Document delivery: considerations for the future

Abstract

There are a number of issues which medical librarians must consider when looking at effective but affordable document delivery. Cooperation, or sharing resources through interlibrary loan is becoming increasingly sophisticated but requires commitment from those librarians wishing to be a part of the network. CD-ROM collections of journals such as those offered by ADONIS make large sets of articles or documents readily available but are expensive and require trained operators. Electronic journals, increasingly available over the internet, require additional budgeting and hardware requirements, and scanning technology, now on trial in the US, is still expensive and relatively slow compared to photocopying. Companies like Black-wells are now using scanning technology to offer document delivery without an attached copyright fee. Copyright, however, is the one outstanding issue which needs to be addressed when considering electronic document delivery. In this time of constrained budgets, the author recommends that document access should increasingly be considered a part of acquisitions. The author conciudes that librarians should spend more time defining their collection development to include „on de-mand" access and on obtaining the equipment and traíning to take advantage of these new technologies, rather than spending resources on acquiring and cataloguing a permanent collection.