Heal-link: using NILDE to provide Public Organizations in Greece with articles from HEAL-Link’s electronic subscriptions

This paper is about the collaboration and cooperation in both software and policies between NILDE, Library of CNR and HEAL-Link. Moreover is about the need of HEAL-Link to acquire and use software in order to fulfill its requirements to setup a document delivery service for the Greek Public Organizations (Hospitals, City Libraries, etc.). HEAL-Link was founded 15 years ago with the aim to provide electronic resources to the members of HEAL-Link. Main goals of HEAL-Link are: −− The collaboration among its members, by establishing common policy on journals subscriptions, to promote rational growth of journals’ collections among members, and achieve both savings and access to a greater number of electronic sources in order to meet the educational and research needs of the users of the participating institutions. −− The joint subscriptions and the management of remote access to electronic resources and information services, including electronic journals. For many years a large number of Public Organizations have been consistently expressing their wish to become active members of HEAL-Link in order to have full-text access to the subscribed electronic resources. But this is very difficult and the main reason is their limited budget to contribute to the cost of the electronic subscriptions of HEAL-Link. Therefore, under the NSRF (National Strategic Reference Framework) 2007–2013, we decided to take advantage of the interlibrary loan terms of the agreements we have with the publishers and setup a document delivery service. After research for software that is used among libraries internationally, we have decided to use the NILDE software. With the great cooperation of the people at CNR, together we managed to make all the necessary changes and modifications in the software so that it can be used for HEAL-Link’s document delivery service. An agreement was signed between CNR and HEAL-Link describing the terms under which NILDE will be used and the terms of collaboration. After signing the agreement, we had a one-week training in Bologna on learning NILDE fundamentals and its source code, and also made most of the changes needed to implement the HEAL-Link version. We were very careful with each needed change in the software so as not to affect the total functionality of the software. As an example of the changes needed in our version only HEAL-Link acts as a lending library. The Libraries of the Public Organizations, that are not allowed to access directly the full-text of the electronic journals, can make a “Document Delivery Request” through NILDE. HEAL-Link sends a copy of the electronic scientific article to them according to the clauses included in the HEAL-Link license agreements with the publishers