Electronic Document Delivery at AHSL

By Joan Schlimgen
Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Services
Arizona Health Sciences Library, University of Arizona

Remember how all our fears about Y2K turned out to be unfounded and we ended up feeling pretty silly with all that extra food and water? Well at the Arizona Health Sciences Library (AHSL), Y2K was pretty disruptive and forced our interlibrary loan operation to make some major changes in the way we do business. Though we're a long way from having everything nicely in place, we believe we will end up with an operation that provides even better interlibrary loan services than the one we had in the 20^st century.

Knowing that our home-grown ILL management system would not survive into the 21^st century, AHSL committed itself to upgrading and enhancing both its interlibrary loan and document delivery operation. We started off in December 1999 by purchasing the Pigasus WINGS ILL Management System, which was the only ILL management system that was interoperable with both DOCLINE and OCLC at that time and one of the first to utilize the ISO ILL protocol. (Other ILL systems are now adopting ISO and several have since added the ability to communicate with DOCLINE, including ILLIAD and Clio.)

In the Fall of 2000 we purchased Relais Express, which includes a workstation, scanner and software for delivering documents to the desktop by a variety of methods, including Ariel, email with pdf attachment, posting a pdf document to a URL, and fax.

As you might imagine in the 21^st century, electronic document delivery was a major component in revamping ILL. While AHSL has used Ariel for many years, mail continued to be the major delivery method for most of the hospital libraries that we serve. It didn't make sense to offer a 24-hour turnaround on a journal article only to have the U.S. Postal Service deliver it several days later. Yet it wasn't clear if all libraries were ready to receive documents electronically or even how to go about finding out.

Now was the time to figure out the best way to utilize this technology for the libraries to which we provide ILL articles. An opportunity presented itself at NCNMLG-MLGSCA Joint Meeting in San Francisco where Elaine Graham led a roundtable discussion about electronic document delivery.

Most of the librarians in the discussion group agreed that they continued to request delivery by mail when they placed requests via DOCLINE. This was a safe procedure because it guaranteed that any library, which had the item in its collection, would be able supply it by mail whereas if Ariel delivery was requested, a library without Ariel would have to route it on. In some cases, mail could end up being faster than requesting it by Ariel or by other electronic methods that are not widely available to smaller libraries. How could we get over this obstacle and deliver the article quickly and in a way that was convenient to these libraries?

We contacted a few hospital librarians, including one who had attended the roundtable, and asked them to join our pilot project. We gave each of them a choice of several delivery methods that they could adopt as their "preferred delivery method." We then proceeded to deliver all articles requested by these librarians in the method that they had selected. We created a special field in WINGS to help us keep track of the "preferred delivery method" and this field now appears in each request. This is what the student who scans the article in Relais looks for. There were a few bugs that needed to be worked out, but all in all it went pretty smoothly and we decided we would open this service to everyone who was interested.

At the end of April we sent out a registration form with our monthly invoices. We asked each library to choose their document delivery preference and we pledged to deliver all their articles by this method even if the DOCLINE or OCLC request indicated that the request was to be mailed. Then we waited for the response.

Within a day or so dozens of libraries faxed and mailed their registration forms back to us with their preference for a delivery method. We also received many phone calls from grateful ILL staff congratulating us on this service. To date, about a month later, we have received 123 responses, which can be broken down as follows:

• 48 Email with pdf attachment
• 43 Ariel
• 16 Mail
• 13 Fax
• 3 Post pdf to URL

We're pleased with these results and hope we can encourage more libraries to receive their articles electronically. There's satisfaction in knowing that we're getting information into the hands of patrons more quickly. As we continue to revamp our interlibrary loan operations, we will be looking for more ways to improve our services.

For more information contact:
Joan Schlimgen or Kathy Tower
Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Services
Arizona Health Sciences Library
University of Arizona
P.O. Box 245079
Tucson, AZ 85724-5079
ahsill@ahsl.arizona.edu
phone: 520-626-6840
fax: 520-626-2831

Next Article