Document delivery: the perspective of industrial information services Available to Purchase

Managing the acquisition of journal articles against specific requests is part of the traditional portfolio of the industrial information service. In industry, holdings policies have always assumed that only journals with a high incidence of relevant articles should be held in‐house. Within the UK, the British Library’s Document Supply Centre is the dominant supplier and many organizations have developed electronic processing systems for streamlining request management. Industry is now being faced with an increasing choice of document suppliers ready to fax articles worldwide. At the same time the launch of products such as Chemical Abstracts’ SciFinder service offers the possibility of browsing from title through abstract to a full document at the desktop. The industrial information service in the late 1990s is now faced with the challenge of fundamentally re‐appraising the needs for document provision in a situation where, apparently, everything will be possible ‐ but not just yet.