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Dissertation Information for Gary Wiggins

NAME:
- Gary Wiggins

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- Indiana University (USA) (1985)

ADVISORS:
- Herbert S. White

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Josefa B. Abrera
- Marcy Murphy
- Russell A. Bonham

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: FACTORS WHICH INFLUENCE THE CHOICE OF DOCUMENT DELIVERY MECHANISMS FOR SERIALS BY SELECTED SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL SPECIAL LIBRARIANS

Abstract: A random mail survey of American scientific and technical special librarians was sent to 200 for-profit and 200 academic special librarians. A total of 200 librarians returned usable responses for a 50 percent return rate. Responses were analyzed using the Statistical Package For the Social Sciences (SSS).

All types and sizes of scientific and technical special libraries do not have equal access to all types of document delivery options for obtaining journal article copies. The options considered in this study were interlibrary loan requests to libraries which charge and to those which do not charge, orders from commercial document delivery suppliers, informal exchange, and reprint requests. For-profit special librarians have greater freedom of access to (and use more frequently) almost all types of document delivery options. There was no significant difference between the groups with respect to the use of free interlibrary loan. Cost of the item is not the most important factor in either type of library. Nevertheless, 66 percent of the academic librarians pass along to the user charges for journal article copies, compared to just 37 percent of the for-profit librarians.

Both groups of librarians are more concerned about the speed of obtaining the journal article copies than about costs. Even so, for-profit librarians consider factors related to speed of supply to be more important than do academic librarians. These factors include the rapidity of supplying the article copy, fast feedback on availability, rush or call-in orders, and deposit or charge account options. For-profit librarians are also much less likely than academic librarians to perform bibliographic checking and verification functions prior to sending the orders.

Electronic transmission of interlibrary loan requests was being used at the end of 1983 by 75.7 percent of the academic and 44.2 percent of the for-profit librarians. For-profit librarians in over 60 percent of the cases work in libraries which do not belong to any network. Thus, they have less access to online union lists of serials. Both groups indicated heavy use of union lists of serials in all forms. However, that use is followed by interlibrary loan requests less than three out of four times.

MPACT Scores for Gary Wiggins

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-01-31 06:07:35

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