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Editor: Robert M. Joven, MLS Information & Education Services Ext. 8493 E-mail - joven@uchc.edu

A New Way to Send and Receive Interlibrary Loan Documents

by Sheryl Bai, MLS - Head, Network Systems

UCHC library recently implemented a new feature in Ariel 3.0 which allows Interlibrary Loan department to send and receive articles electronically via the web server.

With the previous version, documents could only be sent through email in TIFF format. Patrons need to have a graphic format converter to convert the format from TIFF to PDF. And in most cases, the sizes of the graphic files were so big that they took a lot of space from patrons' email boxes.

The new feature in Ariel 3.0 allows the library to send and receive documents in electronic format via Ariel workstation. It converts scanned Ariel document (TIFF images) into Portable Document Files (PDF) and sends documents to a Web server and schedules their maintenance. The new feature also automatically generates a patron PIN number for secure access. When the document is available for the patron to view, it automatically sends a notice to the patron with the URL and pin number indicating where and how to access the document.

Patron interface (see figure 1) lists each document by a textual link, the number of times viewed, date posted, and status. Documents will be deleted automatically after 14 days or 5 views. Documents, however, can be deleted after initial viewing.