Tim Jewell, Electronic Information Program
Recently, concerns about the lack of "real content" on the World Wide Web began to be answered by the availability of "electronic journals": typically free, scholarly publications aimed at exploiting the advantages of electronic distribution for serious academic research. Now publishers of many established, print-based journals have joined that movement by providing electronic access to some or all of their titles, and the UW Libraries has licensed hundreds of them and made them available to users on their own desktops.
Although we are quite far from having a "critical mass" of important journal literature available electronically, these developments do offer great and compelling opportunities to broaden access and improve services. Instead of physically traveling to one of the campus libraries to search for and copy articles from relevant journals, researchers and students can now access them conveniently and quickly from their offices or homes. Electronic versions often appear sooner, and in some cases provide supplementary materials, multimedia features, interactive simulations, or "hot links" to other articles or citations that are clearly not possible through the print medium. Future possibilities include automated interest profiling for users, and other improvements.
Not surprisingly, electronic offerings now available to UW users are especially oriented to current information, and to scientific, technical, and medical (STM) subjects, although there are important resources available in a wide range of disciplines. Professional associations such as the Institute of Physics and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics have made dozens of journals available electronically within the last year, and commercial STM publishers have also been very active. Academic Press, for example, has quickly gained prominence by making 175 titles available through its IDEAL program; the Libraries began to participate in it this spring. The Libraries is also serving as a beta test site for Springer Link, and through the end of the year will have free access to all Springer journals available in electronic form, more than 200 at this time. The Johns Hopkins University Press is making about 40 humanities and social science titles available through its Project Muse program, including two that are available exclusively in electronic form.
No major developments come without issues and challenges, however, and electronic journals pose their share. An editorial by William Miller in the August 1, 1997 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance, points out that subscribing to electronic journals will not save libraries money in the long run: fewer and fewer electronic journals are free, and increasing numbers are "bundled" with print subscriptions in a way that makes canceling print economically disadvantageous. Should a library cancel a print subscription, the library retains the volumes it has already received. Canceling an electronic journal, on the other hand, can mean that the library either loses access to those issues to which it was once entitled, or that it has to assume the costs of making them available electronically for decades or longer.
One noteworthy attempt to try to address this troublesome issue of archiving is the JSTOR project, which the Libraries joined as a charter member last spring. This program is based in part on the fact that library shelf space is expensive, and that libraries all over the country shelve the same back-file runs of core academic journals. Accordingly, the aims of the project's first phase are to scan and make available a permanent electronic archive (typically up to within three to five years of the current year) of at least 100 core journals within the next three years. So far, more than 50 such journals have been made available, including such well-known titles as the Journal of American History, the American Political Science Review, Ecology, and the Journal and the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. Several additional key journals in mathematics, philosophy, and sociology will become available within the next few months.
Still other challenges relate to how users will access the plethora of electronic information. As electronic journals proliferate, simply continuing the present practice of listing available journals on a variety of web pages will soon prove impractical. Other approaches like "hot linking" the online catalog using a future version of Java Willow are being pursued here at the UW. Available workstations, both within the Libraries and those available to users outside it, may need to be upgraded or replaced. (A typical minimal requirement is a PC or other workstation running Netscape or Internet Explorer, plus a direct Internet connection or high-speed modem. In addition, many e-journals also require the installation of general-purpose "helper" applications like Adobe Acrobat, or more specialized ones like Ghostview and Ghostscript, to display and manipulate page images, graphs, formulae, and the like.) New systems for managing printing services and costs must also be implemented within the Libraries, and the introduction of formal license agreements, competing user-authentication approaches, and the trend toward marketing of electronic access primarily to library consortia have introduced a new level of decision-making complexity.
Not all of these challenges are likely to be solved in the short run, but the Libraries is making a serious commitment to the Digital Library as a strategic direction, and electronic journals will continue to be an important part of that picture.