Document Delivery Service of Chinese Academic Journal Publications

Citation

Zhou, P. (1999), "Document Delivery Service of Chinese Academic Journal Publications", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916dad.002

Document Delivery Service of Chinese Academic Journal Publications

Peter Zhou

Overview

The University of Pittsburgh Library System, through its East Asian Library, has established a demonstration Gateway Service Center for Chinese Academic Journal Publications, to deliver digital copies of Chinese-language academic journal publications from six Chinese libraries, via the Internet, for scholars throughout the USA. This is an unprecedented global resource sharing and document delivery service between American libraries and Chinese libraries. Through this Center, scholars and library patrons throughout the country will have free and easy access to full-text Chinese-language journal articles in Chinese libraries, not otherwise available in the USA. This arrangement creates a global virtual library of Chinese journal collections with great depth and extent for scholars in all academic disciplines.

The project is funded by a National Leadership Grant of $189,215 from the US Federal Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) from 1998 to 2000. An earlier pilot study was funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange in 1997. Because the program is underwritten by the federal IMLS grant, US scholars can use this service free of charge.

Research libraries in China partnering with the University of Pittsburgh in this consortium include Peking University and Tsinghua University in Beijing, Fudan University and Shanghai Jiaotong University in Shanghai, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Academia Sinica of Taiwan. These library collections represent some of the largest Chinese-language research publications in the world in humanities, social sciences, science, engineering and technology. Because they are located in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, US scholars traditionally have had to travel to those libraries to use those collection materials. Today, they can directly access some of those valuable materials through the Internet in their offices or homes by using the service provided by this Gateway Service. The Pittsburgh project serves as a bridge between researchers in the USA and the academic libraries in Asia.

The Process

The Gateway Service works in the following way: a researcher anywhere in the USA can first visit this Center's Web site, at http://www.library.pitt.edu/gateway/, and fill in on-line request form(s) for the full-text Chinese journal publications he or she needs.

The request is then sent to the Gateway Service Center and reviewed by librarians with expertise in Chinese journal publications there. The librarian searches in the national bibliographic databases of OCLC and RLIN, to determine if the journal article is held by any research library within the USA. If the article is already held by a US library, the librarian will tell the requester through e-mail which US library holds the material and ask the requester to contact that library directly to get the material through interlibrary loan. If the material is not held by any US library, the request will be sent to an appropriate Chinese library participating in this program, through the Ariel document delivery system on the Internet.

The Ariel software was developed by Research Libraries Group, Inc., located in Mountain View, California. The Chinese library, after receiving the request, will locate the material in their collection, digitize it and send it to the Gateway Service Center at the University of Pittsburgh through Internet. In Pittsburgh, the digital text will then be printed out and sent in hard copy to the requesting researcher through US postal mail.

The whole process usually takes about a week to complete. If the Chinese library cannot locate the material in its collections, staff of that library will then locate and retrieve the material from other libraries in China. It usually takes another week for the Chinese library to retrieve the material from another library within the same city. The time of retrieving such material will be longer if it has to be retrieved from a library in another Chinese province. Libraries in Hong Kong and Taiwan participating in this program are only responsible for retrieving materials inside Hong Kong or Taiwan.

A Brief History

This program started with an experiment between the University of Pittsburgh Library System and Peking University Library. In the fall of 1996, Rush Miller, University Librarian of the University of Pittsburgh, and Peter Zhou, Head Librarian of the University of Pittsburgh's East Asian Library, visited Peking University Library to explore with their Chinese colleagues the possibility of transmitting full-text journal articles between North America and Asia (China). They presented their Chinese colleagues in Peking University with a copy of ARIEL document delivery software (see Figure 1) and requested that an experiment be carried out to deliver full-text journal articles between their libraries over the Internet. In November 1996, the two libraries exchanged electronic full-text journal articles on the Internet successfully, the first such exchange ever between the USA and China. The quality of the text delivered was excellent. This service was immediately made available to the faculties of the University of Pittsburgh and Peking University.

Figure 1.Rush Miller, University Librarian of the University of Pittsburgh and Peter Zhou, Head of East Asian Library present a copy of ARIEL document delivery software to Peking University Administrators Liang Zhu, Vice President and Lin Beidian, University Librarian.From left to right: Peter Zhou, Rush Miller, Liang Zhu and Lin Beidian

In the summer of 1997, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, a private foundation based in Taiwan, provided funding for the East Asian Library of the University of Pittsburgh to start a pilot document delivery project among several libraries in the USA, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. As a result, the University of Pittsburgh expanded its Chinese journal publication delivery program to include four Chinese libraries in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong: the Fu ssu-nien Library of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, Peking University Library and Shanghai Jiaotong University in mainland China, and Chinese University of Hong Kong. This pilot project was to establish a protocol of resource sharing and full-text document delivery among some key research libraries across the Pacific. The long-term goal was to promote such a service to the national scholarly community in the USA after the pilot project. Emphasis in this pilot project was placed on setting up the organizational structure and operations procedures for document delivery and resource sharing among these five libraries. This pilot project lasted one year and laid the basis for a full-scale national service to be established one year later by the National Leadership Grant from the Federal Institute for Museum and Library Services in 1998.

In October 1998, the IMLS provided funding to augment the global document delivery and resource sharing program established at the University of Pittsburgh's East Asian Library to a full-scale national service for the scholarly community in the USA. With this funding, the Gateway Service Center of Chinese Academic Journal Publications was formally established at the East Asian Library of the University of Pittsburgh. In the same month, the directors of the four Chinese libraries participating in this program and the University of Pittsburgh Libraries held a joint meeting in Peking University to establish a formal agreement on the policies and procedures for the Center service. Two other Chinese libraries ­ Tsinghua University Library and Fudan University Library in mainland China ­ asked to join in the consortium. Their requests were approved by all member libraries. The global document delivery consortium of Chinese journal publications was then extended to six Chinese libraries and one US library.

Operation and Limitations of the Exchange

Funding provided by the Federal Institute for Museum and Library Services covers the document delivery cost for each of the participating libraries in staff, material, telecommunication, supplies and postage. Participating libraries each contribute office space and computer equipment.

Since November 1998, after the service was announced to the scholarly communities of the USA, the Gateway Service Center has been receiving requests from all parts of the country. Most of these requests have been fulfilled within one week. In addition, the Center has received requests from other countries such as Australia, Canada, and Singapore. At this time, because it is funded by the US federal grant, the Center does not serve requests from outside the USA. Requests from the University of Pittsburgh Libraries to the Chinese libraries are mostly for journal articles published over the twentieth century in a wide variety of subjects such as history, politics, law, literature, linguistics, economics, archeology, anthropology, art and art history, and other fields of humanities and social science.

Despite its success, there exist some limitations in this global document delivery and resource sharing program. First, there is a lack of electronic bibliographic finding aids of Chinese journal publications. Users requesting this service must provide detailed and relatively complete bibliographic citations. Second, although the Gateway Service Center's Web page provides access to the on-line catalogs of some of those Chinese libraries holdings, the information on the catalog is mostly coded in Chinese characters only. Therefore, the users must have special Chinese-language viewing software to use those catalogs. As a result, users have to rely on the staff at the Gateway Service Center to verify citations for them.

Management of this service presents an ever-greater challenge. This global document delivery and resource sharing project requires a high degree of cooperation among library professionals of different countries and regions across different continents. Member libraries work under drastically different political and economic systems. The challenge is to enable library professionals of different cultures, political systems and library operations in this program to work together, virtually from tens of thousands of miles away, in a concerted effort to provide an effective and timely document delivery service for patrons of these two countries. This project also requires frequent communication and coordination among administrators and staff of those libraries.

The global document delivery service provided by the Gateway Service Center at the University of Pittsburgh operates strictly under the copyright laws of China and the USA. In all circumstances, the service is provided to single library users inside the USA who need the library materials for their research. The full-text journal article is delivered through mail to the requester in hard copy after it is received digitally from China over Internet, thus eliminating the possibility of electronically disseminating copyrighted materials over the Internet to multiple users. The digital document is deleted after the hard copy is sent. In addition, the Center does not deliver multiple articles from the same journal. In most circumstances, the Center does not deliver Chinese journal articles that can be found inside research collections of the libraries in the USA, neither does it deliver non-academic publications.

The ARIEL document delivery software used by this global document delivery program operates on a regular PC platform, with a scanner and a network connection to the Internet. More information about the equipment set-up can be found in Research Libraries Groups' Web page http://www.rlg.org/ariel.html

Zhou is Head of East Asian Library and Adjunct Associate Professor of Chinese Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. pxzhou+@pitt.edu