Putting a Price on Sharing: Fresh Cost Data as an Essential Ingredient of Evaluating Interlibrary Loan Services

Gaffney, Megan; Massie, Dennis

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121589 Copy

Description

Title

Putting a Price on Sharing: Fresh Cost Data as an Essential Ingredient of Evaluating Interlibrary Loan Services

Author(s)

• Gaffney, Megan
• Massie, Dennis

Issue Date

2022

Keyword(s)

• Interlibrary load
• library service
• sharing service

Abstract

In an age when information is abundantly available online, libraries must continuously demonstrate relevance both to users and to funders. Libraries can do this by showing that essential services are being provided to users efficiently, and at a reasonable cost. This paper examines challenges that library administrators face in evaluating collection sharing services, due to the scarcity of detailed cost information and a lack of current benchmarks against which to measure their own library’s data. The authors have been involved with a multiyear project to create the OCLC Interlibrary Loan Cost Calculator, a free internet-based tool that acts as a virtual real-time collection sharing cost study. Designed in collaboration with experts from the resource sharing community and built by OCLC Research, the calculator has the potential to fill in the knowledge gaps regarding current collection sharing costs, allowing for more comprehensive evaluations of this core library service

Publisher

Johns Hopkins University Press and the Illinois School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Series/Report Name or Number

Library Trends 70 (3). Winter 2022

ISSN

0024-2594

Type of Resource

text

Language

eng

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2022.0002

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Owning Collections