Tuesday, February 18, 2020
WISCAT staff have recently compiled 2019 WISCAT statistics for public libraries, and have shared them with library system staff. For most library systems, these statistics reports will provide numbers that can be included in the Annual Report in fields “Items Loaned to Other Libraries – WISCAT” and “Items Borrowed from Other Libraries – WISCAT” if reporting “Categorized ILL Transactions, ” or incorporated into your “Total ILL Transactions.” The reports also include Unique Requests Sent, Fill Rate, Patron Initiated, and Staff Initiated counts on the borrowing end, and Requests Received and Fill Rate on the lending end. These additional figures are for system and library staff reference and are not required on the annual report.
You may wonder why these statistics are being generated several weeks after the year's end. Interlibrary loan statistics are essentially a snapshot of a moment in time, and the later statistics are run, the closer they will be to being accurate. As an example, a library may have placed 10 requests on 12/31/2019. Until those requests are all marked as Shipped by lenders, they will be seen by the system as not yet filled. Activity & Request Reports in WISCAT are based on request origination date, so statistics pulled on 1/1/2020 for 12/31/2019 may have shown the fill rate for those 10 requests to be 0/10, while a later snapshot would show them closer to 10/10, depending on how many are ultimately filled.
Please see WISCAT Documentation for more details on statistics, and please Contact Us with your questions.
Written by Gail Murray, Resources for Libraries & Lifelong Learning