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Dragonfly, Autumn 1999 PDF Desktop Document Delivery at University of Washington

by Mary Rainwater, Document Services,
University of Washington Health Sciences Library

Editor's note: We know that many of you are considering electronic document delivery methods for your patrons, so we asked Mary Rainwater to tell you of her experience with one method. We would be glad to publish your experiences with full-text electronic delivery, too!

When our PDF (Portable Data Format) desktop document delivery service began routine operation in September 1997, we scanned articles using Adobe Acrobat Capture which processed TIFF files into PDF files. We placed the files on our server and notified the patron (via e-mail) that the article was ready. That patron e-mail notification program (which also assigned a random claim number for each article) was a home-built system that was developed here in the library by staff who no longer work here. The developers did not leave behind good documentation for technical support. Therefore, Document Services was very interested in finding a better, more reliable, and hopefully, cheaper solution. That solution was Prospero.

Prospero is a web-based document delivery system that works with Ariel. The article is scanned into Ariel first, and then Prospero converts the Ariel file into PDF format, and automatically sends an e-mail notification to the requesting patron. Prospero assigns each patron a PIN number, rather than individually assigning claim numbers to each article. Therefore, the patron can go to the same web site each time, insert his PIN, and get all his articles in the same place. Prospero is freely available (under the GNU Public License), easy to use, and seems to be well-supported. Our patrons like it better than our old system. Overall, a success.

We are currently using Prospero only for delivery of documents to individuals, not for interlibary loans to libraries.

For further information on Prospero, see http://bones.med.ohio-state.edu/prospero/

URL: http://nnlm.gov/pnr/news/199912/prospero.html