Such is the subject line of an email I got from the NRC-CISTI people last week. NRC-CISTI is Canada's National Research Council -- Canada Institute of Scientific and Technical Informamtion. In other words, Canada's national science library. Many of you probably know them for their document delivery service.
The basic message is that the document delivery service has been outsourced to a US company:
NRC-CISTI, Canada's national science library is changing and we are energized by the possibilities as we move forward in the transformation process announced in February 2009.Today, we are pleased to announce that Infotrieve, Inc., a leader in information center technology development and document delivery for more than 20 years, will be collaborating with NRC-CISTI on providing document delivery services for our clients and business partners. Infotrieve will be acting on NRC-CISTI's behalf within Canada and will be providing exclusive services to our US and International clients. The transition will begin immediately and the process will be completed by March 31, 2010.
Over the next three to four months NRC-CISTI and Infotrieve will work closely together to transition all clients, starting with US clients, to Infotrieve's world-class document delivery services using award winning technology for sourcing and delivering document orders. You will be able to recognize these orders by the accompanying coversheet or e-mail, which will reference Infotrieve. It is important to note that during this transition you should continue to use the same ordering methods you have been using to find and order documents, and you will be billed for services according to the identical price list currently used by NRC-CISTI. There will not be any changes to your current workflow for finding, ordering, or receiving document. NRC-CISTI will also continue to offer licensed access to information content and information services to the National Research Council. More details on what to expect can be found in the NRC-CISTI and Infotrieve Collaboration Question & Answer Guide.
Infotrieve has the fastest document delivery turnaround time in the industry which is achieved by leveraging over 40 million citations available within their own database and Infotrieve's STM Library™ of managed print collections. Add to that the world renowned NRC-CISTI Canadian national science library collection with more than 50,000 serial titles, 800,000 books, conference proceedings, plus 2 million technical reports, and indexed journals in many languages and you've got an enormous collection of scientific, technical and medical (STM) content literally at your fingertips. This combination of content, expertise and technology will enable us to provide NRC-CISTI clients with improved services including faster turnaround times and higher document quality.
We will be providing you with regular updates as we progress through this transition. You can also consult our website or contact us at 613-998-8544 or 1-800-668-1222 (toll-free) or info.cisti@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca.
I wrote about this issue a while back on the old blog, so you can check that out if you're interested in my opinions on what's happening at CISTI. My next post will have a short Q&A with the CISTI communications apparatus.
Information Science
Education
