NILDE, a system designed to manage and to evaluate the quality of Document Delivery services: a case study in Italian biomedical libraries

NILDE (Network Inter-Library Document Exchange) is an Internet-based system designed to manage Document Delivery Service (DDS) in libraries in order to: take advantage of new Internet technologies, support cooperation and resource sharing among Italian libraries, reduce DDS management costs, achieve short turnaround times in satisfying DDS requests. The server NILDE supports the working flow of the activities in the entire DDS process, from request to delivery of a document. Also, NILDE provides a proprietary secure document transmission system based on the Internet. Secure electronic document transmission could reduce delivery costs such as xerox copying and postal or fax expenses. Receiving libraries benefit the most from such a system, since they would receive high quality documents in very short time. The NILDE software was designed and developed at the Central Library of the CNR (Italian National Research Council) in Bologna. In the three years period 2002-2004 more than 400 italian libraries have experimented the system. In this paper we present the case study of the BIBLIOSAN Project, funded by the Italian Ministery of Health, where 52 italian libraries have used the NILDE system in order to support resource sharing and mutual cooperation and to standardize quality of service . Our experience shows that a new Document Delivery organisational model based on the exploitation of new technologies together with the adequate training of library personnel can be easily applied in libraries without sizeable investments in economic or human resources. When adopted by each single library cooperating in the document exchange process, the model brings enormous advantages to final users.