Behaviour and Perceptions of the Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery Service Users: High Energy Physicists at CERN- a Case Study

CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, situated in Geneva, Switzerland, has a rare user population, which consists of more than 10,000 high energy physicists coming from other institutes scattered in Europe and the rest of the world. They come to CERN to share accelerators and research infrastructures and services. Therefore, the library and particularly the ILL-DD Service have a substantial number of potential users. As it is a research library, with many varied subject interests, and experiences the 'normal' budget restrictions, the CERN Library collection cannot accommodate all the documents in all of subjects potentially required. Therefore, the ILL-DD Service is performing an important task. During a one month period this year, we distributed a User Survey. Primarily this was to gauge the level of user satisfaction and to discover if the service was performing competently. Using these results along with statistics collected about the users requests, drawing on experience, and consulting published observations we have collected interesting information in this paper which portrays not only high energy physicists behaviour, but also user perceptions that may shape the future work of all ILL-DD Services.