The Decline of the Number of Interlibrary Loans by Medical Students in a Small Academic Medical Library: A Study of 18 Years of Data

Abstract

The objective of this study is to provide data on one academic medical library's experience with first and second year medical students' use of interlibrary loan at the Indiana University School of Medicine-Northwest, Steven C. Beering Medical Library. The results of a study of 18 years of data show a substantial decline of interlibrary loans by medical students. Several factors, including the unique problem-based learning curriculum and the availability of online journals, which has expanded a small medical library's collection, may be responsible for the reduction of interlibrary loan. This study suggests the need for collection development librarians to understand their medical school curriculum and to invest in the most useful electronic journals for their medical students' education needs.

Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature: 67

“…Only recently has the volume plateau-ed in the US with much individual variation. A brief article (Barrett, 2008) describes the experience of a medical school in Indiana; requests declined from nearly 1,000 in 1990 to zero in 2005. two reasons are ascribed -first the move to "a problem based learning curriculum (which) required the medical students to retrieve information in a timely fashion and that students could not wait the 7 to 10 days that the average interlibrary loan took to fill". Second, "The availability of thousands of online journals .…”

Expanding services in a shrinking economy: desktop document delivery in a dental school library

“…In the United States, while some authors report decreases in ILL due to factors such as increased access to electronic journals [3][4][5][6], others have seen a slight decrease followed by a large increase in requests or have simply remained on a trajectory of increased requests for ILL services. The increases are attributed to cancellation of ''big deal'' packages [6], new programs added to curricula [5,7,8], materials budget cuts [9,10], addition of document delivery service for library-owned materials [1,11,12], increased marketing for ILL services by the library [1,13,14], or discontinuation of fees for document delivery service [7].…”