Inter-Library Loan as an Unobtrusive Measure of Bibliographic Efficiency

One of the most important functions of technical services departments is to provide reference librarians and users with a catalog containing complete and accurate information on the materials held by the library. The enormous difficulties inherent in providing access points or entries and structuring bibliographic records that will fulfill this function have been amply demonstrated by catalog use studies which have shown that in known item searches between 3% and 34% of all catalog users are unsuccessful in finding items owned by the library and represented in the catalog. ¹ While reference librarians and other knowledgeable users of catalogs recognize the necessity of searching alternative entries for items not found by the initial search strategy, others experiencing failure on their first attempt are likely to conclude the library does not own the item. At the State University of New York at Albany (SUNYA) many of the requests submitted to Inter-Library Loan (ILL) are the result of such user failure. Although this fact had been documented for several years, no systematic attempt had been made to analyze the causes of these failures.