Technology (NIST) Library and revealed a significant increase
in the total average cost per request, from $29.91 in 2003 to
$41.20 in 2004.19
We would like to contribute to this ILL cost study literature by
providing a whole new approach, based on time-driven activitybased
costing (TDABC), for calculating ILL costs. Contrary to
traditional ILL cost studies such as the ARL studies, TDABC
does not follow Lor’s20 ‘‘macro-approach’’ of dividing yearly
aggregated costs by total number of requests filled, but the
‘‘micro approach’’, involving cost data collection and calculation
for the various steps in ILL processing. This way, the
TDABC approach results in disaggregated costs for all ILL
service activities, instead of aggregated dollar figures like $x for
borrowing and $x for lending. As the KULeuven library
manager confirmed that ‘‘ILL is extremely time consuming,
difficult to define in terms of subactivities, significantly different
across the requests and costly’’, the in-depth TDABC analysis
really answers a practitioner’s request in order to reveal the true
cost of ILL and clearly show what activities cause the costs.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. First,
we present the inter-library TDABC case. Second, we discuss
the management implications resulting from our analysis.
Third, we end the paper with a brief conclusion