Brief Description

Electronic Document Delivery (EDD) automates the process of converting incoming Ariel files to web-accessible documents. It is currently being beta tested at the Yale Medical Library and is freely available for use/modification/distribution under the GNU General Public License.

Overview

Ariel is a widely-used product of the Research Libraries Group (RLG) which enables internet-based exchange of documents shared between libraries for interlibrary loan. EDD leverages Ariel to enable the delivery of documents to patrons via web, by converting received Ariel files (TIFF images) to easily viewed web documents (PDF images) and automatically notifying patrons via email. At the Yale Medical Library, we post the PDF files to a secured section of our web server, and users can log in through a web form to retrieve their documents. Documents are removed after two weeks. All of this is automated after the ILL staff designates which documents are to be delivered to which patrons.

Version & Technical Specs

NOTE: EDD as described here is no longer under development. We intend to make EDD a production service, using the Prospero codebase which is entirely under GPL. Since Prospero uses the same design and some code from EDD, they are feature-equivalent; Prospero doesn't require VB libraries so it's better than EDD.

If you are interested in what we developed here for historical purposes or otherwise, read on: EDD 1.0b is what we tested at Yale. It's a fairly small Visual Basic 5 application that's been running on Windows NT4. There are a few requirements with the current version:

1. It uses the Adobe Acrobat Capture SDK to automate the tiff to pdf conversion. This can be bought as part of Capture fairly inexpensively at various software outlets. It would be preferable to use freeware to do this instead, but right now, it needs Capture.
2. It depends on a handful of perl scripts for some important pieces (sending email, parsing the Ariel log, retrieving files, etc.). Fortunately, perl runs well on WinNT, and is free.
3. It uses several textfiles, rather than an actual database, to maintain data.

To make EDD work where you are, you will need to download it and run the setup.exe program, get Capture going, and configure the perl pieces (we use a samba connection to a unix machine here for cgi, mail, and file storage... but you could do all of these in NT too). The best way at this point would be to download the source also and read the enclosed *.txt files.

Wishlist

EDD could be easily integrated with an ILL management package. I rewrote it not to depend on MS Access, so it keeps track of everything with delimited text files (mySql would be nice). It would be great to integrate this with a full ILL datamodel or ISO implementation. Rewriting the GUI in Perl/Tk or C++ using GTK+, or the image transform using a free image library (would ImageMagick work?) is the goal for V2.

Download

Available now are EDDbeta and the Visual Basic 5 EDDbeta source files along with several perl scripts.

You might want to do this with the help of a unix+NT savvy type person who has a handle on perl too.

Authors & Acknowledgements

The principal EDD author is Dan Chudnov from the Yale Medical Library. Key support for the project has come from Kenny Marone, Brad Bullis, Carissa Delizio, Vermetha Polite, Faith McGrath, Matt Wilcox, and Gail Harris, all from the Yale Medical Library as well. The project idea was inspired by the NLM DocView work as well as WebEDD from the Marshall University Medical Library.