International Interlibrary Loan Survey by American Library Association

The Reference & User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association, recently released the results of its fifth International Interlibrary Loan Survey.

"The survey was first undertaken in 2007 ... 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 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."

Questions included:

•  Does your library borrow internationally?
• What type of materials does your library borrow internationally?
• Which types of materials are hard to obtain from international collections?
• Charging local patrons for international ILL borrowing requests?
• What type of requests will your library supply internationally?
• Does your library fill more or fewer international interlibrary loan requests now than five years ago? What has the change been?
• Do copyright restrictions prevent your library from supplying non-returnables to international borrowers?
• Do licensing restrictions prevent your library from supplying non-returnables to international borrowers?
• etc.

There were 269 respondents. with 143 responses (53%) from North America.

On nearly every continent, a plurality of respondents worked in academic libraries. The exception was Australia and Oceania where more medical/health libraries responded than other library types (43% medical/health, 29% academic).