Document delivery: the UEA experience
| Pages | 12-14 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040530 |
| Published date | 01 February 1994 |
| Date | 01 February 1994 |
| Author | David Baker,Ian Ellery,Iain Reeman,Ann Wood |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Document delivery:
the UEA experience
by David Baker, Ian Ellery, lain Reeman
and Ann Wood, University of East
Anglia Library
This paper summarises the development,
current position and future proposed
enhancement of the University of East Anglia
(UEA)'s electronic document delivery service.
The service has been developed in
conjunction with the British Library Document
Supply Centre (BLDSC) and began in
September 1993. It now handles up to 20
documents a day, via the
Library.
It is hoped
to transfer to desktop
delivery,
subject to
copyright restrictions.
Background
UEA has long had a tradition of remote provision
of materials. Set up as a 'new' university in the
1960s, it was always recognised that the on-site
holding of all stock likely to be required for
research if not teaching, was an impossibility.
While good collections were built up in key
subject areas, there has nevertheless been an
emphasis on access to major national collections to
support the work and the provision of the Univer-
sity Library in Norwich.
The collapse of provision in
the sciences
Serious funding cuts and rampant inflation in
library materials — especially in the sciences —
forced a major rethink of library provision at UEA.
A high-level working group was set up within the
University to look at alternative ways of satisfying
research library needs within the sciences in
particular. Economic modelling subsequently
carried out by members of the group suggested
that over about £500 (including on-costs), it was
cheaper not to subscribe to a journal but to acquire
individual articles on demand. We began discus-
sions with BLDSC about how to develop a
document delivery service which would meet the
needs of at least our scientific research community
on this basis.
The development of document
delivery
The working group was dismayed to find that no
prototype, let alone a full electronic document
delivery service, yet existed, other than through an
'urgent action' fax service. We were looking for
something more basic and yet innovative, which
would take us into a new style of library provision
of at least journal articles. We began work with
BLDSC and, thanks to funding from UEA's
innovation fund and BLDSC's research and
development section, were able to begin work on
document delivery. The main conclusions of the
UEA group's work were quoted in an article by
David Baker(1). This describes the background to
the subsequent development of the UEA/BLDSC
electronic document delivery service. The previ-
ous article in this issue also reports on the service
from BLDSC's point of view.
The elements of document
delivery
Ideally, we saw a situation where end users could
identify, from a workstation on their desktop, the
required material, order it, and await delivery,
preferably within 24 hours, back to their desktop.
Current awareness services such as BIDS were
already developing, and the accounting/ordering
side of the potential service was also well devel-
oped, through BLDSC's ARTTel service and the
availability of packages such as the Lancaster ILL
System. (UEA was the first site to install this ILL
system — it is now available in over 70 institu-
tions in the UK). We therefore decided to
concentrate on the 'missing link' — the actual
electronic transmission of documents across
JANET electronically.
The prototype service
This is now in operation, and has been working
since September 1993. Translating the idea from
paper into practice was more time-consuming than
originally thought, simply because the combina-
tion of technology and software had not been used
12 — VINE 95 (June 1994)
To continue reading
Request your trial