Interlibrary Loans via Facsimile: Performance and Cost Analysis

摘要

The document is a study into the consequences of introducing fax in NLM's interlibrary loan (ILL) service. The study included a laboratory evaluation of the performance of both high-end advanced fax machines equipped with hard disks and conventional low-end machines. Mathematical modelling resulted in three families of tradeoff curves to enable both short-term and long-term decision making. The independent variable in all these curves is the fraction of ILL requests to be served via fax. The dependent variables are: the number of fax machines needed, first year costs and total 5-year costs. One conclusion is that it is more cost effective to use the advanced fax machines than the conventional machines, even though the latter are considerably cheaper individually.