Document Delivery

Citation

Morgan, S. (1999), "Document Delivery", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 8, pp. 413-424. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.8.413.3

The importance of document delivery has been growing in recent years. Clearly, it lies at the heart of any discussions about the balance which libraries and information services strike between collection development and access to information. The reasons for this importance are many, including an increase in the total amount of published information, escalating prices of books and journals, budgetary constraints and advances in new technologies. This managing information report is therefore quite timely. Its seven chapters – the report itself takes up less than half of the 128 pages – and five appendices bring together the essential elements to give readers an up‐to‐date picture of the subject. These essential elements comprise document suppliers, practical considerations, issues surrounding document delivery (such as access and copyright), costs of services and a brief look at future trends.

After a brief introduction which takes in price statistics and definitions, Finnie discusses the options available to libraries in relation to document suppliers and the kinds of services they provide. These range from collection‐based suppliers such as the British Library through CASIAS (current alerting service/ individual article supply) services such as UnCover to full‐text products such as UMI ProQuest Direct (via the Web). Great emphasis is placed on applying appropriate selection and evaluation criteria to these services to get the optimum return. Criteria include charges, subject coverage, response times, ordering and delivery options, convenience and ease‐of‐use. These are very useful guidelines for comparing supply options. Chapter 3 is a mélange of practical considerations at the policy and day‐to‐day levels. It helpfully charts the steps involved in a typical document delivery process, thus ensuring the audience is singing from the same songsheet. This is followed by some key considerations such as staff training, promotion and performance indicators. The first of these, in particular, is central to the success of providing a new kind of service or refining the existing one and would have benefitted from more detailed coverage. I accept that the staff manual (outlined in Appendix D) from the University of Otago, goes some way to helping. There are still enough staff around who are daunted by the technologies involved in document delivery for training to be one of the highest priorities.

The key issues facing libraries with the growth of document delivery are addressed in Chapter 4. Some of the issues identified are copyright, the development of inter‐operability standards, and access and ownership. A good suggestion is made – that we should have more widespread co‐ordinated collection disposals so that libraries do not cancel the last subscription to a particular title in a particular region/country. Chapter 5 is devoted to the costing of document delivery. More accurately, the chapter is divided into two parts: a summary of previous cost studies and, second, a description of a cost model developed out of the author’s research for her master’s thesis on “access and ownership”. The final chapter details the dozen major projects currently looking into document delivery and the five trends that have been identified from the research. These are integrated solutions, end‐user ordering, desktop delivery, improved interfaces and increased demand.

Apart from the limited space given over to staff training, I would also like to have seen greater emphasis placed on the user’s perspective (including the thorny issue of mediated versus unmediated service) rather than that of the library. Finnie’s report is, nevertheless, a welcome statement of where we are at the moment with document delivery.