[Web4lib] the journal "presence" in online databases

[Turner,Kathleen]

Karen,

I suspect one could find a parallel for the loss of the "wholeness" of a
journal issue" in the world of popular music.  Does the "album" as those
of us of a certain age knew it still exist when most music is acquired
(I'd like to say purchased, but spend too much time around college-aged
people to use such a ridiculous word)as single tracks rather than as
part of a larger whole?

Okay, for most popular music albums (and one could probably say, for
most journals) the order of the songs, and their relationship to each
other was pretty arbitrary -- whatever would fill up that remaining 3
minutes -- but there were concept albums in which the tracks, and the
order of the tracks made up a cohesive whole (well, cohesive might be a
relative term when we're talking about some of the great concept albums
. . .).

It seems that the confounding problem here is that access to these small
press journals is more likely to be through databases that recognize
each article as a unit in itself, but not as they relate to each other
-- comparing, for instance, a Proquest database in which I can search
for and browse a specific journal title and even specific issue, but
only as a list of articles, with ScienceDirect, for example, in which I
can view what is essentially a reproduction of the table of contents of
a journal issue. 

Kathleen


Kathleen H. Turner
Web/Education Librarian
W.W. Hagerty Library
33rd and Market Streets
Philadelphia, PA 19104-2875

Tel: 215.895.6783
Fax: 215.895.2070
khturner at drexel.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of K.G. Schneider
Sent: Monday, July 16, 2007 12:25 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org; 'Code for Libraries'
Subject: [Web4lib] the journal "presence" in online databases

I'm doing some exploratory poking around an issue that is of dual
importance to me as a librarian and writer: the fidelity of the print
journal in online databases. I feel as if this is such an obvious issue
that there must have been EXTENSIVE discussion about this over the last
ten or fifteen years, so bear with me if I am missing the fly on the end
of my nose. 

Here's the issue in narrative form: a library subscribes to a
small-press journal. The journal's articles are also indexed in some
database or other.
The library runs out of space and money to physically house the journal,
and drops the print edition. 

But... 

The journal issue itself now has no physical representation in the
database.
It's a series of articles. It is (and we now move into the alternate
universe where Michael Gorman and I think alike and even use the same
vocabulary) atomized. Even if you can force the database to bring
together the related articles, it is a kludge at best. 

For some journals, maybe that never mattered anyway. But for many
journals in the humanities, the issue is the experience. There are some
very nice online journals, and increasingly, small presses, which
operate just barely above cost-recovery, are reinventing themselves
online. But take the recent issues of Missouri Review or The American
Scholar... like a book, a journal issue is its own event (though unlike
most book-length narratives, one that can be enjoyably experienced
incompletely and in the reader's own preferred order, which is part of
the fun as well). Even though the individual content of the journal may
be preserved piece by piece, the totality of the journal has not.  

Let's set aside some of the characteristics that can't be dragged to the
online medium (the feel and smell of paper, for example) or arguments I
find specious (how many people take baths any more, anyway?). That said,
to what extent do databases (or do not...) recreate the "issue
experience"-that sense of aboutness and completion for a journal issue?
Do we care? 

I see some work is done in metadata that can express the relationship
between articles in a journal. But I'm curious how much we (librarians)
care about this business of fidelity or whether it's just another silent
victim of change. I worry that without intending to we could hasten the
death of an entire area of literature. 

Though with some intentionality, we could also help save this
literature, as well (because mailing and printing costs are the obvious
threats to the small presses-a number have moved online, or started
online, and thrive there in their small-press manner; if a database
could represent, say, The American Scholar in a way that did it justice,
that might be a very good thing). 

Again, maybe I'm just missing something really, really obvious... please
do step in to say, Karen, where have you been? ... or perhaps there are
some e-humanities initiatives already working in this area... but the
more and more I engage with small presses, the more this concerns me. 

K.G. Schneider
Free Range Librarian
AIM/Email: kgs at freerangelibrarian.com
http://freerangelibrarian.com  


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