[WEB4LIB] How do you list all of the electronic journals?

[George Porter]

Peter Scott maintains the Electronic Journals Resource Directory
<http://library.usask.ca/~scottp/links/>, which may be a good starting point
for observing how various organizations have dealt with this question.
Caltech has recently migrated from directly maintaining, in a web editor, 26
alpha pages, with 3000+ entries, to a database format
<http://library.caltech.edu/online/onlinejrnl.htm>.  With the migration to
an online journal database, we are able to offer search capabilities to the
individual title level, rather than the web page level supported by our
website search function.  We chose to automatically generate static pages
daily, a feature that our clientele were already accustomed to using, in
addition to introducing new functionality.  

As Jakob Nielsen observed in "The Mud-Throwing Theory of Usability,
Alertbox, 2 April 2000 <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000402.html>, 

"Users hate redesigns: even if the original design was miserable, those
users who have suffered through the pains of learning it will rather
continue to use what they already know than learning something new."

I'm not implying the static browsable listings were bad or difficult, but
rather that one should be careful not to eliminate features that users are
accustomed to in the interest of offering only new pathways to the
information.  If your new access model is truly superior to the old, people
will migrate when given a choice.  This is especially true if continuing to
offer older access methods can be accomplished with little additional
effort, as it was in our case.

George S. Porter
Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science
California Institute of Technology
Mail Code 1-43, Pasadena, CA  91125
Telephone (626) 395-3409 Fax (626) 431-2681