Goal 3: Lending Services

Support teaching, learning and research by making course and research materials readily available for undergraduate and postgraduate students and staff.

Provision of loans services from any branch of the Library

Borrowing from the collection

Loans of print materials from the Library’s collections declined marginally in 2006; down by 4,380 or 0.4% overall. This represents a slowing since 2005, when the decline was 5.7%. Notably there were significant increases at the Hargrave-Andrew and the Sir Louis Matheson Libraries. The completion of refurbishment at Hargrave-Andrew early in the year may account for some of the increase, as students returned to this library. Building works at Parkville, causing disruption in the library, contributed to the large decline at that campus. Changes in access and loan periods for reserve material were deliberately made to reduce loan traffic during the duration of the works at the Pharmacy Library.

Items borrowed and then renewed declined by 7,809 or 1.2%, with variation across branch libraries.

Self charge terminals are now installed in five of the eight branch libraries, meeting student preferences for self help options, reducing queues and reducing manual handling for loans staff. The Hargrave-Andrew Library Open Reserve Collection self charge terminal provides users with full self service access to printed reserve material in that branch.

Borrowing from collections at other campuses

The procedures to request items from the collection regardless of their branch location using the library catalogue, which were introduced in 2005, continued to be popular in 2006, with 148,944 items (127,727 in 2005) sent to another branch library. Of these 96,560 were charged to the Library user’s record. This represents an increase of 3.8%, or 18,590 items actually charged to a user. Part of this increase can be attributed to the trial of the SMS messaging service which notified Library users that their holds were available for collection. This service will continue in 2007. Overall, the number of online hold requests placed increased by 18.91% (38,014 items) and the number of those that were borrowed increased by 4.25% (32,393 items) in 2006.

This is a popular service that involves increased workloads for staff. In 2007 options for reducing workload while still providing access to materials from other campuses will be considered.

Provision of access to reserve collections and electronic reading lists

In 2006 47,630 items were lent from the hard copy reserve collections compared with 48,814 in 2005, representing a 2.5% decrease in loans. Loans from hard copy library reserve collections decrease as electronic access options increase and more reserve collections are moved to open access. The Hargrave-Andrew Library offered open access to their reserve collection for the first time in 2006, allowing browsing without borrowing, joining the Sir Louis Matheson Library in offering this service.

Demand for electronic reading lists remains strong. In 2002 the service commenced with reading lists for 290 units, increased to 1,055 units in 2005 and remained steady in 2006 with 1,052 units. There were significant increases in workload in 2006 developing cross campus access to these lists. The number of lists has the potential to increase and to include a service offer for international campuses.

A project has been established to develop a service model, related policies and practices, and make recommendations on technology improvements to manage current and potential demand for this service.

Provision of access to other libraries’ collections

The Co-operative Action by Victorian Academic Libraries (CAVAL) Reciprocal Borrowing Program saw staff and students from Monash University borrow 26,883 items from 28 other Victorian academic libraries. Monash University Library lent 44,712 items to staff and students from the same libraries.

Monash University Library, as a member of the University Library Australia national borrowing scheme, enables Monash staff and students to borrow from all other university libraries in the country. Monash loaned 2,418 items to students who had registered through this reciprocal borrowing arrangement.

Obtaining materials from other libraries for postgraduate students and staff

The implementation of a new automated inter-library loan and document delivery module (Clio) was completed in 2006. Users made 27,778 requests via the library catalogue in 2006 and the system was working reliably by mid-year, after initial start-up problems were dealt with.

The Document Delivery Service was reviewed by the newly appointed Document Delivery Librarian to evaluate work practices and performance in relation to the International Federation of Library Associations [IFLA] Guidelines for Best Practice in Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery. Several changes were made to internal processing and workflows. Two key indicators of the quality of the service are:

• the turnaround time from the day a request is placed to the day an item is received by the requestor
• the fill rate, the percentage of requested items that are actually supplied to the requestor.

As noted in 2005, increased support to build library research collections naturally reduces the need to acquire material from other libraries. At the same time, research is increasing at Monash University and the demand remains significant. There may be a trend to a larger percentage of ‘difficult’ requests as the more readily available items are held by Monash University and other Australian library collections. In 2006, staffing for the area was decreased in proportion to decreasing demand.

* It is likely that some requests received in 2005 were counted as processed in 2006. Other requests may have been received on paper forms because of issues in implementation of the new inter-library loan and document delivery module.