Report from the Field: Researching Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Usage by Health Sciences Libraries during the COVID-19 Pandemic

摘要

During the spring of 2020, a number of health sciences librarypersonnel who continued to provide Interlibrary Loan (ILL)/Document Delivery (DD) during the COVID-19 (COVID) pandemicanecdotally noticed an increase in the volume ofrequests. These were presumed to be from peer libraries thatwere unable to access their print collections, and few seemedspecific to COVID-information needs. This raised the question,“What are libraries doing about providing requested materialsin this resource sharing environment, especially when requestscannot be filled through ILL/DD?” This report introduces amulti-institutional research effort by health sciences library staffthat is being planned to understand the demand for, andefforts to supply, content from library print and online collections,as well as third-party providers, during COVID. The purposeof this report is to describe the research-in-progress andencourage additional research into maintaining access to informationduring extraordinary conditions. The expectation is thatthe results of such research efforts may provide insight onhow libraries can adapt their ILL/DD services and workflowsduring emergencies to license and share resources even moreeffectively in the future.