Content Access via Resource Sharing Early in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Findings from Nine Health Science Libraries Dataset
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Dataset
Date
2025-07-11
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Health Science Libraries
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DOI
https://doi.org/10.34944/8qrj-bd24
Abstract
Objective
COVID-19 challenged libraries and information exchange globally, including interlibrary loan (ILL) networks. This research focused on resource-sharing by Health Sciences Libraries (HSL) before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors aimed to identify any changes in ILL lending, ILL borrowing, and Document Delivery (DD) processing and processes that may have been impacted by the pandemic.
Methods
This study utilizes ILLiad resource sharing software borrowing, lending and document delivery data reports provided by nine HSL. The authors compared institutional-level data on ILL and DD from academic and association HSL from two time periods: March-August 2019 and March-August 2020. Journal article request data from DOCLINE was also analyzed over the two time periods.
Results
Regarding the number of requests from the nine institutions, five saw a decrease, while four saw an increase. The average rate of journal borrowing decreased by 67.1% (standard deviation (SD) 31.7%) per library, and lending decreased on average by 44.7% (SD 68.2%) per library. Document delivery, on average, decreased by only 1.9%, though this varied widely (SD 45.5%). The percentage change in monograph lending from 2019 and 2020 for individual libraries ranged widely from a 98.3% decrease to an increase of 100%. For monographs loaned across the study timeframe (2019 and 2020), there was a predominance of single request titles unfilled (n = 1631; 93.5%).
Conclusion
The study compared the journal article request data across nine libraries and found that ILL and DD requests volumes varied, although each library experienced a decrease in journal article borrowing, lending, and document delivery in 2020 compared to 2019. The predominance of single request titles unfilled during the pandemic when libraries limited their sharing of physical materials argues for a deeper exploration of controlled digital lending of materials held in print. The findings across this study and its related investigations (Lloyd et al., 2022; Bakker et al., 2023) on the impact of the pandemic on resource sharing can inform and enhance preparedness planning, future resource sharing workflows and messaging, budgeting, evidence-based collection development, and dialog with content copyright holders about digitization priorities.
Description
This is de-identified ILL or DD data consisting of publication source title and publication year from requests for journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and all other types of materials covering the early pandemic period (March-August 2020) and the comparison period of March-August 2019.
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Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC