Unmediated document delivery at Leeds University: from project to operational system

Abstract

The Documents Direct project at the University of Leeds in the UK started in March 1999. Its aim was to investigate and evaluate new mechanisms for the discovery and delivery of full-text journal articles and similar material to academic staff and researchers of the University. More specifically, it intended to assess the costs and benefits of on-demand single article supply to the desktop at the point of need as an alternative to full subscriptions to journals. In short, offering unmediated document ordering and delivery to researchers and academics within the University.The University of Leeds has a large research library with a substantial periodical collection, which has developed over time to support the research needs of the University. The Library currently subscribes to and pays for approximately 6,000 titles. As with all libraries, it offers an inter-library loans (ILL) service (recently renamed Document Supply to reflect the changing focus of the service), which costs all its users £2 per request. The Library therefore combines both a traditional holdings policy and an access policy, in the form of inter-library loans. A number of issues have meant that this model needs to be reconsidered. In addition, the Library has undergone cultural change in recent years, which has seen the development of outreach activities and put an emphasis on its role in supporting the University's researchers, by providing high quality information, whether available locally or remotely. This approach to providing researchers with access to literature resources unavailable in the University is one currently being investigated by many academic organisations around the world.(For examples, see articles by Crowley (1999), Crowley and Hart (2000) and Houle (2000).The project's evaluation demonstrated that, for the user, ILL is deemed a slow process which is time-consuming and inefficient. It is an expensive service to operate and unlike other library services has not been developed alongside Web technology. The reasons given for this lack of development are twofold. UK Copyright Law demands a signed declaration from users for each article, in order to comply with fair dealing. In addition, many libraries make an administrative charge to their users for document delivery services and if the service was migrated to the Web then the primary issue to resolve would be how and when the user would pay.

Unmediated document delivery: the issues and possibilities

“…The University of Leeds Document Direct Service (Birch & Young 2001) and the University of Sydney DI-RECT service (De Saxe 2001) are examples of unmediated services that use multiple suppliers.…”

Management and the management of information, knowledge‐based and library services 2001

“…Legal deposit and the preservation of digital publications is the subject of a research paper by Muir (2001) who indicates that most activity is of a technical nature, and that not all management issues or users' needs are being addressed. Birch and Young (2001) describe a project at Leeds University that investigated the feasibility of offering user-initiated unmediated requesting and delivery of documents as an alternative to traditional periodicals holdings and conventional interlibrary loan. Following quantitative and qualitative evaluation the project moved into a trial service.…”

Pay-per-view article access: a viable replacement for subscriptions?

“…Throughout the literature, a number of different terms are used to refer to end-users requesting articles directly and paying by the article: unmediated document delivery 1 or unmediated document ordering 2 , user initiated document delivery 3 , the 'just-in-time model' 4 , end-user document supply 5 , articles on demand 6 , and payper-view (PPV) 7 . Beginning in the 1990s, libraries began to experiment with PPV as an alternative to traditional forms of inter-library loan (ILL).…”