RE: Data on circulation of books

["Mcsean, Tony \(ELS\)" <T.Mcsean@elsevier.com>]

I think this is one of those unanswerable questions.  When I ran 
the BMA library our annual book loan figures were almost 50% of 
the total stock, but this was a working clinician's library as 
well as research and that would distort the numbers.  I would 
think that was pretty well up the hectic end of the continuum and 
that for most large, old research libraries the long tail would 
be of midgard serpent dimensions.

To answer speculatively your question on the efects of 
large-scale digitisation.  If we take the digitisation of journal 
backfiles as an indicator, we can probably expect to see the 
usage increase pretty significantly, and ILL traffic to diminish 
also.

Tony McSean
Director of Library Relations
Elsevier
London NW1 7BY