Monitoring of Information Queries of Remote Users of Inter-Library Loan and Electronic Document Delivery on the Basis of the Central Scientific Agricultural Library
The purpose of the research was to study the specifics, quickness, and completeness of information librarian service of agribusiness scientists and employees and other users of the Central Scientific Agricultural Library (CSAL) on the basis of the interlibrary loan (ILL) system and electronic document deliver (EDD). The tasks were set: to identify the main categories of ILL and EDD users and to study their information requirements; to analyze the dynamics of their retrievals in the information resources of the library and to estimate the degree of granting requests and service terms. The research involved monitoring of 48808 requests from remote ILL and EDD users submitted to the CSAL in 2002-2016. Data collection was automated using the CSAL Integrated Database. Tables were drawn up by using software applications in programming languages C and Refal. The main categories of ILL and EDD users were identified: common subscribers (90.9%) and individual users (9.1%). Among common users there are NRU libraries (49.3%), university libraries (21.4%) and public libraries (15.4%). The most number of requests for 2002-2016 was submitted from the NRU libraries (65.4%). There was observed an increase in EDD orders from 28% (2002) to 88.0% (2016). Sixty percent of requests were handled for 3 h to 3 days. The most number of submitted requests included plant growing and veterinary science (13.3%), general issues of economics (11.4%), animal breeding (10.2%). Domestic literature is in the maximum demand (71%), the demand for domestic books (50.7%) far exceeds the demand for foreign books (3.1%), for journals the difference in demand is not so great - 20.2% (domestic journals) and 17.2% (foreign journals). It was found that 83.1% of requests were granted, suggesting that the CSAL collection meets the information requirements of users.