Document delivery from the library catalogue

Sun Aug 17 21:48:26 EDT 1997

Apologies for cross posting but this may be of interest to a number of lists.

The web enabled library catalogue raises a wide range of new opportunities.
One of them is ability to enhance online access to the content of journals
by linking from a catalogue entry to a document delivery services for that
journal. Naturally you would do that for titles that the library did not own
rather than those that it did. This essay explores the issues involved in
this idea and how this might be done.

We are used to the situation where a library either owns material or the
material is obtained from another library. In the case of journals this is
in the form of photocopies. The advent of the network has made some changes
in this approach. For instance by the use of the original Ariel system to
use tftp, then ftp for transmission and now mime based email. New
opportunities are offered by services which give article level delivery via
web access and a variety of means of delivery (mainly http). Such services
are Uncover, the Blackwell's Navigator service and Ebscohost and those from
individual publishers such as Academic press.

So far none of these services have impinged greatly on what is being done
with the catalogue. With the arrival web based OPACS this is changing.
Tentative first steps have been made to add URL links in the OPAC to full
text versions of journals via the 856 MARC tag. Users of the catalogue can
then use a web browser to search , find the title, and then link to the full
text. In this way the delivery of the text is integrated with the searching
for the title. While the library then does no need to hold a hard copy
version of the title concerned we have see that for many publishers access
to the electronic version is conditional upon a print subscription. This can
only be a transition solution. At some stage all publishers will need to
look much harder at solely electronic access to their serial publications.

OPAC links to document delivery services

It is possible to go further than this. A link from the record could be made
not to the publisher, but to a document delivery services. This would be
particularly valuable if the link was to a full table of contents service.
The use of the catalogue could then link from the catalogue entry to a menu
of the table of contents of the journal on the suppliers web server. There
the required article could be located and transferred either direct to the
browser, via email or through some other means. In this way a library would
be able to provide an access service to journals that it did not hold or
held a subscription.

There is the vexed question of payment. The user my pay or the library
may have arranged some form of subsidy. Uncover already provides a
service where a library can subsidise access for users from their
domain so precedents exist for such a service. The ideal would be for
a link to a table of contents service for the journal as described
above. Alternatevely a searching mechanism for papers published in the
journal would be a possibility .

This can only be done if the service offers a stable URL to each
title. Unfortunately existing services all appear to offer HTTP POST
based services where the search arguments are not encoded in the URL
or state maintaining transaction variables, which change each session,
are used. A change in the way document delivery services are currently
offered over the web might be needed. Ideally you would be able to
access such a service via a URL of the form -

     http://document_delivery_service.com/ISSN/123456789

where "123456789" would be the ISSN of the title.

Is the library catalogue only about holdings?
=============================================

A philosophical objection might be raised by some about whether it is
appropriate to use the library catalogue to describe material not held by
the library. The resolution to this is held in deciding whether the purpose
of the catalogue is to deliver information or to describe information
artifacts held by a library. An allied question relates to the use of the
856 MARC field. This is intended to indicate the location of an electronic
document. The way I have described its use, it is being addressed as a
mechanism one step removed from the location of the document. Definitional
purists might feel that additional tags are required in the MARC record to
allow for such alternate usage.

How could such a service could be offered?
==========================================

It is all very well to postulate such a service but the labour of adding
serial catalogue records is a significant cost to cataloguing operations. Is
there an easier way?

A possible approach is described below.

   * The library would supply the vendor with a list of their current serial
     holdings

   * The vendor would match this against the titles they offer and supply
     the library with a list of titles the library did not hold.

   * The library would then select the titles which interested them
     indicating, if appropriate, differential subsidy options. That is,
     whether they wish to subsidies access to some titles for users from
     their institution or all of them.

   * The vendor would then supply MARC records for the titles chosen with
     URLs to their service in the 856 field which the library would load
     into its web enabled OPAC.

The end result is that the catalogue would contain records for additional
serial titles of interest to the library's patrons to which it did not to
subscribe. There may be no subscription either because of the staff costs of
checkin, binding, claiming etc or due to high subscription price or both.
These entries in the catalogue would then provide direct user access to the
contents of the journals.

The end users get easier access and hopefully cheaper access to titles which
the library could not provide other than through laborious inter-library
loans services

An updated version of this paper will be maintained at -
http://ningaui.anu.edu.au/e-says/docdel.opac.shtml

Tony Barry
Mon, 18 Aug 1997

_____________________________________________________________
mailto:tony at ningaui.anu.edu.au                |+61 6 249 5688
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/Tony.Barry           |+61 6 288 0959

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Visiting Fellow,  Department of Computer Science,  Faculty of
Engineering and Information Technology.   Australian National
University,    ACT 0200   AUSTRALIA

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