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Summary

DocView is software that many libraries are adopting as part of their document delivery strategy. To aid its development, DocView’s developers asked users to participate in a survey. Ninety responses were received. The survey period covered 4,050 days of use, or nearly 11 person years. It is hoped that the results of this survey will help a library decide whether DocView could find a niche in their document delivery strategy. As this survey shows, important reasons why libraries and patrons may choose DocView are that a large majority of its users believe that:

• DocView has improved the way they receive library documents.
• They want to continue having documents delivered to their desktop.
• They would recommend DocView to their colleagues.
• DocView is easy to learn to use.

Although DocView has several useful features, it is apparent from the survey results that one feature nearly all testers used was printing. Having the ability to read a journal article from paper is apparently an ability that users desire. While having an image display on a screen has its merits, having it on paper seems to merit even more. Many features that make it easier to use images on the screen were either underutilized or not tested by many users. These included electronic bookmarks, copy to clipboard, image rotation, zoom, shrink, and document management. The results seem to imply that minimal features needed by document reception/utilization software should first include printing, and a second, less critical feature would be document viewing on a screen. So, despite all the intermediate electronics, information that originated on paper ends up on paper.