Dear SERIALSTers,

The following is excerpted from the most recent issue of _Current Cites_
(Jan. 1998)  and contains several review items that should be of great
interest serialists -- or to anyone interested in electronic publishing,
the sphere of digital libraries, and the impact of these occurences on our
profession.  Forwarded, FYI.

        Birdie MacLennan
        Coordinator, Serials & Cataloging   bmaclenn@zoo.uvm.edu
        University of Vermont               bmaclenn@uvmvm.uvm.edu

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date:    Mon, 2 Feb 1998 16:50:00 -0600
From: CITES Moderator <citeschk@library.berkeley.edu>
Sender: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU>
Subject:  Current Cites, January 1998

                        _Current Cites_
                        Volume 9, no. 1
                          January 1998
                          The Library
               University of California, Berkeley
                 Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
                        ISSN: 1060-2356
 http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1998/cc98.9.1.html

                         Contributors:

           Christof Galli, Kirk Hastings, Terry Huwe,
        Margaret Phillips, Richard Rinehart, Roy Tennant
                  Jim Ronningen, Lisa Yesson

<snip>

DIGITAL LIBRARIES ...

   Crawford, Walt. "Paper Persists: Why Physical Library Collections
   Still Matter" Online 22(1) (January 1998)
   (http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/JanOL98/crawford1.html). - For
   many years the library community has benefited from Walt Crawford's
   reality checks. No technophobe, he analyzes information systems for
   the Research Libraries Group. With this Online essay, he addresses an
   audience which may see total digitization as imminent, but he gently
   deflates that notion by citing examples of digital media limitations
   and library usage patterns. He makes a convincing case that, for now
   and the forseeable future, the value of online resources will be to
   enhance and extend library collections. For those administrators and
   others who demand that an argument be put succinctly, he offers the
   simple phrase "and, not or" as a reminder that any good information
   center will combine appropriate technologies, including the printed
   page. - JR

   Klemperer, Katharina and Stephen Chapman. "Digital Libraries: A
   Selected Resource Guide" Information Technology and Libraries 16(3)
   (September 1997): 126-131
   (http://www.lita.org/ital/1603_klemperer.htm). - An excellent selected
   guide to digital library resources for anyone wanting an overview of
   digital library issues, draft standards, and technologies, as well as
   strategies for staying current in the field (full disclosure: Current
   Cites is mentioned). The sources cited here serve as good background
   Main sections include general resources, bibliographies, retrospective
   conversion and preservation, electronic publication of current
   materials, initiatives to follow, listservs, conferences, journals,
   and workshops. - RT

  ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

   Gilpin, Kenneth N. "Concerns About an Aggressive Publishing Giant" New
   York Times (December 29, 1997):C2. - Although buried in the business
   section, this article on the aggressive business practices of Reed
   Elsevier, one of the world's largest publishers of science journals,
   is really more about the nature of scholarly communication and about
   how consolidation among publishers is stifling competition and driving
   up journal prices -- in other words, it's about the "Microsoft-zation"
   of the science publishing industry. With Purdue University at the
   lead, libraries and academic communities may be starting to fight
   back; when Reed Elsevier's president offered to lock in the annual
   increase in the price of 350 online publication to 9.5 percent, Purdue
   University balked and ended up cancelling many of its Elsevier titles.
   (For more on the burgeoning grassroots efforts to fight back against
   the publishing industry, see a letter by Professor Rob Kirby of the UC
   Berkeley mathematics department:
   http://math.berkeley.edu/~kirby/journals.html.) - MP

[note from SERIALST ed. : this letter was also reprinted in _The
Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues_, no. 199 (Jan. 21, 1998), see:
http://www.lib.unc.edu/prices/1998/PRIC199.HTML ]  -bml

   Rosenblatt, Bill. "Solving the Dilemma of Copyright Protection Online:
   The Digital Object Identifier" JEP: The Journal of Electronic
   Publishing 3(2) (December 1997)
   (http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-02/doi.html). - Publishers have
   long desired a standard way that individual intellectual objects
   (journal articles, for example) can be uniquely identified without
   using a physical address (which is what a Uniform Resource Locator or
   URL is). Books have International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) that
   perform this role for printed books, but a similar system was needed
   that provides the same service but in a networked environment and for
   a much broader range of material. This article describes the process
   that the publishing community went through, and the outcome of their
   efforts in the form of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Rosenblatt
   gives us a good start, but I wish he had provided more links to the
   resources that are required to truly understand how these are
   constructed. For example, he repeatedly refers to the Serial Item and
   Contribution Identifier (SICI, more information at
   http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SICI/) as a part of the syntax of the DOI,
   and yet neglects to mention where one can go to figure out how one
   should be constructed. Nonetheless, this article is a useful
   introduction to both the reasons for, and the use of, this object
   identifier. - RT

   Schad, Jasper C. "Scientific Societies and Their Journals: Issues of
   Cost and Relevance" The Journal of Academic Librarianship 23(5)
   (September 1997):406-407. - It seems that for-profit publishers are
   not the only ones to blame for the rising cost of journals (see cite
   for Gilpin in this issue). In this perspective piece, Schad questions
   the publishing motives of scholarly societies. For instance, the
   American Chemical Society states that one of its top priorities in
   publishing a journal is to preserve the archival record of research in
   their disciplines. Another spin on this motive might be that journals
   published by scholarly societies are simply a service for scientists'
   quest for tenure, promotion and grants and as such, some of what is
   published in these journals may be of archival use but may not
   necessarily be of use to currently active scholars. Yes, scholarly
   societies should continue to publish journals since journal literature
   is an important part of scholarly communication; journal prices could
   be reduced, however, if they were downsized and were to publish only
   the best of the professions' scholarship. Schad goes on to suggest
   that if scientific societies want to continue to preserve an archival
   record of research in their discipline, they can do so cheaply by
   providing access to this material in electronic form. - MP

   Turner, Judith Axler. "Pioneering an Online Newspaper: Lessons from
   the Chronicle" JEP: The Journal of Electronic Publishing 3(2)
   (December 1997) (http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-02/chronicle.html).
   - In this piece the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education
   describes the process and the lessons learned from moving a print
   publication to the Internet. As a pioneer (Academe Today was one of
   the earlier online publications), they learned a lot, and this article
   shares a good deal of that experience in an informative and engaging
   way. What they learned about online user behavior is well worth the
   time it takes to read the article. But then you get to the "missed
   opportunities" section, in which Turner shares her regrets. Now this
   is candid and informative stuff, and not to be missed. Her ending
   section is titled "Pioneers Are the Ones with Arrows in their Backs",
   but because of the lessons learned from pioneers like Turner's outfit,
   those who follow in their footsteps will have a much better
   opportunity to dodge them. - RT

<snip>
     _________________________________________________________________

   Current Cites 9(1) (January 1998) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright &copy;
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