2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Engineers, as well as other professionals, researchers and students in many disciplines, will occasionally need to use standards documents from a wide variety of standards developing organizations. As our university aims to simultaneously increase research productivity and graduation rates, the need for rapid access to full text standards documents will only increase. In the past, most standards were provided by the library in bound, print format, with the exception of digital IEEE standards, just-in-case they were needed. It was, and remains, cost-prohibitive to acquire all of the standards that a public, doctoral-degree-granting university community might need. Several actions were taken to improve access for faculty, staff, and students. We anticipate that the number of standards documents requested by faculty and students will increase as outreach about standards documents was implemented. We expect an increase in fulfillment rates for standards documents requested through interlibrary loan after the university licensed a standards aggregator service and after outreach in the form of staff training was provided to interlibrary loan staff. Further, we expect an increase in the use of standards already in the collection as well as those acquired via the aggregator after each outreach intervention was implemented. Several outreach interventions, including staff training, were implemented over the course of the study period. A workflow for on-demand acquisition of standards documents was developed, with three potential starting points for requests and several decision points about acquisition method and funds used. De-identified interlibrary loan request data and collection use data were analyzed for request and fulfillment trends and correlation with outreach interventions. Recent updates to the on-demand workflow are described. The data show an increase in requests for standards documents. Increased fulfillment rates for standards document request suggests that outreach for interlibrary loan staff was successful. Success of outreach to patrons was shown in an increased number of interlibrary loan requests for standards documents and in increasing use of subscribed standards sets such as IEEE and ASTM. The data support continuing some outreach methods, streamlining workflows to exclusively use interlibrary loan as a request and fulfillment system, and the need to periodically train interlibrary loan staff. We also recommend that discoverability of standards in our collection should be improved through cataloging improvements and creation of finding aids for different audiences.