PurposeThe purpose of this study is to identify and examine the factors that affected the scale of ILL photocopy requests between Japanese university libraries from 1994 to 2008.Design/methodology/approachBased on the newly developed conceptual framework to interpret the rise and fall in ILL, more than 10 million requests, sent through a nation‐wide system called NACSIS‐ILL from 1994 to 2008 were quantitatively analyzed.FindingsThe number of photocopy requests for articles in foreign journals started to decrease in 2000, due to the dramatic increase of e‐journal titles made accessible through “Big Deal” contracts that came into effect in 2002 as well as other similar trials prior to it. On the other hand, requests for articles in domestic journals, mostly written in Japanese, continued to increase until 2006. The main factor for this increase was the expansion of journal title coverage in bibliographic databases, which enabled users to retrieve more references. However, requests decreased in 2007, because of advances in digitization in the Japanese academic environment.Research limitations/implicationsThis research proposes a conceptual model to understand document demand and service patterns observed in nation‐wide ILL services. It also successfully draws a comprehensive picture of ILL in Japanese higher education institutions, based on more than 10 million request records over 15 years, and it shows how the number of ILL requests correlates with the availability of requested journals in electronic form.Originality/valueThis research proposes a conceptual model to understand document demand and service patterns observed in nation‐wide ILL services. It also successfully draws a comprehensive picture of ILL in Japanese higher education institutions, based on more than 10 million request records over 15 years, and it shows how the number of ILL requests correlates with the availability of requested journals in electronic form.
The Standing Committee for Research on Academic Libraries (SCREAL), in cooperation with 45 institutions in Japan, conducted a questionnaire survey from October to December 2011. As a result, 3,922 valid responses across various fields were collected. Following up this survey, we attempt here to clarify how usage and perception of e‐journals and scholarly articles among researchers and graduate students in Japan changed. The basic findings were as follows. 1) More than 90% of respondents in natural sciences, including pharmaceutical science, chemistry, biology, physics and medicine, reported that they used e‐journals at least once or twice a month. 2) E‐journals were not as heavily used in humanities and social sciences as in natural sciences, but the proportion of regular users turned out to be more than 4 times that of the 2001 survey. 3) This difference in e‐journals usage by discipline is strongly associated with the degree of dependence on domestic documents written in Japanese. The two groups of respondents, users of international documents and users of domestic documents, showed a statistically significant difference in answering the question concerning “Frequency of e‐journals use.” 4) Attitude to the necessity of printed version drastically transmuted. 62.3% of respondents in natural sciences and 53.6% in humanities and social sciences thought “printed journals are unnecessary when e‐journals are accessible.” 5) Use of digital devices for e‐books was not popular as yet, but the respondents expressed their high interest in the future use. Some preliminary discussion is made to identify the factors affecting the usage and/or perception of electronic resources by Japanese researchers.
We reconsider the architecture of the information collected from higher education institutions by the National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement of Higher Education (NIAD-QE) and analyze its character. NIAD-QE periodically collects educational information, evidence-based documents, and self-assessment reports to enhance the quality of higher education, which are in a broad sense used to support university reform. These data represent a collection of organizational information gathered by observing higher education institutions in which, to collect the facts about organizational members, the data are aggregated in tabulated form. However, we find that this is not as efficient a way of conveying the information content in a limited data size as the original individual data sets.
506vol.56 no.8 2013 J o u r n a l o f I n f o r m a t i o n P r o c e s s i n g a n d M a n a g e m e n t JOHO KANRI
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