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Belgium has a longstanding and rich tradition in library automation from the beginning in the late 1960s to the present day. Unlike, for instance, the Netherlands, it has no national centre for library automation such as PICA. Library automation in Belgium followed more or less the same richly diversed pattern as in Great Britain.

The principles of national interlending put forward by Line and Vickers and those for international lending developed by the IFLA Office for International Lending are considered in the Belgian context. A report on statistics in French university libraries and a survey of interlibrary borrowing by Antwerp University Library are summarized. Attention is drawn to some aspects of interlibrary loan costs. Various aspects of union catalogues are reported: the proposed German Union Catalogue (Deutscher Gesamtkatalog); union catalogue automation in France; the impact of the OCLC interlending subsystem on one US library; and a union list of serials/co‐operative acquisition scheme. Brief accounts are given of document delivery in South Africa, the use of telecopiers in a small network, and standardization of interlibrary loan procedures. A handbook on international lending in socialist countries and three reports of relevance to interlending in the Netherlands are mentioned.

There is a widespread lack of adequate statistical information relating to inter/ending transactions between Belgian libraries and this situation should be rectified as soon as possible so as to provide an adequate basis for the development of an effective system. The overall volume of interlibrary lending is estimated to be 300,000 transactions per annum. As in other European countries the burden of cost is borne by the bigger libraries. Two factors which would contribute to a quick and efficient system are missing: firstly an up‐to‐date union catalogue of holdings of both monographs and periodicals and secondly the willingness of all libraries to make their collections readily available to the whole community.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of interlending and document supply in Belgium – particularly in relation to Impala, a system for facilitating the service.

The history of Belgium, its libraries and interlending and document supply is described.

The paper finds that Impala has been an outstanding success in facilitating a fast and cost‐effective service with a high satisfaction rate.

The paper is of importance to all librarians who are interested in nationwide resource‐sharing schemes.

Belgium, one of the smaller European Union countries, has long since integrated its interlending and document supply in a truly European context and 20 per cent of all supplies come from the document supply centres of neighbouring countries. The Belgian electronic document‐ordering system, IMPALA, is the heart of the system. New ICT developments in communication technology will render traditional ILL and document supply partly obsolete by making available full text databases.

Discusses various technical aspects of, and the prospects for, electronic document delivery. Describes the impact of high speed networks on library organization and operation and some applications of new technology. Gives details of some specific activities in a number of countries and several surveys relating to interlibrary lending (ILL) are summarized. Covers training related to ILL both generally and with reference to two specific projects. Reviews access to, and provision of, newspaper material and, finally, examines the relationship between copyright and document supply.

A survey on the relative importance of various library functions, including interlibrary lending, introduces this review. Various national library systems are considered, with emphasis on the degree of centralization involved. A central lending collection is proposed for France. Both decentralized and centralized solutions are put forward for India and Japan. The latter also claims an international role. Unplanned decentralized systems in the Netherlands and Belgium are described and the planned decentralized system in the Federal Republic of Germany is defended. The accuracy of location information in the USA is considered briefly. A number of items on interlending in Australia are reviewed, with particular attention to the effects of the new voucher payment system.

Generally speaking, the three‐year synchronous impact factor is larger than the two‐year one. This follows from theoretical models derived from observations based on ISIÒs database. In this article we present an exception to this general rule, based on data from the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD). In 1998 42% of this databaseÒs source journals did not follow the expected trend. As a possible explanation we note that, contrary to intuition, in the CSCD the changes in the number of both publications and citations are largely independent. It is, however, not ruled out that the observed discrepancies are nothing but statistical fluctuations of the basic publication‐citation model.

SGML, or Standard Generalised Markup Language, is an international standard (ISO 8879) allowing the logical structure of electronic documents to be represented rigorously and independent of applications. This article does not discuss the actual standard, but rather proposes a strategy libraries can consider when implementing SGML applications on top of existing products, or when embedding these in innovative end‐user services. Experiences of SGML within the VUBIS‐Antwerpen Library Network (Belgium) are discussed VUBIS‐Antwerpen has adopted SGML as a key standard for the exploitation of its bibliographical data (union catalogues, document ordering online contents, current awareness, publishing on the World Wide Web). With the move towards electronic publication and distribution of documents, SGML tends to become a crucial standard for digital libraries. Projects such as TEI, ELSA, DECOMATE and ELVYN now focus on access to and delivery of full‐text electronic documents, using SGML to manipulate, process and transform the document for the purposes of full‐text searching or hypertext navigation.