How the digital era has transformed ILL services in Japanese university libraries: a comprehensive analysis of NACSIS‐ILL transaction records from 1994 to 2008

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to identify and examine the factors that affected the scale of ILL photocopy requests between Japanese university libraries from 1994 to 2008.Design/methodology/approach – Based on the newly developed conceptual framework to interpret the rise and fall in ILL, more than 10 million requests, sent through a nation‐wide system called NACSIS‐ILL from 1994 to 2008 were quantitatively analyzed.Findings – The number of photocopy requests for articles in foreign journals started to decrease in 2000, due to the dramatic increase of e‐journal titles made accessible through “Big Deal” contracts that came into effect in 2002 as well as other similar trials prior to it. On the other hand, requests for articles in domestic journals, mostly written in Japanese, continued to increase until 2006. The main factor for this increase was the expansion of journal title coverage in bibliographic databases, which enabled users to retrieve more references. However, requests decreased in 2007...