Library and Information Science

To analyse all elements that resulted the dissatisfied circulation requests at the charging desk of Kitasato Memorial Medical Library, Keio University, a study was made by using specially designed slips to record all these requests asked in 67 days from October 19th, 1964 to the end of the year. The objectives of the study were; i) To count all the dissatisfied circulation requests for periodicals and find the causes which prevented the library to meet the user's needs, so that the library can take a step to reduce the number of their occurrence; ii) Even when a request for a periodical was turned down because a particular issue of a particular periodical had already been loaned out to someone else, this does not change the fact that the library could not meet a user's requests for the journal. Therefore, the library wanted to find out what issues of what titles were asked for, when they had already been loaned out, in order to decide which periodicals need duplicates; iii) To correct a part of the defects in preparing a list of most used periodicals by the circulation counting method, it is necessary to give a consideration to all unrevealed dissatisfied requests for circulation; iv) To find out the percentage of the dissatisfied circulation requests which were finally satisfied through inter-library loan service against all dissatisfied circulation requests.

The results obtained are as follows; i) The total of circulation requests for journal issues in these 67 days was 10,114 including 5,768 photo-duplication requests and 498 dissatisfied requests. The percentage of the dissatisfied requests to the total of requests was 4.9%. These 498 dissatisfied requests included 247 “the library does not have”, 40 “lacking volume, issue or page”, 22 “missing”, 103 “on loan”, 9 “at binders”, 10 “not yet arrived”, 56 “unexplained”, and 11 “other miscellaneous reasons”; ii) There were 71 titles, 103 volumes and issues which could not satisfy the requests because of their being “on loan”. Most of these titles were on the list of the most used periodicals compiled by the circulation counting method. And most of the volumes and issues requested were those in the range of last five years; iii) However, the actual figures of dissatisfied circulation requests were not as high as they were supposed, therefore the neglect of them would not affect the result of circulation counting drastically; iv) Among all dissatisfied circulation requests of 498, only 85 (17.1%) were further asked to obtain through inter-library loan service. This fact suggests that in most cases when medical researchers are in need of literature they need them right there and not somewhere else nor later on. During this survey period 63 more periodicals were requested through inter-library loan from other libraries, without being asked at the circulation desk. This means there are fairly large number of dissatisfied circulation requests which were not revealed by the present study.