European Association for Health Information and Libraries
Abstract
Electronic journals have become an important tool for scientists and medical practitioners over last few years. This paper reports the results of a survey undertaken at Biblioteca Centrale dell'Area Biomedica to determine the effects of e-journals availability on Document Delivery activities. Aim of the study was also to consider the cost-benefit aspects of the direct access to biomedical literature by library patrons.
In 2003 our library gathered access to Elsevier ScienceDirect through CILEA mirror (about 1800 e-journals); we have also access by several years to the services of some others e-journals providers (Blackwell, Highwire, Ingenta, Ebsco, etc.).
We have compared the data concerning DocDel Service during a six months period in 2003 with the statistical findings of a corresponding period in the year 2002 (http://pacs.unica.it/biblio/docdel2002.ppt).
We have studied the number of potential users versus real users: the target population consisted of biomedical professors and researchers belonging to University of Cagliari.
The results of the survey are shown in a series of tables and graphics.
The statistical findings analysis indicate a considerable decrease (about 25%) of the number of documents requested and supplied by our DocDel Service. This also suggests that print journal usage decrease significantly with the introduction of online journals in favour of an increase in the number of articles directly retrieved by patrons.
Due to higher availability of online documents, our patrons generally retrieve a number of documents greater than that usually requested to the library reducing drastically the working load of our DocDel Service staff
