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WorldShare® Interlibrary Loan

OCLC Resource Sharing facts and statistics

Number of libraries represented worldwide

10,383

Number of countries where OCLC Resource Sharing is used

56

How often a request is filled through OCLC Resource Sharing

every 3 seconds

Since the introduction of OCLC's first interlibrary loan service in 1979, use of OCLC's Resource Sharing services has continued to grow. Below are some key statistics about the current use of these services.

Top interlibrary loan requests

OCLC has mined data collected through use of OCLC Resource Sharing services to provide member libraries with lists of the monographs and journal titles most requested through the service. The lists below show the most-requested monographs (books) and journal titles (articles) requested via OCLC Resource Sharing over a one-year period, from July 1, 2016, through June 30, 2017.

Please contact us with suggestions for other resource sharing data of interest to you.

Top journals

  1. Pediatrics
  2. JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association
  3. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
  4. Dissertation Abstracts International: B: the sciences and engineering
  5. Journal of Access Services
  6. Neurology
  7. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry
  8. Computers in Human Behavior
  9. Annals of Medicine
  10. Disability

Top monographs

  1. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis by J D Vance
  2. A Man Called Ove: A Novel by Fredrik Backman
  3. Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild
  4. Milk and honey by Rupi Kaur
  5. Underground Railroad: A Novel by Colson Whitehead
  6. When breath becomes air by Paul Kalanithi
  7. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
  8. Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 programming questions and solutions by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
  9. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker by Katherine J Cramer
  10. Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville

Top lending and borrowing libraries

These are lists of the top libraries in the OCLC network for loan requests made and for borrowing requests created. The time frame is from July 2016 to June 2017.

Top 10 lending libraries

Institution name Symbol
University of Texas at Austin IXA
University of Chicago CGU
University of Michigan Library EYM
Pennsylvania State University UPM
Minitex MII
The Ohio State University OSU
Texas A&M University TXA
University of Illinois UIU
Indiana University IUL
Cornell University COO

Top 10 borrowing libraries

Institution name Symbol
Mid-Continent Public Library CMI
State Library of Louisiana AGLSL
University of Michigan Library EYM
Indiana State Library SHARE
University of Wisconsin, Madison GZM
Texas Tech University ILU
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis MNU
University of Maryland, College Park UMC
Texas A&M University TXA
Northwestern University INU

OCLC Resource Sharing growth

The data in this chart shows ILL activity by libraries that use OCLC Resource Sharing services for the period between July 2016 and June 2017. It includes the total number of libraries using OCLC Resource Sharing services and the total number of requests created by those libraries. It also includes statistics about the use of Interlibrary Loan Fee Management (IFM).

Total number of OCLC ILL users 10,383
Total number of ILL requests 7,066,399
IFM ILL charges transferred $10,877,000 (U.S.)

WorldShare Interlibrary Loan automates your cloud-based interlibrary borrowing and lending processes though the largest resource-sharing network in the world to save your staff time and to ensure timely delivery of items to the people who need them.

Service availability

  • WorldShare Interlibrary Loan service

    Available everywhere

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Resource sharing revolutionized
Learn more about OCLC’s plans for resource sharing

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WorldShare ILL is available as a stand-alone service or as part of the WorldShare Management Services suite.

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Past and recorded events

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