Now Available: Executive Report of STARS International Interlibrary Loan Survey

From the Introduction to the Executive Report:

The quadrennial international interlibrary loan survey is one of the fundamental, core charges of the American Library Association (ALA) Reference & User Services Association (RUSA) Sharing and Transforming Access to Resources Section (STARS) International ILL Committee. The survey was first undertaken in 2007, with the current (2023) survey being the fifth iteration. The 2023 survey was distributed globally in collaboration with the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Document Delivery and Resource Sharing Section (DDRS), and was the first survey to be made available in all seven official IFLA languages (i.e., Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish).

The 2023 survey instrument utilized the Qualtrics platform and was built upon the 2019 and 2015 instruments, with the majority of questions from those prior surveys retained in order to facilitate longitudinal comparison. The committee began their work on the 2023 survey in earnest in the summer of 2022. They refined the text of specific questions to make them as 2 clear and accurate as possible and reached out to language experts to provide the most understandable translated versions. The committee also discussed which questions should be withdrawn from the instrument and what new ones should be added.

Suggestions made in the 2019 survey executive summary for modifications and additions to the survey were incorporated into the 2023 survey. Questions which had not yielded actionable data were removed, and new questions aimed at gleaning information regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on libraries’ international interlibrary loan operations were added.

The survey was distributed via listservs, library contact information gleaned from the International ILL Toolkit, and social media to institutions in over 85 countries. The survey was open for twelve weeks from June 14, 2023 to September 10, 2023.

Direct to Full Text Report
32 pages; PDF.

See Also: RUSA STARS International ILL Toolkit

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