[ILL-L] Unfilled request numbers

[Campbell, Heather]

I know someone will correct me if there's been a recent change.  I was
told by someone at OCLC last year that deflected items show up as
unfilled.  That seems unfair to me.  If you have stated in your policy
statement that you don't loan certain items or formats and borrowing
libraries choose not to read your policy and request deflected items, I
don't think your institution should be penalized for not filling the
requests. I don't want to get into the old "we don't have time to read
policies" brouhaha. I just wish deflected items showed up differently in
OCLC reports. It's like OCLC is saying- here's this great deflection
feature but -beware- the stats we provide will make it look like you're
ignoring instead of deflecting them.

Heather Campbell
Manager- Special Services (Interlibrary Loan and Books by Mail)
303 North Laura Street
Jacksonville, FL 32202-3505 ill at coj.net  (904) 630-2986


-----Original Message-----
From: ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:ill-l-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Shuping
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 11:04 AM
To: Interlibrary Loan Listserv
Subject: [ILL-L] Unfilled request numbers


Hi all,

I'm looking for some information and wondering what everyone else does
regarding unfilled lending requests (requests that we aren't filling
as lenders).  Our numbers always seem really high for unfilleds.  For
example for July we had 202 requests, but we only filled 112 of them.
It's been about 30%-40% unfilled for the last few months.

Some of this stems from collections we don't lend but are loaded into
OCLC.  For example we have Special Collection records uploaded and
Media Center items, none of which we lend.  We also have 3 Center
libraries that are cataloged under our symbol, but we don't lend from
any of those collections.  We keep adding material to these
collections and all of them are uploaded to OCLC.  I can easily
auto-deflect the media items, but it still counts toward unfilleds.

I dislike having that many unfilled requests because I know it costs
staff time to find libraries that own the item, only to have them not
be able to fill it.  So I'm looking for some advice.  Are my numbers
normal?  How do you handle collections that you can't lend?  Do you
put them on OCLC?  Do you catalog them under a separate symbol on
OCLC?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!


-- 
Andrew Shuping

Robert Frost - "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned
about life: it goes on."


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