Timesaving and procedural improvement of an electronic SDI service

In 2000, the Rector Gabriel Ferraté Library [Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya] began a new service, D’interès, in which e-mail was used to distribute SDI listings. The only parts of this service that originally had been automated were those that were “visible” to the user: the procedure for subscribing to the bulletins performed by users via a web interface and the delivery of these bulletins. After one year an evaluation of the service demonstrated certain positive points, such as user satisfaction, but from  an internal perspective, there was too little time for adequately preparing the bulletins due to the monthly frequency and the labour-intensive  compilation process. The library therefore proposed an internal restructuring of the service in order to have mechanisms to permit the information resources to be handled in a more agile fashion. Two databases were created: the first to handle the information sources that provide the resources and the second, to handle the resources that later would be sent to subscribers. At the same time, the selection of information sources and resources was improved, together with a restructuring of the tasks related to electronically editing the bulletins, in  order to make the entire process faster.