DOCUMENT DELIVERY SERVICE OF INSDOC:

INSDOC has been offering DDS at national level since 1952. The service is provided utilizing the entire country's resources including those of National Science Library and the Pilot Electronic Library of INSDOC. The requests are received by mail, fax, telex and e-mail. The location of required document is identified using the compterised National Union Catalogue of Scientific Serials in India (NUCSSI) maintained by the Centre. NUCSSI database contains serials holdings information of about 850 science libraries in India. When requests for document delivery are received, they are sorted out on the basis of availability of source documents. Firstly, the requests are serviced from INSDOC's own library collection, then from Delhi based libraries and finally, the requests are met from other libraries in India or foreign Countries. INSDOC supplies copies of documents from its own library collection of about 8000 periodicals including 2110 journals in electronic form. Some of the most important Delhi based libraries utilized for document delivery purposes are Indian Agricultural Research Institute Library, National Medical Library and Delhi University Library. The three regional centres of INSDOC located at Bangalore, Calcutta and Madras supplement the document delivery service of INSDOC utilizing the resources of the regions. Using the local resources, on an average 73% requests are met within 2 weeks and 85% within 4 weeks.Procurement of a document copy from other Indian libraries from foreign countries usually takes about 8-12 weeks time. About 22,000 requests are handled every year and of them are satisfied. Requests are received from universities, industries, R&D centres and foreign countries and also from individuals. Maximum number of demands (over 80%) are for journal articles. To improve the speed of the service INSDOC is acquiring over 2000 full-text journals on CD-ROM. Some of the full-text journal databases on CD-ROM, subscribed by INSDOC, are ADONIS, Extra Med, Health Reference Centre (biomedical periodicals), General Periodicals on Disk, Business Periodicals on Disk, 1EE/IEEE Periodicals on Disk (engineering periodicals) and Computer Select (computer science periodicals). Requests for journal articles available at INSDOC on CD-ROM, are satisfied immediately using INSDOC's CD-ROM workstation.