Old vs. new ILL statistics reports

At this time of year, many libraries are seeking statistics for the past year's interlibrary loan activity. This is the first time our ILL program offers a choice of new and old reports to get those numbers--and we suggest you stick with the old Net Activity report for a basic count of your yearly lending and borrowing totals. If you need details like titles and call numbers in your report, the classic Request Records and Lender Response Records reports remain the only option (with CSV format now being required for these reports rather than EXCEL).

If you check the numbers obtained from comparable new and old reports, it's likely you'll find them close but not in perfect agreement. That's because of a change in the way things are counted. The old reports count requests that were created within the date range chosen. The new reports count requests whose status changed within the date range. In the new Lending Statistics report, for example, the Shipped count is the number of requests updated by the lender to Shipped in the date range. In the new Borrowing Statistics report, the Received count is the number of requests updated to Received by the borrower in the date range.

Using the old Net Activity report and combining counts for returnable and nonreturnable requests, statistics for the State Library show 2526 requests created by other libraries from January 1 to December 31, 2024 were filled (Shipped) by NHSL as the lender. The new Lending Statistics report shows 2510 requests were marked Shipped by NHSL in 2024. Here's an explanation for those different counts: some of the requests created in 2024 weren't marked Shipped by the State Library until the early days of 2025.

The new reports are intended to count things in the right places. Although no longer labeled as beta reports, some tweaks to the new reports are in the works. For example, the Lending Statistics report currently isn't counting all "rejected" statuses (Retry, Unfilled, etc.) but should in the near future. As these reports are developed further, we may suggest a different approach when it's time to harvest annual ILL numbers in the years to come. For now, if you need borrowing and lending numbers for annual report purposes, we encourage you to stick with the tried and true: go to Staff Dashboard > Statistics > Activity and Request Reports, enter the date range, and choose Net Activity.

The "statistics are zero" choice is up to you, as is the format (choose HTML if you just need a glance at your stats). Hit "Submit" and you'll see your numbers:

The lending and borrowing numbers you need are right at the top of the report. "Loans" means returnable requests that were filled while "Copies" means nonreturnable requests (usually photocopies or PDFs of magazine or newspaper articles) that were filled.

If you need help with statistics (or anything else in the NHHAIS ILL System), contact the NHAIS Help Desk: nhu-pac@dncr.nh.gov or 603-271-2141.