Wisconsin has ranked first in ILL for a number of years, solely because of our predominance of public libraries (with independent governing boards) participating in regional shared integrated automation systems, and system-wide delivery services, coordinated by federated regional library cooperatives. To the patron, though, the ILLs are pretty transparent--they search and place holds on items in a catalog of all materials in the system, and the comes to their library--much as it would in a county library system with branches. At some point we may want to distinguish between ILLs that are conducted outside of a shared catalog/ILS system (through OCLC or other state ILL network) and those conducted within networks where there is no need to enter extra bibliographic records or patron records. Then again, maybe it would be too hard to explain! But the two types of ILL have widely different costs and staff burdens.

Suggested change: Drop renewals as part of the definition. In fact, exclude renewals.

Reason: I assume that we want to know the cumulative total how many individual uses each material has during a year. To me, an item renewed two times by the same individual is one individual use, not three. If the same person returns an item and a week later checks it out again, that is two uses. Instead of individual uses, the circulation count is of number of loan periods.
Before automated systems, it was too labor intensive to ask libraries to cull out the renewals in the checkout cards, count the new circulations, and then re-order the cards.

We now have automated systems that can differentiate between new circulation and renewal. It is time to obtain a count of individual uses of materials. True, this change will result in a circulation decrease. Reports will need to provide explanations for the decrease for several years. However, because so much is in flux these days, this is the time to begin a new count rather than perpetuate an inflated number.

The registered users question is a problem not just because libraries purge their records at different times, but because libraries have vastly different expiration dates. As long as these two variables differ library to library, then the figures we receive will be wildly inconsistent library to library. We should look at replacing this question (in the future) with a count of how many people borrowed library material in the designated fiscal year. Every ILS can produce a report like this, and it will give us a more meaningful measure of how many real library users we actually have.

We need more use measures, particularly circulation. Don't we believe,, for example, that the world will want to know how many e-books actually are being circulated in libraries now? And there must be a reason why we are not asking for physical-book, audio, and video circulation, but it sure would be interesting to be able to show how they are trending.

Posting for Diana Very
502-ReferenceTransactions Comment: from Diana Very, I feel that this element should be deleted because the numbers are guessed at most of the time and do not include a certain time or length of the transaction characteristics.