ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Books and bytes

By Sara Eichhorn Acting Head of Circulation University of California, Irvine

A successful electronic document delivery service for books and journal articles.

At first glance, books and bytes seem to share no common ground. One is print and hard-copy, the other electronic. One is associated with Gutenberg, scribes, and the Bible, the other with MTV, Big Brother and thermonuclear global war.

But in today’s libraries, books and bytes are beginning to intertwine. New electronic media are taking over the old manual methods of libraries and, as with everything else in our society, revolutionizing them.

Today’s libraries use computers to check out books, issue fines and even deliver books. In computerese, this process is known as document delivery but it has its roots in plain old recordkeeping and the rural tradition of checking out books through the postal mail service. As with manual records, electronic records are used to analyze the activity that has taken place and to help plan for the future. And now, electronic mail and electric campus carts substitute for the U.S. Postal Service to provide document delivery service.

UCI is a 16,000-student campus near the Pacific Ocean, midway between Los Angeles and San Diego. It has some 900 faculty members on campus. The UCI Main Library Circulation Department began document delivery service on January 6, 1986. Its purpose was to enhance the research of faculty members by placing books in their hands without requiring them or their staff to physically visit the Library. The long-term goal was to, in effect, deliver the books by computer. But the service was initially established in the time-honored manual fashion, with penciled notes on slips of paper.

This pilot manual delivery service was available Mondays through Fridays to and from the Main Library to the faculty’s on-campus offices, either directly to the faculty member or a designated assistant or secretary. Materials to be delivered included all books ordered or recalled by the faculty member, Interlibrary Loan items, special purchases from the Acquisitions Department, and films from the Library Media Center. Material also could be returned by the same service.

A Circulation Department clerk worked two to three hours a day processing the delivery service. Duties included sorting materials for delivery by building and department, preparing routing slips, checking for retrieval reservations, charging out materials for faculty, keeping statistics, delivering the materials by an electric cart and returning others to the Main Library. This service actually included retrieving materials from the Library’s stacks, Government Publications Department, Interlibrary Loan, and the Media Center. In addition, the Library’s Copy Service was given the opportunity to use the Circulation Department’s service to deliver photocopies of materials prepared on a charge-to-department basis and requested for delivery.

Daily statistics kept from the onset of the program included: dates of delivery, initials of the delivery person, names of the faculty requesting delivery, titles and call numbers of the requested books, and names of the faculty members or secretaries receiving the material. Additional statistics were kept to indicate where the delivered books came from and the number of returns.

One of my goals, upon becoming acting head of the Circulation Department some months after this service began, was to expand and improve the document delivery service. It soon became clear that a dramatic and exciting way of accomplishing this goal would be to computerize the document delivery service—in effect, to deliver books by computer.

The UCI campus was already swept up in the electronic revolution. Administrators had standardized the use of personal computers and authorized their purchase for faculty members throughout much of the campus. The University Administration encouraged the use of electronic mail and provided the equipment and facilities for doing so.

Computerizing the document delivery service would be mutually advantageous for both the faculty and the Circulation Department. Faculty members could request books or other materials from the Library without leaving their desks. The Circulation Department, meanwhile, would have its records stored on computer. Until time permitted, internal record-keeping documents were kept in the time-honored manual fashion, with pencilled notes on slips of paper.

The Circulation Department immediately began working with the UCI Computing Facility on campus to develop this electronic service initially through the Main Library. As envisioned, books requested electronically would be provided on same- day or next-day delivery. If the material was unavailable, the faculty member would receive a report by electronic mail on the status of the request. These requests required the following information: library card number; campus delivery address; book call number and brief title; if the book was not available, should it be recalled; and any additional comments.

In January 1987 the new electronic document delivery service began inauspiciously for the Social Science and Social Ecology faculty. It was immediately enhanced to include delivery of books that were requested by faculty for purchase. In other words, if a faculty member requested a book that was already in the collection, a staff person from the Circulation Department would retrieve the book from the stacks and it would be delivered. Starting March 1, the document delivery service also expanded to include University Administration, the Engineering Department, and the Information and Computer Science Department. A mailing distribution list for these departments was obtained and personal letters announcing the new service were sent to all faculty from University Administration, the Engineering Department, and the Information and Computer Science Department along with instructions on how to make use of it.

In April 1987 the Biomedical Library and the Physical Sciences Library joined the Main Library in providing document delivery service via the online DDS program. At the same time, the service was further expanded to provide to faculty in Biological Sciences, Fine Arts, Humanities, and the College of Medicine. The following September, DDS was expanded to include faculty in the Graduate School of Management, Physical Education, Teacher Education, and Physical Sciences. In October, DDS reached its complete audience with expansion to 116 additional persons in the University Administration. These included non-faculty persons who headed departments.

To complicate matters, it was decided that at the end of 1987 the UCI Computing Facility would discontinue the use of the CP6 system that operated on a Honeywell DPS 8/49 computer. This would be replaced by the VMS and ORION systems. ORION is the nickname that the UCI Computing Facility has given to the UNIX service that uses a Balance 21K computer manufactured by Sequent Computer Systems. The VAX/VMS system runs on Digital Equipment Corporation’s equipment and provides connection to the UCInet campus backbone Ethernet and electronic mail network. Also provided is connection to BITNET, a network linking over 2,000 computing systems worldwide for electronic mail and file exchange. Therefore, our document delivery programs had to be rewritten for ORION and VMS. Although it took about six weeks for the programs to be rewritten, there were no complications and there was no real interruption in service.

The campus was already swept up in the electronic revolution.

By the end of 1987, books were being delivered to the entire campus. Professors and others would order their requests, the books were being paged by members of the Libraries’ stack crews, and the DDS courier worked two to three hours a day making deliveries.

Faculty next began to ask that the service be expanded to include the delivery of journal articles. This meant that additional personnel would be needed. The DDS program would have to be further expanded, and a decision would have to be made about whether the faculty would be charged for this service.

A document delivery and replacement assistant position was recruited and filled. Half of this per- son’s time is devoted to expediting faculty requests for document delivery. The rest is spent replacing lost items. The document delivery library assistant is responsible for building a delivery collection daily. Electronic mail is checked twice a day for requests and response is also made to patrons immediately when appropriate. Books are paged from the stacks and recalls and holds placed on titles in circulation. Books and journals are photocopied by the DDS library assistant for recharging to faculty and ultimate delivery. Daily delivery and retrieval includes preparing a daily delivery roster, checking out items in CLSI to requesting faculty, and integrating into the delivery route the delivery of materials for the branch libraries and the pickup of materials from faculty offices. All returned materials are checked in and branch materials placed in the campus mail for the next day return. Statistics are kept daily for the monthly report.

The DDS program has been enhanced so that faculty can now request both books and journal articles. The final format of this request form asks the following questions:

Document delivery service request

Select holding library:

l. Main

2. Biomedical

3. Physical Sciences

Enter choice:

1. Library card no.(Patron Zebra): 2-1970.

2. Campus Delivery Address: Room No./Bldg.

3. Department

4. Is this request for a Pickup only? (Y/N)

5. Is this a request for a book or an article? (1 = Book, 2 = Article)

Please enter exact information for your request to be processed:

6. Book Call No.

7. Brief Title

8. If the book is not available then recall/hold? (Y/N)

9. If the book is unavailable for recall do you want to be notified? (Y/N)

10. Journal or microform call no.

11. Journal title

12. Volume, issue, date & pages

13. Article title

14. Departmental recharge account ($.20 per exposure) no.

15. If the Journal is unavailable, do you want to be notified? (Y/N):

16. Comments:

Do you wish to make any changes? (Y/N)

Do you wish to request another document from the same library? (Y/N)

Do you wish to request another document from a different library? (Y/N)

The final and most difficult decision was whether faculty would be charged for the copying of journal articles. It was finally determined to establish a $.20 per exposure charge for photocopies made from unbound or bound journals and books. It was decided that there would be no additional service charge for each request.

The future

Now that the requesting of books and articles is done by electronic mail, the University of California, Irvine, Libraries are making plans to accept Interlibrary Loan requests and course listings for Reserve Services by electronic mail. It can be anticipated that developments based on the electronic revolution will continue to accelerate in directions that cannot be foreseen today,

But these are exciting times with library services at the nucleus of the information explosion. It is incumbent upon library administrators to harness these energetic changes, to remain flexible, and to seize the opportunities presented.