ABSTRACT
A document delivery service has been available on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University (IU) in one form or another since 1972 when the Librarian for Economics and Political Science began providing faculty of these departments delivery of books and photocopies from the general collections. Beginning in 1982, a formalized document delivery service called Branch Delivery Service was instituted and underwent many changes until stabilizing in 1984. This service offered faculty, administrators and graduate students the ability to receive books, articles, and tables of contents. The only charge was for photocopies at ten cents per page. In 1991, more changes came due to budget restrictions and the service was limited to book delivery and tables of contents for faculty, administrators, and professional staff. Public outcry caused the full service to be re-instituted in the same year. Before being re-instituted, the service underwent a few changes, including a name change to Bloomington Delivery Service (BDS). Because the costs to the library had become prohibitive in providing the service, a fee was instituted to help subsidize some of the costs. Both books and articles were delivered through BDS. The charge for books delivered to an office via campus mail was $1. The charge for articles to be delivered in the mail or electronically was $2 for the first ten pages, and $1 for each additional increment of up to ten pages. Tables of contents were $1 each. The for-fee service was available to faculty, staff, and graduate students. In 1993, the service was expanded to allow undergraduates to place requests as well. The fee served its purpose to help offset some of the costs as well as to prevent any one person from requesting an inordinate amount of items. The number of requests dropped significantly once the fee was instituted. In December of 1990 there were 2,123 BDS requests compared to only 582 requests in December of 1991, after the fees were imposed.
