For the sixth straight year, the number of requests Research Services received from Brooklyn College's faculty and students to borrow books or obtain copies of articles from other collections increased, up some 500 items over the previous year. (Research Services staff were able to fill 89% of all the requests they received.)
What explains the continuing rise in requests for materials from outside the Library's collections?
The ease of accessing other libraries' catalogs on the Web
At the same time, staff also received more requests from other libraries for loans of books or photocopies of articles from Brooklyn College's collections. Perhaps this increase is attributable to these same factors.
Sometimes the distinction between commercial document delivery and interlibrary is a misleading one: while commercial-supplied documents always come at a price, materials acquired via interlending from other libraries are not always gratis. For example, in 2001-2002, the Library spent $4,621 to purchase 193 copies of journal articles and 188 book loans for Brooklyn College readers–loans and copies which we were unable to obtain from other libraries free of charge. The previous year, only $3,378 was spent in this category: the rise is attributable to CUNY central's decreasing our budget for commercial document supply. That the increase in spending from our own resources was no greater is indicative of the diligence of the Research Services staff in finding a free or inexpensive alternative to commercial document delivery.
In January 2002, Brooklyn College enrolled in the METRO Hospital Library Services Program, supported by New York State with a regional award of more than $165,000. This means that each month we can send METRO the invoices we've received for health-related interlibrary loans, and the consortium will pay them. Since Health and Nutrition Sciences, Biology, and Chemistry are big users of interlibrary loan and many libraries charge for such loans, this will help decrease some of our expenditures.
Research Services' major clients included the departments of Biology, English, and Geology. Faculty formed the largest client group, followed by graduate then undergraduate students. The average waiting time for a requested item was 8.9 days. (By contrast, items obtained via commercial suppliers arrive almost instantaneously.) And, requests for journal articles continued to exceed those for books--further evidence that the hunger for journal material pervades all disciplines and had not been assuaged by our local e-journal collections.
For the first time in many years, we borrowed more items from other CUNY libraries than we lent to them (1,071 items lent vs. 1,729 items borrowed). Certainly, the lack of access to books and journals during the move also affected our ability to lend materials to other CUNY libraries.
