The role and characteristics of interlibrary loaning as a part of document and copy delivery services of National Technical Library, Hungary. Analysis of the 1985 data

Abstract

Within interlibrary loaning the document copy delivery service increases with respect to primary document loaning (in NTL, 9470 copies were delivered as compared to 2224 documents loaned in 1985). As for copy delivery, the "interlibrary" character has been diminished (in NTL, more than 40 000 document copies were ordered in 1985 of which less than a quarter was interlibrary loaning). The interest of library services requires to report also document copy deliveries above interlibrary loaning because they reflect indirectly the library's services to users. The data of interlibrary loaning of NTL show that it fulfits its functions as a national scientific and technical library. The ratio of public and special libraries doing interlibrary loaning is 30 to 70 per cent, the ratio of loaning to country and Budapest libraries is 20 to 80 per cent, and the ratio of Hungarian and foreign documents loaned is 25 to 75 per cent. The fulfilment of requests is also high, 83 per cent, though its timeliness is low (59 per cent of requests fulfilled within 20 days, 92 per cent within 25 days), due to inadequate technical equipment and human performance. The study reveals that aging of technical and scientific literature is not as fast as belived. A quarter of loan requests asks for documents older than 15 years, a fifth of them asks documents published between 1971 and 1977. For Hungarian documents. the respective figures of loaning requests are: one third for literature older than 15 years, one quarter for that published between 1971 and 1977.