Intercontinental Document Delivery: The AUA/FAU Experience

Abstract

While interlibrary loan and document delivery service within North America have undergone near expansion, change, and development over the past two decades, international resource sharing cooperation between libraries has proceeded at a slower pace. Reasons for this include the significantly longer time it can take to send materials overseas, and the added postal expense for international delivery. RLGs introduction to Ariel, a digital document delivery system, in the early 1990s, provided a rapid and cost effective alternative to earlier methods of transferring information, such as photocopying and mailing it, or sending it by fax machine. Since documents are digitized and transferred over the Internet, the lending library does not incur the expenses involved with mailing (e.g., postage) or faxing (e.g., long distance phone charges). While this does not solve potential problems involved with sending returnable loans overseas, it lends itself extremely well to transmitting copies. The following article describes a pilot project in overseas document delivery via Ariel, conducted by the American University of Armenia (AUA) and Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Background information on the history of Armenia and AUA is provided, followed by discussions of the origins of the project, the development of a formal agreement to provide guidelines, implementation of Ariel at AUA, and evaluation and the impact of the project on AUA library users.