The electronic journal has "come of age". Spurred by the increasing
sophistication of Web technology, and an exponential increase in the
use of the Internet, "e-journals" are experiencing phenomenal growth.
The number of titles appearing in electronic form is advancing so
quickly that no reliable count of the total is available. The last
edition (1996-97) of the Association of Research Libraries' Directory
of Electronic Journals listed more than 7,000, but there are well
over 20,000 now.
What exactly is an electronic or online journal? A few years ago,
a journal available via CD-ROM, ftp, telnet, e-mail or a listserv
would qualify. While that is still technically true, the modern definition
generally refers to a journal available on the Internet. These are,
in many cases, electronic, full-text versions of the print copy, but,
increasingly, journals are appearing in electronic form alone. They
carry enormous potential: speedy delivery, availability unlimited
by time and geography, and expanded search capability. E-journals
can include links to other articles, to images, and even to multimedia.
Understandably, they have taken off in the scientific disciplines
first, where currency of information and speed of delivery are so
important, but the humanities and social sciences are steadily making
up for lost ground.
E-journals are accessible from anywhere on the Brown campus: offices,
dorm rooms, as well as the Library. Access is governed by license
agreements between Brown and the journal publishers which limit use
to "authorized" Brown users, which includes primarily faculty, staff,
and students. With a valid net-ID, e-journals and other electronic
resources are also available from off-campus via an Internet service
provider (ISP), utilizing the University's proxy server, described
on the Libraryâs Research Center page.
At Brown, growth in the number of e-journals closely mirrors the growth
on the larger stage. At the close of the 1998/99 academic year, the
Library had established access to about 250 electronic journals. In
the course of the last 18 months, however, that number has soared
with the addition of more than 1800 new online titles. The large majority
of these new titles were not even available in print at Brown previously,
which greatly expands our holdings, particularly in the scientific,
technical, and medical areas. Alphabetical and broad subject lists
of the e-journals are located on the Libraryâs Web page. E-journals
also appear in Josiah, our online catalog, with notations of the actual
extent of our holdings. The Web version of Josiah provides direct
links to the electronic texts. Some of the major e-journal collections
are described below.
Newly acquired Science Direct provides access to the full-text of
some 1,100 key scientific journals, containing 500,000 articles, published
by Elsevier Science and its affiliates. You can browse journals by
title and subject, and tables of contents; search by title, author
or keyword; set limits by date against all or a subset of a journal;
or go directly to a full-text. 700 of the titles are not currently
received here in print form. JSTOR, Journal Storage, from an independent,
not-for-profit organization created by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
helps the scholarly community to take advantage of information technology
to save shelf space in libraries. The retrospective collection--in
many cases providing decades of coverage÷is comprised of 117 core
titles in 15 different disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social
sciences. Phase II will add 9 journal titles in the general sciences.
The texts are fully searchable. Project Muse is a collaborative project
of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Milton S. Eisenhower
Library, offering the full-text of over 100 scholarly journals in
the fields of literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing
arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies,
and many others. Springer-Verlag provides over 400 full-text journals,
300 of which are new to Brown, in life sciences, chemistry, geoscience,
computer science, mathematics, medicine, physics and astronomy, engineering,
environment, and economics.
The number of e-journals available at Brown will continue to grow
in the coming months. As titles are added, they will be included in
Josiah and on our Web listings. If you know of a title or titles available
electronically that you believe the Library should link, or if you
have any questions or problems accessing e-journals, please contact
steven_thompson@brown.edu
(x 3-2976)
---Steven E. Thompson, Head of Serials
http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/University_Library
