Electronic Journals Betty Sawyers 11 Oct 1991 18:19 UTC
I recently placed a subscription for Psycoloquy on behalf of the OSU Libraries and received a message back from one of the editors suggesting that we make the journal available to our users electronically rather than in paper form. I have since informed him that we _are_ making electronic journals and newsletters available to our users in electronic form and described the methods that we are using. I thought that the subscribers to this list might find the information of interest as well. At OSU we are making electronic journals and newsletters available electronically over OSU's campus-wide information service as a joint effort of University Libraries and Academic Computing Services. Those titles that we categorize as "journals" contain substantive articles or works of fiction that are refereed. For these titles, all current and back issues will be accessible online. Those categorized as "newsletters" generally contain news of topical interest to an audience in a particular subject area; only the most current issues of these titles will be available online. All electronic journals and newsletters will have entries in the Libraries' online catalog, indicating that they are considered a part of the Libraries' collections, but they will be accessed through the campus-wide information network operated by Academic Computing Services. Thus, the location shown for a psychology journal published in print form will be the Education/Psychology Library (EDU), and the location shown for Psycoloquy will be the campus-wide information service (CWS). We presently have the current issues of five journals and five newsletters available for the campus community to access. By the end of next week we plan to add more titles (including Psycoloquy) and make all available back issues of the journals available. The menu for journals now shows the title and issue identification of one issue each of five titles. In the format to which we'll be moving next week, the user will be first presented with a menu of titles through which s/he can page forward and backward. When a title is selected, a listing of all available issues in inverse chronological order (i.e., most recent issue first) will be displayed; again it will be possible to page forward and backward through the list. Once an issue has been selected, it can be viewed using software that will allow paging forward and backward, as well as searching for particular character strings. Thus if a table of contents is included in a journal, the reader can search for a character string from the title or an author's name and proceed directly to that article without having to page through the issue to reach it. Our intent is to handle these titles exactly as we would titles in the more traditional print format in all areas except method of access. Here we will take advantage of their unique technological characteristics by providing electronic access rather than converting them to print form. In all other respects they will follow the same procedures and be recorded in files and catalogs just as are titles received in print form.