A study of costs of the inter-library loan system at the Australian National University

Abstract

The ANU Inter-Library Loan Costs Study comprised two parts: 1. A detailed study which made use of a modified daily diary technique; 2. A gross costs study which made use of personnel files and existing statistics to establish overall costs. 1.A modified diary procedure required all staff who were involved in any way with ILL work to fill in a diary form every day for two months. During the first month all requests entering the system for the first time (i.e. requests initiated during that month), whether incoming or outgoing,, were numbered. The numbered requests constituted the sample of requests for this study. The number on each request and the work done on it were recorded on the diary sheet. The diary sheet was a record of times spent on various discrete tasks and in relation to a particular request. In the first month this information was recorded for all requests, both ongoing requests and those initiated during the month (the numbered requests which constitute the sample). In the second month diary sheets were filled in only in relation to the requests initiated during the first month (i.e. requests in the sample). The aim of this diary procedure was to collect two separate groups of data, a. data about how much time library staff involved in ILL work spent in various tasks over an entire month, i.e. a detailed picture of the workload of the ILL system, b. data about a large sample of ILL requests which would show what tasks were done on each request, by whom and when, thus allowing for a study of the variability in processing time and costs of ILL requests. The study succeeded in obtaining the first but not the second objective. The tail of the sample was lost and it was not possible to use the existing data to extrapolate this area. 2.The gross costs study is an independent and more reliable measure of annual costs. It does, however, rely on the diary study for estimates of time contributed by those outside the ILL Unit to the ILL system. Its estimates of costs per transaction are not independent, as a gross costs study cannot examine cost per unit time. It relies on the diary study for its cost ratios. The results obtained by the two separate studies are similar. Show more