It involves both borrowing and lending. The libraries involved in interlibrary loan are not under the same administration. System resource libraries report activity here. A registered borrower is a library user who has applied for and received an identification number or card from the public library which establishes the conditions under which the user may borrow materials. Libraries which have not purged their files at least once in the last five years were asked not to report this figure.
Residents are persons living in the library's municipality.
Non-residents are persons served by the library but who live outside of the library's municipality. A reference transaction is an information contact which involves the knowledge, use, recommendation, interpretation, or instruction in the use of one or more information sources by a member of the library staff. The term includes information and referral service. Information sources include printed and nonprint materials, machine-readable data bases, catalogs and other holdings records, and, through communication or referral, other libraries and institutions and persons both inside and outside the library. The request may come in person, by phone, by fax, mail, or by electronic-mail from an adult, a young adult or child.