Document Delivery Task Force
Findings and Recommendations
Members: Sherri Jones
(chair), Carol Brach, Thurston Miller, Carole Pilkinton, and Kathy Ryan-Zeugner
LEC Liaison: Nigel
Butterwick
Massive journal
cancellations, as well as the desire to enhance service to users, are driving
many universities to implement document delivery projects. These projects vary
from large scale services where the library fully subsidizes unlimited,
unmediated article purchasing for all affiliated users to smaller scale pilot
projects involving selected departments and/or selected user groups. Some
libraries choose to offer a mediated service, where users’ requests are filtered
through the ILL office or branch library before being filled via a commercial
document supplier. Both the sending of the requests and the receiving of the
articles are done through the ILL/branch staff.
Some libraries impose a fee while other libraries fully fund the
service. With unmediated subsidized document delivery, the users’ requests are
sent directly to the commercial provider and the receiving of them is done at
their desktop or personal fax machine, thus bypassing the ILL/branch office
totally. No fee is imposed for articles purchases. However, some libraries set limits to the service, such as the number of
articles that can be purchased per user per semester or the maximum cost of the
article purchased, or they will limit participation to selected groups. A
variety of commercial vendors are being used, including CISTI, Ingenta, Infotrieve,
and the British Library Inside service, to mention a few.
No One Size Fits All Method
In June 2004, a Document
Delivery Task Force was created and charged with identifying the critical
features required for a successful document delivery service and then selecting
one (or more) commercial document delivery system(s) to use during a trial
period to test the service. The task force is responsible for planning and
implementing the trial (pilot) service including determining the length and
time for the pilot project, the restrictions, if any, placed on the service,
and patron eligibility for the service. The task force is also responsible for
evaluating the service upon completion of the pilot.
The members of the Task
Force have spent a great deal of time reading the journal literature on
document delivery, talking to commercial vendor representatives, and examining
practices at other institutions to determine the type of document delivery
service that would best suit our needs. As a result of our investigation and
after careful deliberations, The Task Force has concluded that there is no one
perfect model for meeting document delivery needs across all disciplines nor is
there one perfect vendor. Therefore, we are recommending the implementation of three
different pilot projects, staggered at least one month apart, in order to
reduce the amount of stress on staff members implementing the services and to
allow for a smooth transition from one service to another. Also, offering a
variety of services will allow us to better evaluate the services by making
comparisons between them
Phase I
Self Service (unmediated) library-funded commercial
document delivery using CISTI Source
Purpose:
To test the feasibility and user acceptance of library funded, self-service
ordering of articles to enhance local ownership by providing users with speedy
access to journal articles at the time of need. Specifically, we hope to
§
How much staff intervention
is needed?
§
Are users willing
to take the time to request articles?
Duration:
six months, to begin in February 2005 (or whenever Ariel software can be
installed successfully at the Engineering and Life Sciences Library).
Limits: No limits on the number of articles ordered;
no maximum cost per article. However,
the library will not subsidize the purchase of articles from journals to
which the library subscribes.
Participants: Faculty, post-docs, graduate students, and staff in the Department of
Biological Sciences and all departments in the
Participation is voluntary.
However, since effective user training will be critical to the success of the pilot,
class attendance or individual training will be required before a user can
obtain an account password for ordering articles.
Participants will be asked
to complete a survey at the end of the pilot. Survey questions might
include the following:
Why limit participation?
In order to control
expenditures and to discover if use patterns emerge across disciplines, it was
decided to test the service on a select group of users, with the hopes of
expanding to additional groups in the future. By limiting participation to a
select number of groups, the potential for abuse can be gauged and the final
decision about totally or partially subsidizing document delivery can be made a
later date. Also, by limiting participation to selected groups, we can assure
that each group has a library liaison to serve as a contact person to assist
them with questions or problems.
While unmediated,
self-service ordering of articles will be limited to selected participants, the
Table of Contents/subject alerting service offered by CISTI and the ability to
search the CISTI Source database will be freely available to the entire ND
community.
Why limit participation to the sciences?
Based on our experience
with journal usage and previous cancellation projects, we have speculated that
faculty and students in the scientific disciplines, and to a slightly lesser
extent, the social sciences, would benefit most from an unmediated commercial
document delivery service.
Literature on the subject
indicates that the sciences, including engineering and medicine, and the
statistical-related social sciences depend heavily on journals as the primary
mode of scholarly communication. Also, at Notre Dame, like at most other institutions, science, engineering, and social science journals cost more
compared to humanities journals and have experienced the greatest inflation in
periodical prices. As a result, it is in these areas that the library has been forced
to cancel the most journal subscriptions.
Cited studies support the
view that science users would benefit the most from an unmediated commercial
document delivery service. A study involving a library-subsidized self service
document delivery service at the
Why CISTI Source?
CISTI, the Canada Institute
for Scientific and Technical Information, is one of the institutes of the
National Research Council of Canada. It was mandated in 1929 to be the national
science library for Canada, and as a result, has the strongest collection in
the field of science, technology, and medicine in Canada and one of the
strongest in the world. The collection is particularly strong in journal and
conference proceedings.
Document Delivery is a
major service for CISTI. The primary service is delivery of copies of articles
from the CISTI collection and from the Canadian Agricultural Library (CAL).
Items not held at CISTI or
CISTI Source is an
integrated current awareness Table of Contents (TOC) database and document
ordering service, consisting of over 17,000 journal titles from 1993+. The
coverage is primarily science, medicine, and technology literature as the
database is produced by CISTI. (52 % Science, Technology, and Medicine; 21%
Social Sciences; 9% economics and business; 5% humanities).
Why unmediated?
Unmediated document
delivery provides for speedier access to information because it eliminates the
middle man and thus decreases processing and delivery time. Ordering articles for themselves offers a
convenience to those users who prefer to take charge of their own document
delivery needs or are under severe time constraints. Furthermore, unmediated
document delivery reduces ILL expenses and staff workload by transferring the
ordering and receiving processes to the requestor. It can also soften the blow
of journal cancellations by streamlining the process of obtaining articles. [3]
A benchmark study by
What are the associated costs?
$2750 for a six month
subscription ($5500 per year for annual subscription) to CISTI Source
§
Includes unlimited
use of Table of Contents and subject alerts.
$2000 for integration of
custom holdings (one time fee)-“Holdings matching” is critical to prevent
unnecessary ordering of materials owned by the library.
Phase II
Self Service (unmediated) library-funded
commercial document delivery using Ingenta Connect and Ingenta “Pay per View”
service
Purpose:
Same as above.
Duration:
six months (to begin approximately one month after first pilot begins)
Limits: No limits on the number of articles ordered;
no maximum cost per article. However, the library will not subsidize the
purchase of articles from journals that the library subscribes to.
Participation: Faculty, graduate students, and staff in the departments of
Psychology and Life Sciences and all departments in the
Participation is voluntary.
However, since effective user training will be critical to the success of
either pilot, class attendance or individual training will be required before a
user can obtain an account password for ordering articles. Participants will be
asked to complete a survey upon completion of the project.
Why are no humanities represented in the trial?
While Ingenta is a
multidisciplinary database, coverage is primarily in the sciences and social
sciences. Libraries offering document delivery services have found that users
in the sciences and social sciences benefit from the service more than those in
the humanities.
Why Ingenta?
Ingenta (formerly Carl
Uncover) is an automated alerting service that makes available current tables
of contents from a database of over 28,000 periodicals covering a wide variety
of disciplines, delivered via fax or Ariel, and another 6000+ titles available
electronically on a “Pay per view” basis.
Ingenta offers the most comprehensive collection of academic and
professional publications, with over 16 million articles.
Like CISTI, Ingenta has the
ability to set limits on cost per article or per user per semester to control
expenditures. Also Ingenta provides gateway clients with monthly user statistic
reports to track expenditures. Other features that we found attractive are:
§
Electronic
subscription matching allows patrons to seamlessly access the electronic full
text of the journals we subscribe to from a single location.
§
Institutional
Holdings Matching prevents unnecessary ordering of articles by blocking orders
on titles already owned.
§
User Profiles
Management to match groups with various user rights and purchasing power.
Branch Library staff have
been using Ingenta for several years to order articles for users and are
familiar with the search interface.[5] Also,
many users are already familiar with the Ingenta gateway from using it as an
article database and for accessing ND’s online subscriptions.
What are the associated costs?
Annual gateway fee with
holdings matching- $3570 for six months or $7140 per year.
§
Includes a 15%
discount on all document delivery fees.
§
50 user license
for Table of Contents/Alerting Service Allows for table of Contents and keyword
search alerts for up to 50 patrons (additional users can be purchased).
§
“Holdings
matching” is critical to prevent unnecessary ordering of materials owned by the
library.
$1000 initial set up fee.
Data Collection and analysis:
Data from management
reports received monthly from CISTI and Ingenta and from user surveys will be
collected and analyzed. Each vendor will be evaluated on the following:
§
Journals having
five or more articles requested
§
Percentage of
orders for articles from cancelled journals
§
Average cost
per article
§
Average turnaround time for receipt of article
§
Degree to which
turnaround time met users’ needs and expectations
§
Monthly
expenditures
§
Number of
orders per month
Phase III. Somewhere down the road….
Direct ordering using Open URL LINKING
As the final project, we
hope to work with a commercial document supplier such as CISTI, Ingenta, or
Infotrieve, to integrate direct article ordering into our online databases, using
outbound and Open URL linking. By using Open URL linking, we could create
direct order links to the commercial vendor from our Find Text databases, such
as Sci-Finder Scholar, Biological Abstracts, Compendex, etc, or from our
e-journal locator for selected titles.
Other Task Force Recommendations
Ariel is a software
program developed by the Research Libraries Group (RLG). Ariel sends scanned
documents via FTP in TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), from one Ariel station to
another. Recent versions can also send via e-mail from Ariel-to-Ariel, or from
Ariel-to-patron.
Prepared by S. Jones,
[1] Roe, Jane, Shrode, Flora, and Rita Smith. “Across the Disciplines: Does Subsidized Document Delivery Meet the Challenges?” Collection Management 26(2):2001: 13-29.
[2] VanBuskirk, Mary and Diane-Helene Caouette. “Ariel in a High-Volume Environment: How CISTI has integrated Ariel into its Document Delivery Business.” Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery, and Information Supply. 10, #4 (2000): 113-119.
[3] Haslam, Michaelyn and Eva Stowers. “Library-subsidized unmediated document delivery.” LRTS 45, #2 (2000): 80-89.
[4] Stabler,
K. “Benchmarking interlibrary loan and document delivery services: lessons
learned at
[5] From January 03 to September 04, library staff ordered a total of 619 articles from Ingenta for a total cost of $18470.26 or $29.83 per article.
[6] Four copies of Ariel 4.0 have been ordered. Priority should be given to installing the software at branch libraries participating in the pilots (Engineering, Life Sciences, and BIC).