Evaluation of the interlibrary loan services in Iran: a case study of the AMIN service

Abstract

Purpose -this article aims to evaluate the use and the costs of AMIN the interlibrary loan service in Iran.Design/methodology/approach -A questionnaire was used for the data collection which was completed by those librarians in charge of AMIN in the academic libraries. Findings -The statistics collected from six libraries showed that 514 items were loaned, of which 49% were journal articles and 43% were books. Post was used for the delivery of about 55% of the items, while email was only used for the delivery of only 7% of the items. The average time spent for dealing with each request (the time lapse between reception of the request and dispatching the item) was about 7.1 days. The library of the University of Tehran was the most effective library in this regard as it only took 3.4 days on average for each request. The study revealed that the participating libraries did not have a proper procedure in place for collecting usage statistics and therefore one cannot evaluate the effectiveness of the AMIN service.Originality/value -The paper reveals the cost of document supply in Iranian academic libraries and illustrates that the ILL services in Iran are not efficient and measures could be taken to reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of the services.

Collaboration and document exchange among librarians in virtual communities: A case study of LIS Group

“…A comparison of current study on LIS Group and a survey on the Iranian national ILL service, AMIN, as described in Jamali et al (2010) may result in a better understanding of differences in formal and informal interlibrary services in developing countries. AMIN in its best year (2008) delivered 288 documents while 662 items were provided by LIS Group members in 2016.…”

“…Jamali et al (2010) studied the transactions of the Iranian national ILL service, AMIN. A questionnaire was distributed among the academic librarians of Tehran universities in order to gather data about ILL records.…”

“…Such issues are more serious in developing countries and therefore, one can expect less effective collaborative librarianship in those countries. As an example, libraries in Iran have always faced serious shortcomings in performing interlibrary services in local (Biranvand et al, 2015), national (Jamali et al, 2010) and international (Najafqolinejad and Shekari, 2015) levels. International cooperation of Iranian libraries is limited to general agreements between the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI) and the equivalent libraries in Islamic or neighboring countries.…”

“…With the exception of a rich nation-wide consortium of academic libraries known as CONSIRAN (Emrani et al, 2010), formal library collaborations have remained under-developed in Iran. International ILL services are rare and a few attempts for establishing official ILL services resulted in ineffective projects (Jamali et al, 2010). Structural and cultural barriers are known as the main issues for the development of interlibrary cooperative programs in Iran (Alidousti et al, 2008).…”

“…In particular, it is important to study in detail how informal networks such as email groups facilitate knowledge sharing, document exchange and other forms of interlibrary collaborations in developing countries. Formal agreements for interlibrary collaboration among Iranian libraries have failed in the past (Biranvand et al, 2015; Jamali et al, 2010) and in return, the Iranian community of library and information professionals has moved towards online networks such as LIS Group in order to overcome their professional shortcomings. However, it is unclear how, to what extent and in which areas email-based networks are used by the community to fulfil their day to day needs.…”