Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Purpose - To describe the services offered by FIZ Karlsruhe.
Design/methodology/approach - Descriptive.
Findings - FIZ AutoDoc is suitable for end-users without specific knowledge of document delivery services. The depth of integrating FIZ AutoDoc into a company's full-text supply and the degree of using it are arbitrary and depend on each company's specific situation. The whole spectrum of sci-tech literature is made available: journal articles, reports, patent documents, books, etc., whatever publishers and scientific libraries offer. The usage via a portal on the web, integrated in intranets, or linked with other information providers' systems, makes FIZ AutoDoc the solution for all full-text requirements.
Originality/value - Provides an insider description of an important document supplier both in Germany and internationally which uses the collections of other libraries to satisfy customer demand. Some trend statistics of demand are given.
Keywords Electronic document delivery, Document handling, Text retrieval, Information brokers
Paper type General review
Introduction
FIZ Karlsruhe produces and markets scientific and technical information services in print and electronic form worldwide. Its most important business area is the operation of STN International in Europe since 1984. The STN databases offer a wealth of information in all fields of science and technology. In most cases the databases contain just the bibliographic data and an abstract from the original publication, and customers need to order the full texts of the articles in which they are interested. In the early days of online searching there was an inconvenient disruption in the provision of information. Within a few minutes of online searching you could find publications which exactly hit the target of your search - but the full texts of the articles had to be ordered offline, which was very time-consuming.
The first step to speed up this process was the introduction of the ORDER command, soon after the launch of STN. With the ORDER command STN customers could send orders for copies of articles to different libraries that cooperated with FIZ Karlsruhe. The ordered documents and corresponding invoices were sent directly to the customers.
Ordering online with the ORDER command was much more comfortable than visiting a library and ordering or copying the articles there, but with the ORDER command users still had to choose the library where their...