Abstract:
The Consortium of Sri Lankan Academic Libraries (CONSAL) established a Document Delivery
Service through the British Library Document Supply Service (BLDSS) in the year 2017. This service
was funded by the University Grants Commission (UGC) of Sri Lanka and was co-ordinated by the
University of Colombo. The objective of this service was to find scholarly literature, which was not
locally available, and was expected to cater to the needs of all the academics attached to the state
university sector. Electronic download formats were used to disseminate the articles. Initially, a trial
project was implemented by depositing 2500 GBP with the commercial document supplier- British
Library. The total number of articles, which have been requested through this service from 11th of
November 2017 to 25th of November 2020, was eighty-four (84). Out of them, 37 (44%) were fulfilled
through the British Library; 19 (23%) articles were found via other networks and 26 (31%) of the
articles were unavailable. Only six (06) state universities; Peradeniya, Jaffna, Colombo,
Sabaragamuwa, Sri Jayewardenepura and Moratuwa have made article requests so far. Among them,
the University of Peradeniya has made the highest number of requests (56%).The majority of the
requests (69%) have been made from the field of Medicine. The article delivery statistics indicate that
this service is yet to be fully utilized by the scholarly community belonging to different educational
streams, attached to the state university sector. A user satisfaction survey must be conducted to gather
suggestions to improve the usage of this service. As there is a considerable percentage of unavailable
scholarly material in the British Library, a mechanism should be developed to utilize the existing
funds to access this inaccessible content by collaborating with many commercial document suppliers
similar to British Library and developing an online payment system to purchase scholarly material
from direct publishers.
