Electronic Journals

[Peter C. Gorman]

Marty Tanner Hughes writes:

>but with Project Muse and JSTOR subscriptions and various publishers
>offering all of their titles online, the numbers seem to demand a different
>approach.

We, too were faced with an ever-growing list of E-journal titles, so we
decided to take the individual journal titles off our main resource menus
and provide access to them through our catalog (we have a web interface)
instead. For the time being, we're still providing collection-level access
(like JSTOR) on the menus but we're considering whether to take all
full-text resources off the menus and provide them only through the
catalog. On the other hand, we have a number of subject-based guides which
list individual E-journal (and other) titles. It is up to the author of
each subject guide to decide what to include.

This is not only a question of navigatibility and presentation to users;
there is also the issue of the duplication of effort required to create and
maintain both catalog and menu (we do use a database) records for each
title.

>In addition to subscriptions, we also want to point our users toward
>"free" resources on the Web. Do we mix these in with our "on-campus
>only" subscriptions?

Though I've seen this distinction made, it really baffles me. If a resource
is of high enough quality for us to want to offer it to our users, it
shouldn't matter (from a menuing perspective) whether we've paid for it or
not. The same goes for "Internet" versus "local" resources. It's nice to go
to one spot to find resources of a particular type or subject area, and not
to have to check the "free" menu *and* the "paid-for" menu. On the other
hand, you may want to have an area for peripheral (usually free) resources
that would not be considered part of the "core" (usually expensive)
resource collection. It's entirely appropriate to put these in a separate
area, but the distinction should be made on the basis of their potential
use for patrons, not on whether they cost the library money.

PG
_______________________________
Peter C. Gorman
University of Wisconsin
General Library System
Automation Services
pcgorman at facstaff.wisc.edu
(608) 265-5291