Why does Finland make so many international ILDS requests?

Reports on a study initiated by the Finnish Council for Information Provision (TINFO) in order to find out why, as was shown in a European‐wide survey of interlending and document supply, Finland makes so many international interlending requests. Several methods were used to throw light on the situation. In order to find out if foreign suppliers were preferred to domestic suppliers librarians were interviewed about current practices and procedures and data from international request forms were compared to the union catalogue. International request forms were analysed in order to draw a picture of the material needed from abroad and to reveal potential gaps in the national collection. Suggests that national characteristics of users’ needs for library material should be taken into consideration when planning national information provision. A citation analysis based on references from dissertations was carried out with the aim of detecting such characteristics.