Glasgow University Library

West of Scotland University Libraries Document Delivery Project

Introduction

This SHEFC-funded project, running from April to July 1997, is a co-operative venture among the four university libraries in the West of Scotland: Glasgow (lead partner), Strathclyde, Glasgow Caledonian, and Paisley. It follows-on from an earlier SHEFC-funded project (Project Director: Tony Kidd; Project Officer: Richard German) which investigated the overlap in current serials titles among all twelve HEI libraries in the area. This revealed a surprisingly low level of overlap, such that it was felt that there might be scope for implementing a local inter-library document delivery system, at least among the four university libraries. The main aim of current project (Project Director: Tony Kidd; Project Officer: Kerr Jamieson) is to investigate the feasibility and economics of this idea. A secondary aim is to identify frequently-requested titles which are not in stock in any of the four libraries: subscriptions to any such titles would then be considered in the interests of better service provision.

Staff

The Project is managed by a Steering Group comprising the following persons:- In addition, the following members of staff are directly involved in implementing the practical aspects of the Project:-

Data

At present, the great majority of inter-library loan requests for journal articles from all four libraries is sent to the British Library Document Supply Centre at Boston Spa in West Yorkshire. The Document Supply Centre has been most helpful in providing data on requests from the four libraries during the period 1995-1996, which, in conjunction with the data from the earlier project, will be very useful in establishing what proportion of each institution's requests might be expected to be available locally, in addition to providing the essential information for determining which titles were requested most frequently. This has saved much time which would otherwise have had to be spent in collating data from each of the participating libraries.

Time-Trials

For a period of one week during the Project, journal article requests from readers at each of the four libraries will be checked in the SALSER (Scottish Academic Libraries SERials) union catalogue for availability at any of the other participating libraries. If found to be available locally, an inter-library loan request will be sent by E-mail to the other library, which will take the necessary action to satisfy the request, using the standard methods of photocopying with delivery by first-class mail. Each stage of the process will be timed for comparison with the normal current practice, whereby requests are checked for availability only in the reader's own library, and, if not found there, are sent to the BL Document Supply Centre.

Additionally, two of the participants (Glasgow and Glasgow Caledonian) will conduct a further trial using the more advanced techniques of scanning and electronic document transmission, using the latest Hewlett-Packard Network ScanJet 5 high-performance network scanners.

Links to Other Document Delivery Projects

Contact Details

Project Officer
Room 521, Glasgow University Library
Hillhead Street, Glasgow G12 8QE
Scotland, UK

Tel: +44(0)141-330 6290
Fax: +44(0)141-330 4952
E-mail: gxla12@udcf.gla.ac.uk

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Last updated 03 Jun 97
Maintained by Kerr Jamieson (E-mail: gxla12@udcf.gla.ac.uk)