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[The British Library Research and Development Department recently awarded its largest grant — £794,000 over 3 years — for a quadrapartite project to investigate a wide range of factors affecting the creation and exchange of electronic information. Technical, human and organisational aspects will all be considered. The following pages set out the background to the project and describe the main areas for research. Though it is not directly relevant to library housekeeping, the project will look at many of the issues which are beginning to interest librarians, particularly as they move towards greater networking of library services and information. Ed]

Provides an introduction to some of the current work being done on electronic document delivery services within the European Libraries Programme and relates this to other national initiatives. Seeks to draw up a list of issues that must be addressed as the area develops and, in particular, to outline the considerations that must be given to initiatives within the next phase of the Framework Programme.

As part of Quartet, a research project funded by the British Library, University College London (UCL) has been investigating the use of digital telephone networks for document delivery. The system will facilitate the transmission of electronically encoded documents, such as scientific journal articles, usually in facsimile image format, from a central archive to a requesting client, and the intention is to investigate the technical and economic viability of basing such a system on ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network). Present experiments involve the use of Group IV Telefax across IDA, British Telecom's prototype ISDN network, and Megastream links between UCL and the British Library's Document Supply Centre at Boston Spa (near York). This paper is based on a talk given to the UK Online Users Group at Aslib, London, in November 1987.

Technology, politics and the marketplace: While the underlying technology for constructing networks continues to evolve very rapidly, forces from the ‘political’ sphere and from the marketplace may be having an even greater impact on the evolution of information and communication systems.

Introduction Electronic mail, in the broadest sense; is not by any means a new technology. From the earliest days of telegraph; back in the 19th centuary; electronic media have been used to transmit textual information between distant points of the globe. Today the humble but ubiquitous telex machine is perhaps the best representative of this form of communication.

Desktop publishing has emerged in the last few years as perhaps the most exciting new application of the microcomputer. Prior to this development, the only way of producing high quality printed output from computer generated text was to use elaborate embedded formatting codes for driving a typesetter (as in the Unix troff system) or else to use very expensive purpose built equipment (such as that developed for the newspaper printing industry). Thanks to desktop publishing the situation has changed dramatically. With the aid of software packages such as Ventura Publisher or Pagemaker, low cost microcomputers and laser printers can be used to produce high quality camera ready output in a great variety of formats and with sophisticated typographic control. With such cost savings, the quality of presentation material can be greatly improved. It becomes affordable for even small organisations to produce, in‐house, properly printed brochures, newsletters, factsheets, and other forms of documentation. This move towards a higher quality of published information helps immeasurably to improve the public image and credibility of the organisation. With greater control over the printing process it also becomes easier to provide more frequent updates of material. Thus information can be more timely and accurate, as well as better presented. In addition, it may no longer be necessary to print off large numbers of any particular document at any one time: short runs and ‘publication on demand’ become feasible with DTP. Even online storage and document delivery over communications networks become possible, particularly with the adoption of a standard page description language (such as PostScript). In summary, desktop publishing makes communication easier, both by making the printed product more readable and by enabling a whole range of additional services to be added; such as frequent updating, demand publishing and electronic archiving. New methods of document distribution, using electronic mail or other digital networks, also become possible. In this sense, it may represent just the first step towards a radical change in the way we communicate.

Based on a talk given during the final session of the FASTDOC Workshop on Electronic Document Delivery held at the University of Patras, 4‐6 March 1996. Provides an outline of some of the main issues that electronic document delivery services must now confront and relates these to the many project reports given during the workshop (largely work carried out under the European Libraries Programme).

Discusses an attempt by the British Library Document Supply Centre to exploit the capabilities of electronic mail linked to satellite transmission as a channel for large scale document delivery. Examines the background, transmission procedure, mode of operation, and future directions for electronic document delivery. Surmises that satellite transmission′s most serious competition comes from ISDN, although the likelihood is that the two will merge to carry a multitude of services.

This paper summarises the development, current position and future proposed enhancement of the University of East Anglia (UEA)'s electronic document delivery service. The service has been developed in conjunction with the British Library Document Supply Centre (BLDSC) and began in September 1993. It now handles up to 20 documents a day, via the Library. It is hoped to transfer to desktop delivery, subject to copyright restrictions.

Since the concept of provision aimed to attract particular groups from the community to use libraries began, library staff at all levels have discussed whether these materials should have a separate section of their own or be integrated with other items in the main classification sequence.