Evaluation of an Internet document delivery service

An Internet-based Document Delivery Service (DDS) has been developed within the framework of the CNR (Italian National Research Council) Project BiblioMIME, in order to take advantage of new Internet technologies and promote co-operation among CNR and Italian university libraries. Adopting these technologies changes the traditional organisation of DDS and may drastically reduce costs and delivery times. An information system to manage DDS requests and monitor the progressive evolution of the service has been implemented, running on the local-area network of a test-site library. It aims to track the number and types of documents requested and received, user distribution, delivery times and types (surface mail, fax, Internet), automate repetitive manual procedures and to deal with the various accounting methods used by other libraries. Transmission of documents is carried out by means of an e-mail/Web gateway system supporting document exchange via the Internet, which assists the receiving libraries in retrieving requested documents.