State of interlending and document delivery among Ghanaian state funded universities

Abstract

The state funded universities in Ghana participate in informal interlending. A questionnaire survey of Head Librarians of Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery (ILL/DD) Units was used to ascertain performance levels of the ILL/DD services. It was found that informal interlending was active. These ILL/DD services however operated far below their potentials. There was no fully fledged interlending unit in all the respondent libraries. These services were run as supplements of other library service units, sharing staff time, attention and other resources. The services therefore suffered from low fill rate, high turnaround time, untimely delivery of documents and consequently, low volume of transactions. Tools needed to effectively run the services: union lists or automated catalogues of the various libraries and codes to guide transactions were nonexistent. ILL/DD transactions were limited to the lending of journals and the delivery of photocopies of documents. No books were ordered or loaned during the survey period. Despite this state of affairs, interlending staff were very positive that the services satisfied an important niche of the information needs of their clientele. This is the silver lining. It is suggested that the University Librarians of these libraries endeavour to formalize the ILL/DD services, build codes to guide transactions and create full fledged ILL/DD units to better serve the information needs of their users.

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