During the past weeks, we’ve all faced a wide variety of changes in our lives and jobs. For librarians, part of that challenge is serving students, teachers, faculty, and patrons who now have to work and study from home.
As a library cooperative, OCLC has leveraged dozens of partnerships with publishers to provide extended and, in many cases, free access to e-resources. We are working with our partners to organize and centralize this content and make it easily discoverable in library services.
Since 2016, when we first presented our list in Next, it’s become a highly anticipated announcement in the resource sharing community: What were the most requested titles on OCLC’s ILL systems?
This year has been no different, and I’ve had several colleagues ask me about when the list would be rolled out. So without further ado, I’m pleased to present the top 10 interlibrary loan requests made in 2019.
By Justin Parker, Subscriptions Manager, University of Manchester Library, and
Tim O’Neill, Electronic Resources Coordinator, University of Manchester Library
As Subscriptions Manager and Electronic Resources Coordinator at the University of Manchester, part of our jobs is to make sure the university gets the best deal on its e-resource investment. But what does “best deal” really mean? Does it mean the least expensive materials? Well, an inexpensive subscription isn’t a good deal if it isn’t used at all. And even free, open source content has a cost associated with the cataloging, discovery, and course management systems we use to make it available.
The challenge is to find better ways to assess the value our students, teachers, and researchers gain from the e-resources we provide. And the end result should be a better plan for accurately conveying the importance of library collections within the larger goals of the institution. But how do you get there? Having spent some time recently tracing the pathways of e-resource usage, we have a few suggestions.