Document Delivery: : A Managing Information Report

Citation

Smith, M. (1999), "Document Delivery: : A Managing Information Report", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 2-3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.1999.27.3.2.1

This work aims to provide guidelines for librarians and others involved in selecting document suppliers. It also provides information on practical issues such as costing document delivery, integrating new document suppliers into existing workflows and establishing performance indicators. The work aims at a global market and therefore does not restrict its commentary to the situation in any one country. While this is a strength in certain respects it is a weakness in many others. For example, its three pages on copyright issues hardly skim the surface of a complex topic, which needs to be addressed in a national context.

There is plenty which is sound in the book. This includes the section on evaluation criteria for selecting document suppliers, which runs through a comprehensive list of 13 different attributes including the key ones of cost, coverage and speed. However, some of the material is repetitive, e.g. chapter 2 is mainly about selecting a document supplier, but this does not prevent the author including two more sections on this topic, separated from each other by only a few pages, in the following chapter on “practical considerations”.

The book also has weaknesses. In particular I found that the classification of the document suppliers on pages 11 and 12 was not very helpful. The ten types identified, including CD‐ROM products and online ordering via database hosts for example, do not provide a classification which would help a newcomer to distinguish clearly between the different sources available for acquiring material on document delivery. I would prefer to see a classification which distinguishes between the following:

collection based suppliers ‐‐ such as BLDSC and INIST, which concentrate on document delivery;

information brokers ‐‐ who rely on copying material held in other libraries;

library fee‐based document delivery ‐‐ where a library offers a paid for service;

interlibrary loan ‐‐ where a library offers a service on a reciprocal, often uncharged, basis;

and‐pay‐as‐you‐go electronic access ‐‐ originally to ASCII full text via database hosts such as those on Dialog and OCLC FirstSearch, and now increasingly to full images over the Web.

The book is short. The main text is 65 pages, but it includes a good number of references for further reading. The appendices occupy a similar amount of space and include:

a commentary on major suppliers which inevitably is already dated given the recent changes in the industry;

a case study on electronic document delivery in the University of Otago, New Zealand;

the same library′s staff manual for its document delivery operation;

a short section on equipment such as copiers, faxes and computers;

and a glossary of terms.

The book is poorly edited. In the opening chapter there is a reference to a graph which does not exist and similar irritating examples occur elsewhere in the text.

In short, there is some useful content in this book, but it is not presented in the most effective way. A ruthless editor could have turned this into a very useful introductory text, but at £35 for a flawed presentation it is difficult to recommend outright ownership of this title. Definitely one to borrow on interlibrary loan.