The Relais Document Delivery System: An Innovative Model for Resource Sharing

This paper describes the Relais document delivery system, which enables libraries to fully automate their interlibrary loan and document delivery processes. Relais has been successfully implemented at the U.S. National Library of Medicine and a predecessor system, IntelliDoc, was successfully implemented at CISTI (Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information). Three central capabilities are described in detail: the use of a scanning workstation to digitize requested documents, the ability to support an array of delivery methods, including electronic delivery, and the ability to retrieve detailed data on requests processed by Relais.