Testing Orr's document delivery test on biomedical journals in South Africa

This paper describes the use of a document delivery test (DDT) to measure the availability of biomedical research journals in South African health sciences libraries. The methodology employed was developed twenty years ago by a team of researchers from the Institute for the Advancement of Medical Communication under the direction of R. H. Orr. The testing of the methodology was in itself an objective of the present research. A citation pool consisting of 307 items was constructed from references to journal articles in papers published in 1989 by South African biomedical researchers. The availability of each article was determined at each of seven medical library sites; the performance was measured and presented as an arithmetical value or document delivery capability index (CI). The results of the tests show a high level of availability, ranging from CI = 81.68 to CI = 92.97 for the journals sampled. The DDT methodology was found to be practical, applicable to such studies, and flexible. Its use is recommended for similar studies.