Standing strong in the winds of change: an analysis of a Document Delivery Service in South Korea

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to review the evolution of a nation-wide Document Delivery Service in Korea over the past decade, focusing on how the service has been reconfigured to sustain and fortify its position as a central channel for accessing information in the era of abundant digital resources. Design/methodology/approach – The impacts of policy changes and technical improvements introduced incrementally over the years on the advance of the service are analyzed. The overall statistics over the period of 14 years are first presented to show the changing trends of the service, and the transaction log of the period of nine years is analyzed in detail to examine the impact of policy implementation and technical advancement on the quantity and quality of the service. Findings – The transaction log analysis has uncovered the two main themes or directions of changes that have contributed to its robustness. First, changes introduced to streamline the service process both on the request end (unmediated requests) and on the delivery end (electronic delivery) have brought a sizable improvement on the speed of the service. Second, efforts to incorporate various resource-sharing activities into a unified service framework have led to an enhanced efficiency of the service as well as an increase in volume. Originality/value – The empirical data demonstrating how managerial and technological changes have contributed to sustain the value of the service can be valuable benchmarking data for other services facing the same challenges.

A document delivery service for foreign scholarly journals: the experiences of South Korea

“…The leading body in this project is KERIS, a government agency aimed at improving national research competitiveness through the distribution of scholarly resources. One of KERIS’s missions is to establish an infrastructure to foster a large-scale cooperative network of academic libraries (Oh and Lee, 2015), such as the Research Information Sharing Service (RISS), which is explained in detail below. In the FRIC project, KERIS is responsible for technical support, including developing the FRIC information system, which allows users to search the centers’ holdings.…”

“…Second, in 2009, KERIS developed new e-DDS software called dCube (Lee, 2013). The new software improved the turnaround time for document delivery, and as a result, boosted the use of RISS DDS (Oh and Lee, 2015).…”

“…Since then, the project has addressed the problems of acquiring expensive foreign scholarly journals and making them available to research communities. The project has been very successful, as shown by the fact that it contributed to the recent growth of DDS usage in Korea (Oh and Lee, 2015). This study aims to describe the current status and usage trends of the project, which serves as a useful example of a collaboration between the government and academic libraries to widen users’ access to foreign scholarly journals.…”

Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature: No 89

“…It is a government-funded agency aiming at promoting public education and enhancing the research competitiveness of the country. As part of its mission, among others, KERIS has fostered a large-scale cooperative network of The change in usage is described and particular attention is paid to the introduction of dCube -the unmediated delivery of material to users giving a much improved service "the majority of transactions processed within 24 hours but 40.8 per cent of dCube requests were delivered to the requesting libraries within 8 hours" (Oh and Lee, 2015).…”

“…The change in usage is described and particular attention is paid to the introduction of dCube -the unmediated delivery of material to users giving a much improved service "the majority of transactions processed within 24 hours but 40.8 per cent of dCube requests were delivered to the requesting libraries within 8 hours" (Oh and Lee, 2015).…”