5 : Maximising current awareness and document delivery services

[alerts, preprints, communities, mediated and unmediated document delivery, request forms, resource sharing, management]

Alert services

The book gives a range of alerting services. Notable ones to add from the UK and Europe perspective include:

ZETOC which is available to higher education and the health service in the UK. It allows searching of the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents database with details of articles from approximately 20,000 current journals and 16,000 conference proceedings published per year in all subjects. ZETOC Alert will email the contents pages of chosen journals every time a new issue is loaded into the database.

Catchword provides electronic access to over 800 journals from over 40 publishers, including the British Psychological Society, Carfax Publishing, E&FN Spon, International Labour Organisation, Routledge and Taylor & Francis. The Table of Contents Alerting Service will send an e-mail when a new issue of any chosen journal becomes available.

Springer's LINK ALERT service gives email delivery of contents of Springer journals with links to online abstracts.

Preprints

Notable services to add are Cogprints - a collection of preprints in cognitive science - and the US Department of Energy's PrePRINT Network for energy science and technology. There is growing interest in the idea of self- or institutional publishing of research material to take control away from publishers and back to those who create the work. The Budapest Open Access Initiative is leading the campaign. Some of the work in this area is part of the Open Archives Initiative, which among other work is developing standard publishing software for use by institutions.

Document delivery

Although we tend to think of electronic delivery in relation to remote delivery, some UK universities do provide a book delivery service to distance learners, including overseas. There may be limitations in what may not be loaned, notably short loan or reference items and perhaps audio visual material. Photocopies of reference material may be offered within copyright restrictions.

The book discusses a variety of document suppliers which are used in the US, but, of course in the UK there is the well established centralised and national service from the British Library Document Supply Centre which predominates, though there are some alternatives, such as LAMDA. LAMDA is based on the journal collections of 10 leading academic libraries in the UK and utilizes Ariel scan, send-and-receive software to transmit documents electronically.

LAMDA arose from the JISC funded eLib programme which has been discussed by Jacobs and Morris. Their survey concludes that though many of the projects, like EDDIS and AGORA produced only demonstrator services, the programme introduced competition to the British Library - who reduced prices - and encouraged collaboration between universities.

Allowing users to request items themselves for delivery to their desktops is not a service libraries have been keen to adopt since there is no easy control over costs. However, the Documents Direct Service being developed at Leeds University [Birch] brings a more positive view. A pilot project with a small number of users investigated the provision of an unmediated service using suppliers like the British Library's Inside, AskIEEE, Royal Society of Chemistry. It worked well for users who knew what they wanted and has been extended to further schools in the university. It is thought that costs might be offset by the cancellation of journals. Off-campus users have not been specifically considered, but could clearly benefit.

References

Birch, K & Young I A Unmediated document delivery at Leeds University: from project to operational system Interlending & document supply 29 (1) 2001, 4-10

Jacobs, N & Morris, A The impact of the JISC-funded eLib document delivery-related projects Interlending & document supply 30 (1) 2002, 4-16