Reorganization of the Loan Division of the Library of Congress
Library of Congress senior managers have approved the merger of the Loan Division and the Collections Management Division. The intention is to provide a single organizational entity which will handle all requests for items in the collections, whether the request is from a Member of Congress, an interlibrary loan client, a reading room patron or an LC staffer. The first phase of a planned five-step reorganization has been completed, with the establishment, on paper, of the Collections Access, Loan and Management Division (CALM). In reality, there have only been a couple of changes thus far. Steve Herman, the former chief of the Collections Management Division, has been reassigned to become the acting chief of CALM. Chris Wright, the former chief of the Loan Division, has embarked on a new assignment with the library's foreign language divisions as assistant to the director for area studies.
Until the reorganization and merger is completed, in about a year's time, all other managers, supervisors and staff of the former two divisions are performing the same duties in the same organizational alignment as before. So, all interlibrary loan contacts at LC, with the exception of Chris Wright, are still valid.
Loan statistics:
In fiscal year 2001 (October 2000 through September 2001), the Loan Division received a total of 58,835 interlibrary loan requests, and filled successfully 36.42 percent of them.
Over 57 percent of the requests came from academic libraries in the USA,while nearly 24 percent came from US public libraries. The remaining requests came from a variety of government, special and foreign libraries.
Nearly 80 percent of the requests were received via OCLC, while almost 13 percent arrived via RLIN. The remainder were received through other means,including e-mail and fax.
