Library launches information
delivery services

by Emily Silverman, special to the Chronicle

wo new information delivery services—UnCover's Subsidized UnMediated Ordering (SUMO) and REVEAL—are now available to campus faculty, staff and graduate students.

     SUMO, a document delivery service, allows users to order full-text journal articles directly and receive delivery by fax. REVEAL is an automated current awareness service, which delivers tables of contents of journals and citations for new books by e-mail.

     Both services are subsidized by the Libraries and are available at no charge to faculty, staff, and graduate students.

     SUMO and REVEAL supplement campus library resources and offer users the flexibility of searching for and receiving materials 24 hours a day without librarian mediation. The SUMO document delivery service offers access to 18,000 journals (dating from 1988 to the present) in the UnCover database. Users may order fax delivery of articles in journal titles and journal volumes not owned by the Libraries and for which publishers grant delivery. UnCover faxes articles to the location specified in the user's profile, typically within 24-48 hours. Users may request delivery to a fax machine of their choice, including the Interlibrary Loan Office fax machine (7-3114) in the Du Bois Library.

     UnCover SUMO is a self-service operation available 24 hours a day throughout the year. According to Library staff, it is an excellent alternative to interlibrary loan, as most articles will be delivered within 24 hours.

     Articles can be delivered to one's home or office, and article requests can be monitored online. Traditional Interlibrary Loan services continue to be another available option, with library staff ordering articles for users. Undergraduate students may order articles at a reduced rate, by paying with a credit card. They may also request the same material, free of charge, through Interlibrary Loan (www.library.umass.edu/ILL.html).
UnCover SUMO can be accessed from any computer using a graphical Web browser (www.library.umass.edu/docdel/). Users sign in with the Library barcode number found in the lower right corner of each UCard. (Sign-in requires the first 14 digits of this 15-digit number for validation.) Users will also need to establish a password. Detailed instructions on using UnCover SUMO are available on the Document Delivery Web page.

     UnCover REVEAL is a personalized current awareness service from which journal tables of contents and/or search strategy results are sent directly to the user's personal e-mail account. Users may select up to 50 journal titles for table-of-contents delivery, and store up to 25 keyword and author searches to be matched against new UnCover citations on a weekly basis. Resulting citations will be sent by e-mail. In addition, through "Books-in-Reveal," users can receive e-mail alerts on the latest books published on topics of interest. The Books-in-Reveal feature will run the search terms that the user has stored for new article alerting on a weekly basis against new book titles in the Academic Book Center database. This database averages about 600 new book titles every week.

     For information, contact Anne Moore, Resource Access librarian, at
5-0553 or by e-mail (amoore@library.umass.edu).