Counting ILL requests

This week's post about the NHAIS ILL System's 5th birthday mentioned that "nearly three-quarters of a MILLION requests have been placed in the system" since October 8, 2019. By this time next week, the count will almost certainly be MORE than three quarters of a million.

If you take 750,000 and divide it by 60 months (5 years), you get an average of 12,500 requests in the system per month. But wait! Interlibrary lending screeched to a halt in March 2020, courtesy of COVID-19. Six months passed before ILL activity resumed. If you exclude those months, you get an average of nearly 14,000 requests a month.

For just the first 9 months of this year, the count is closer to 15,000 a month--roughly 500 a day. Can you imagine if we didn't have the NHAIS ILL System routing all those requests to holding libraries and, instead, you received 500 e-mails each day asking if you have this or that title available? Yikes!