National Library of Australia - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 67 | February 2004


Stepping Beyond the Boundaries—Document Delivery in a New Age

Kinetica Document Delivery (KDD) users can now order documents from suppliers outside of the traditional library-to-library arrangement.

Last year, a trial was conducted between KDD and the Canadian Document Delivery Agency (CISTI). KDD users searched the CISTI catalogue from within KDD and requested items from CISTI. The trial was very successful, and the arrangement with CISTI has now been formalised with a joint agreement.

In October last year a similar arrangement was made with Infotrieve Australia Pty Ltd, a U.S.-based commercial document supplier with a local office in Melbourne.  Infotrieve Australia Pty Ltd is a major supplier of documents to Australian and New Zealand libraries, and using KDD to request documents from Infotrieve is already proving to be very popular.

Many KDD customers previously requested documents from CISTI and Infotrieve.  However now all of their requesting is brought together in a single interface (KDD), and they can take advantage of the KDD Payments Service to administer the financial side of requesting. There is no need to worry about currency conversions, maintaining an infrastructure for billing and receipting and juggling multiple systems to manage interlibrary loan activity. KDD takes care of all of this, so document delivery staff are freed up for other important tasks.

KDD staff will continue to identify and evaluate additional services that can be integrated with KDD for the benefit of customers.

For any further information, contact Lynn Hedley (lhedley@nla.gov.au) or phone the Kinetica help Desk on 1800 026 155.

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