6262 1522.
Kristen Ritchie
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National Resource Sharing Working
Group members and National Library staff. |
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au