Marta Zaetta is an analyst and software developer at the CNR Bologna Research Area Library. She has a bachelor degree in Computer Engineering and she studies Information Technology & Management at the University of Bologna.

Daniele De Matteis is a Graphic and Web Interface designer and he is graduating in Communication Sciences at the University of Bologna.

Giacomo Tenaglia is a graduating student in Computer Science at the CNR Bologna Research Area Library, with a thesis in Federated Authentication and Shibboleth.

Alessandro Tugnoli
National Research Council, Bologna Research Area Library, Italy

Alessandro Tugnoli is a senior analyst and software developer at the CNR Bologna Research Area Library. He has a degree in Computer Science.

E. Beghell
National Research Council, Bologna Research Area Library, Italy

Enrico Beghelli is a graduating student in Computer Science at the CNR Bologna Research Area Library, with a thesis in Library Reference Management Software.

Abstract

This paper presents the most recent progress and implementation of the NILDE (Network Inter-Library Document Exchange) system, that was developed by the National Research Council (CNR) Bologna Research Area Library.

NILDE is a web based document delivery (dd) software for libraries and end-users, linked to the Italian National Serials Catalogue (ACNP) and OpenURL-compliant. It allows libraries to manage the entire work-flow of dd activities, both borrowing and lending. The main advantages for libraries are the provision of synthetic and analytical statistics, provision of dd performance indicators “fill-rate” and “turn-around time”, and support for secure electronic delivery via Internet by means of a file-uploading/web-server. The main advantages for end-users are the possibility to forward a document delivery request to their library from any OpenURL-compliant database (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus, Scifinder, PubMed, CSA Illumina and SFX platforms) and to check the
status of their requests.

NILDE was born in 2001 as a research project with the aim to improve document delivery services within the Italian public and academic landscape, yet in about 5 years its development has led librarians to perceive NILDE as an essential daily working tool, used in an increasing number of libraries.

As well as new challenges in electronic publishing (such as journal price increase, cross access and licensing issues) have led libraries from all over the world to organize in consortia, the increment of NILDE users has allowed to build up a cooperation network to promote resource sharing based on a degree of standard quality of service and fair
behaviours, and to establish an efficient communication channel among libraries, consortia and publishers. It has been proved that, to accomplish effective resource sharing, libraries should be willing to fulfill document delivery on a reciprocal
basis, both requesting and providing documents. In particular, each library should make its best effort to expose and update its holdings by actively participating in collective national OPACs (such as ACNP) or in Italian META-OPACs.

It has been shown how, by adhering to these principles, libraries start up a virtuous cycle (what economists call “network effect”) within NILDE network, increasing its own value.

As a result, the number of NILDE libraries have accelerated their growth rate, showing that the above said resource sharing policy is a real building block for success: NILDE is presently used by more than 500 Italian libraries and about 3.000 registered end-users. Given all that, and the need to guarantee scalability and high performance operations, the NILDE development team decided to rethink the overall system architecture, which ended-up in the design of a brand new piece of software.

New technologies, referred to as Web 2.0, have been incorporated into NILDE, making it an even more user-oriented and friendly tool for document delivery and scholar work. NILDE’s new features are:

• a software-like user interface;
• fully customizable and adaptive environment;
• improved user control over its own data and operations;
• a dedicated end-user module to manage personal bibliographical references, allowing users to easily import, organize and export references, and to initiate a document delivery request when the document is not directly accessible;
• federated end-user authentication via Shibboleth; this way, NILDE provides inter-institutional Single-Sign-On and federated identity management to the organizations belonging to the network;
• a watermarking module and a hard-copy module, making on-the-fly conversion of pdf-text documents into pdf-image documents, in order to improve secure electronic transmission over the Internet and to implement copyright protection;
• multilingual support;
• compliance with W3C guidelines for an accessible and usable web development;
• use of cutting edge web technologies: MySQL 5, PHP 5, XHTML 1.0, CSS2,
• Ajax.