Negotiating the Digital Library: Document Delivery

Academic literature, the raw material of scholarly work, is an important resource, and one to which the various actors and groups within the university have differential access. One means by which this access is mediated and controlled takes the form of technology, and it could be argued that the technological librarian is both participant in and arbiter of contesting claims on this resource. Hence the librarian has a key role in deciding between the final resource access outcomes as they are made durable in the physical and virtual arrangements that make up the library. Within the rapidly changing field of document delivery, the eLib funded FIDDO Project aims to provide library managers and others with reliable and relevant information to support policy decisions. The FIDDO project has interviewed senior librarians about the future of document delivery. The interviews have been transcribed and analysed with the support of the NUD*IST software package. The findings address some of the issues raised above as they relate to various possible models of document access, and so contribute toward an understanding of how the winners and losers will come about in any new set of arrangements for document delivery.