| Summary: | Utility company libraries are scattered geographically, but serve a specific information clientele. These libraries are supported by parent companies or government entities that provide electrical, gas, and/or telephone services. In this era of increased regulation, and financial difficulties for all types of utilities, their respective library budgets are shrinking. Thus reliance on each other for interlibrary lending is increasing; but there is no ILL network, formal or informal, and no organization that would various types of utilities other than the represent the Public Utility Division (PUD) of the Special Libraries Association.
The PUD decided to create a Union List of Serials for the libraries of those members wishing to participate in the study. This investigation involved gathering the data for that list, and providing the Union List itself to the PUD. The library holdings were then analyzed to determine the resource capacity in terms of title diversity and collection overlap. The potential contributions to an interlibrary loan network were examined for the entire group, between various segments of the list, and between the trade association libraries and their individual constituents.
The existing interlibrary loan policies of the participating libraries were also examined and included in the Union List of Serials provided to the Division. Other studies have shown the relationship between collection size and overlap is linear and positively correlated, but have not dealt specifically with overlap in serial collections. This study tried to determine whether this relationship also existed for this group and for serial collections.
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