A. Fax delivery of articles requested through the normal ILL procedures.
The standard practice is for the article to be photocopied from the printed journal issue, which is often inside a bound volume, and then fed into a fax machine with an automatic feed. This is the most commonly available technology and is
routinely use
d across the U.S. for "rush" requests. Non-rush requests are sent by courier (within the SUS) and UPS or U.S. mail (to other libraries). Articles sent by traditional fax machines are sent over long distance direct dial telephone lines and thus incur sta
ndard Suncom long distance phone charges. If the receiving fax uses thermal paper, the article is usually photocopied onto plain paper--an added cost.
The latest version of fax technology combines the photocopy machine and the fax machine into one piece of equipment. The photocopy image is transferred directly into the memory buffer of the fax portion of the machine and is ready for transmission.
his eliminates a paper step and saves both paper and time, but there is no visual verification that the article was properly and clearly copied during the copy process. The combined copy/fax machine actually contains an embedded PC which has been preprog
rammed with the features available on the machine. Several SUS libraries have this more sophisticated device. Transmission is still over normal long distance dial phone lines.
B. PC-based scanning systems.
This technique utilizes a general purpose 386 PC, a flat-bed scanner and a laser printer. As with fax, the source of the article is an issue or bound volume in print form. Articles are scanned and stored on the PC hard disk until an operator sends th
m out using software specially written for this purpose. Incoming articles can also be stored on the hard disk or can be transmitted directly to the laser printer. This equipment is somewhat similar to the copy/fax machine, but there are several importa
nt differences. First, the scanning resolution is superior to fax. Second, gray scale is possible depending on the scanner used. Third, the laser printer quality is superior to most fax machines.
The best known product for this type of journal article delivery is the Ariel software developed by the Research Libraries Group. The Ariel software is designed to send the articles over the Internet, thus avoiding the cost of the long distance tel
ne circuits.
A variation of the PC-based fax system is one which can accept input from a standard fax machine as well as a scanner. This system can also deliver the article to a fax machine as well as to a laser printer. The advantage of this system is first that
it can deliver articles direct to fax machines in faculty offices. Secondly, it can accept articles from fax machines in branch libraries. This obviates the need to remove the journal from the branch library. Ohio State University has developed this s
ystem for use by the CIC schools (Big 10 universities and the University of Chicago). Ariel can route articles to fax machines for printing but cannot accept fax input.
Requests for articles may be made through standard ILL procedures, and are thus relatively slow, or they may be made using methods described below.
C. Commercial rapid delivery services.
Several companies promise rapid delivery of articles for a fee. The fees include royalties as well as the delivery firm's charges. Fees range from $7.00 on up depending on the company and the royalties, but most articles will fall in the $7 to $20 ra
ge. The major firms offering this service are Faxon, OCLC, UMI, Engineering Index, RLG, CARL, and Dialog. With all of these services, the user must first be connected to a database that shows which articles can be obtained. CARL, for example, maintains
a database of journal citations for approximately 11,000 journals. The citation database, called UnCover because it goes under the journal cover to the table of contents page, is stored on a computer in Denver. CARL offers access to UnCover to librarie
s for an annual fee. After finding a desired article, a user can enter a command to request the article. The CARL system will prompt the user for relevant information such as the user's name, destination where the article is to be delivered and billing
instructions (account number, VISA number). The article will be shipped to a local fax machine within 24 hours.
D. In-house databases of journal articles.
Some firms are beginning to offer electronic versions of journal articles to libraries for local storage and retrieval. The articles are offered in CD-ROM form for use on a library LAN, or are they available on tape for loading into a library's online
catalog system. The two leading companies are University Microfilms Inc. (UMI) and Information Access Corporation (IAC). IAC offers articles covering business and general academic areas. UMI has three products: business, science and general academic.
In order to know what journal articles are available, the library must have the citation database from the same company for the same subject area. If an article is available electronically, its citation will have a special field which indicates to the u
ser that the article is available. If the user requests the article, it is printed on a laser printer nearby in the library. Mainframe versions could print the article in the library or route the article to a faculty office. UMI charges for each articl
e printed. IAC charges a lump sum annual fee in lieu of use fees.
UMI and IAC also use different technologies to store their journal articles. UMI scans the pages of printed journals and preserves the entire page image including advertisements and continuation pages where two or three articles may share the same pag
. Each page is preserved as a bit map image of the original. On its LAN version, UMI can display the article pages on PC monitors. However, such images cannot display on older style terminals, such as the current LUIS terminals, so users would have to
request a printout based solely on the citation information. By contrast, IAC converts the text of articles to ASCII characters and leaves only graphs, pictures and other non-text material in bit-mapped image format. Ads and other material that might ha
ve shared a page with the original article are not kept as part of the article. IAC's electronic version of an article thus does not preserve the format and appearance of the original. However, the user can display the text part of an article on older t
erminals and can use information in the text to decide whether to print the complete article. With either vendor, PCs with high resolution monitors would be required to display the image data.
E. Electronic journals.
A new publication medium is evolving in which articles do not originate in print form, but in electronic or machine-readable form. At the simplest level, these are ASCII text files available via the Internet. A new journal created by OCLC and AAAS, T
e Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials (OJCCT), is an example of the direction towards which such publications are moving. To take full advantage of the features of OJCCT, users need PCs with high resolution monitors running Windows software that en
ables viewing images and navigating the links through the publication.
olutions A and B require copyright compliance, but do allow considerable "fair use" privileges. Solutions C and D achieve copyright compliance through contracts and royally payments with no provision for "fair use" privileges. The jury is still out
solution E in this regard.
The five methods of article delivery described above are not mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary, libraries will rely on all five to provide a complete delivery service, with the ubiquitous (group 3) fax machine declining over time from its current p
osition of one-and-only tool for the electronic delivery of articles to that of a lesser used tool of last-resort.