Stephen Abram points to a recently-released white paper on interlibrary loan, from ARL. You won’t find any actual numbers in this 4 (barely)-pager, but you will find some interesting trends. ILL for returnables (books) is generally up, according to statistics from several sources, but ILL for non-returnables is generally pretty far down. There are some possible reasons for these trends discussed.
I found it interesting that in the preamble the author made it sound that ILL is quite the restrictive service; I’ve always thought of it as an enhancing service…
“Research and academic libraries provide ILL services only to their own clearly defined user community. Since ILL services are costly to operate, libraries attempt to control the volume of lending requests that they handle. Research and academic libraries set up reciprocal arrangements with very specific and limited numbers of partner libraries. Fees are charged to libraries not in those consortial arrangements to set up a barrier for non-reciprocal sites and discourage use of interlibrary loan.”
What she writes is all true, it just sounds as though we’re really begrudging the service!