February 7, 2002-Vol33n16: Q&A

VOLUME 33, NUMBER 16

THURSDAY, February 7, 2002


	ORTNER

Jill Ortner is interlibrary loan coordinator for the Arts and Sciences Libraries.

What is the interlibrary loan program?
The Interlibrary Loan Service provides photocopies of articles/chapters/proceedings papers and loans of books, microforms and A-V materials not held by any of the University Libraries in any format. The service is available for all members of the UB community with an active UB Libraries account. We also provide photocopies and lend books from the UB Libraries to other libraries all over the world.

Does each library at UB have its own interlibrary loan program?
There are three interlibrary loan departments serving the UB community. The Arts and Sciences interlibrary loan serves members of the Arts and Sciences schools; the Information Delivery Service at the Health Sciences Library serves members of the schools of Dental Medicine, Health Related Professions, Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Nursing, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Roswell Park Cancer Institute graduate programs. The Law School community is served by the interlibrary loan department in the Law Library.

How many requests do you get each year?
We receive approximately 17,000 requests from the university community in the Arts and Sciences Libraries interlibrary loan service. We usually fill about 12,000-13,000 of the requests.

Are the primary users of the program faculty researchers?
Although it appears that the primary users of the service are master's and Ph.D. students, we fill many requests for faculty researchers. We also assume that many requests placed by students are requested by student assistants for faculty researchers.

What's the weirdest request you've received?
I'm not sure if it would be categorized as "weird," but one of the more memorable requests was for about 10 years worth of newspapers published in Germany during the Weimar Republic period between World War I and World War II. The lending library sent us several large boxes of the original newspapers, which we had to store and keep track of while the researcher claimed several months of issues to read at a time. Fortunately, despite the papers' age, they were in pretty good condition so we didn't have to worry about returning boxes of crumbled papers when the researcher finished with them. It is unusual to receive original print editions of newspapers and periodicals—usually the materials have been microfilmed and the library lends us the reels.

Has the Internet and the availability of online resources changed your work?
Yes, but perhaps not in the way that you might expect. Although many periodicals' contents are available in full-text online, they are, in many cases, an alternate format for materials that we have in print. Therefore, we have not seen a reduction in the number of requests for materials because they are available online. However, because it is possible to search more index databases more easily and faster, and because it is easy to see the tables of contents of individual journals in many of the index databases, researchers are more aware of articles and papers that have been published. When they find references to information related to their research that is not in our libraries, they submit requests for interlibrary loan. It is not unusual for us to receive 20 requests at a time from the same patron, and often they are all from the same journal volume.

What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?
Although we make every effort to obtain the information that UB researchers and students need, we sometimes have to return requests "unfilled" because the material does not circulate. Examples of materials that often are unavailable through interlibrary loan are dissertations, video/audio cassettes, rare and fragile books published pre-20th century, and entire issues of periodicals.