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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 41 | October 1999


Kinetica Document Delivery Service begins

The Kinetica Document Delivery Service was launched as a pilot service on Wednesday 8 September, with about 350 requests lodged by users on the first day. The pilot service operated for a week to allow users to manage the changeover from the ABN interlibrary system to Kinetica Document Delivery at their own pace. Full changeover occurred on 15 September with users entering all new requests on Kinetica Document Delivery from that date.

The Kinetica Document Delivery system is now functioning under almost full load, and availability and stability have been good. Users are rapidly learning the system and the National Library’s Document Supply Service reported on 17 September that incoming requests on Kinetica were matching the numbers formerly received on ABN ILL.

While some processes are quick to perform, certain operations such as creating a request and viewing details of requests can be slow, especially at peak periods. Kinetica staff are monitoring the response time to measure system performance under the increasing load. The National Library’s IT experts have provided additional processing power and made changes to the operating environment, to address response time issues, and the vendors are now concentrating on tuning the software. Further improvements can be expected over the coming weeks.

Many users have been asking questions and making suggestions for future enhancements as they learn to use the system. The questions are being used as a basis for issuing advice to the user community via the Kinetica-L email list, and suggestions for improvements to the system will be used to establish priorities for the further development of the service.

The Kinetica Document Delivery Manual, September 1999, is available on the Kinetica information pages at http://www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/kineticadoc.html. Also available here are User Guide No. 8: Requirements for Web Cached Access to the Kinetica Document Delivery System, for those users having problems accessing the system, and User Guide No. 9: Kinetica Document Delivery at a Glance, a brief guide to using the service.

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