Secure Electronic Delivery
You can receive your journal articles or conference papers direct to your desktop via the British Library's Secure Electronic Delivery (SED) service.
Rather than receiving a photocopy in the post you will be sent an e-mail carrying a link to your article as an encrypted PDF document.
The advantages of this service include:
- Cost: It is slightly cheaper than requesting a print copy.
- Convenience: Articles can be accessed from your preferred e-mail account wherever you are.
- Speed: Cutting out postal and courier deliveries means that you receive your articles sooner.
- Quality: Articles are scanned to order providing high quality reproduction.
How to access this service
You will need a recent version of Adobe Reader and the FileOpen Plug-in on the PC you intend to use to receive your documents. University PCs already have these as part of the standard desktop.
However, if you want to open your documents elsewhere you may have to download free versions of both from the Internet: Adobe Reader, FileOpen plug-in.
You can check your PC is set up correctly by attempting to open a test document on the British Library's web pages.
Once you have opened the test document successfully it should read:
Important things you need to know
When you receive the e-mail from the British Library the link to your article will remain live for 30 days.
Unfortunately, owing to Copyright Restrictions you are only able to print your document once. In theory you can print your document up to 14 days after the original download, but this only applies on your own computer, not to machines in public use such as those in the Library and Computing Centre.
We strongly recommend that you print your document as soon as you open it and check your printer has enough paper and toner before attempting to do so. If your printer fails or jams please contact Inter-library Loans and we will attempt to re-supply.
