Negative numbers in ILL stats

A NHU-PAC interlibrary loan user recently reported: "I just tried to run the statistics report for August 2008 and it showed we have -1 unfilled leading to a fill rate of 116%." According to documentation from Sirsi Dynix, "a minus number can occur when a higher number of items are shipped by a library within that time frame than the number of requests made to that library in the same period." In this case it's likely that a request received at the end of July wasn't shipped until early August. Looking at a larger time frame tends to lessen the chance of encountering negative numbers in the ILL statistics.

If you didn't know NHU-PAC's ILL program provides statistics, check out Mary Russell's posting on how to find those numbers.