Lending, reserves, archives definitions

[Tony Barry]

At 10:21 AM 11/7/97, Prof Bruce Royan wrote:

>Chris wrote:
>-What is "lending" in a digital environment?
....

>The medium is changing, that's all

Its getting more subtle than that.  The dreaded word "convergence" comes
into play.  To access a paper/article you might -

        #       Connect to the publishers web site, navigate through a table
                contents to get to the Journal, go though its contents and
                get the journal on the screen. (eg Academic Press)

        #       Go through the publishers search engine to get direct to the
                article  (eg American Mathematical Society)

        #       Go through a third party search engine to get to the article
                (eg Alta Vista)

        #       Access the article via the authors home page

        #       Access an overt article level service (eg Uncover)

        #       Use a bridging service to get to the publishers service (eg
                Blackwell's Navigator)

        #       Search a web enabled library catalogue which linked you to
                one of the above

The delivery mechanism might be -

        o       http direct (eg electronic publishing, REDD)

        o       tftp (eg Ariel 1)

        o       ftp (eg Ariel 2)

        o       email (eg Ariel 2, JEDDS)

        o       fax (uncover)

        o       snail mail (ILL)

The payment regime is still a mess.  I suspect as digital cash schemes take
off the publishers preferred solution will be direct end user access to
their services at an article level delivery, relying on volume sales rather
than few high cost subscription sales to libraries which presently supports
most academic publishers particularly in STM.

The move is towards choosing the "bibliographical" database of your choice
which will increasingly deliver the full text to you. I say
"bibliographical" as these will no longer be citation databases as full
text is involved.

The other area of convergence is the increasing ability to bridge between
databases -

        +       at the client end with scripting languages (eg javascript)

        +       at the server end via cgi scripts and by grafting servers
                into databases

        +       bridging between protocols such as z39.50 and http

The long term prospect is that there will be far fewer places needed to
start a search.

Likely to change all this once more is PICS-NG being worked on by the W3C
consortium but that is moving out of the scope of the original question
which was is there such a thing as an electronic interlibrary loan. The
answer is clearly no.

Tony

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