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Staff & Administration • Library Documents

Report of the University Librarian to Senate, January, 1996

Resource Sharing Between Ontario Academic Libraries
Cooperative Programs

Ontario academic and research libraries offer three programs that enable students and faculty at Ontario universities to make use of resources within the Province that complement and augment those that are available to them locally.

  1. Interlibrary loan gets copies of books, journals, documents, etc.

  2. document delivery provides photocopies of journal articles, conference papers, extracts from books, etc.

  3. reciprocal borrowing agreements enable faculty members and students to borrow material in person at any of the participating institutions.

  4. the academic journal access project enhances the availability of and access to "non-core" scholarly journals.

Resource Sharing Statistics

For the period May 1994 through April 1995, interlibrary loan and document delivery transactions between members of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) totalled 48,777. Of these, 28,863 or 59% per cent were for photocopies. If the scope of resource sharing is extended to include lending to and borrowing from academic libraries in the Province of Quebec, the National Library of Canada, CISTI, and other Ontario and Canadian libraries, there were 221,115 transactions in 1994/95.

Direct 'reciprocal' borrowing agreements between members of OCUL accounted for a further 209,718 transactions. The total annual resource sharing activity between OCUL libraries therefore amounted to 258,495 transactions. Including the additional libraries listed above brings this total up to 382,056.

Tri-Universities Group

The libraries of the University of Guelph, the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University are heavily engaged in the joint use of collections and resources. Activities include:

  1. rationalization of collections

  2. promotion of interlibrary loan and document delivery services

  3. database sharing

  4. networked information resources

In 1994/95, interlibrary loan and document delivery transactions among the three institutions totalled 1,593. Because of their proximity, reciprocal borrowing among the Universities of Guelph, Laurier and Waterloo offers a preferable alternative to interlibrary loan; transactions in this category totalled 40,821 in 1995/95. Total resource sharing activity within the group therefore amounted to 42,414 transactions in 1994/95.

Murray Shepherd, University Librarian
January 1996


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Last Updated: May 26, 2005