---------------------------- Text of forwarded message -----------------------
Date:         Mon, 6 Jul 1992 15:09:02 EDT
From:         Judith Hopkins <ULCJH@UBVM>
Subject:      Report from ALA: Electronic journals

LITA PROGRAMMERS/ANALYSTS INTEREST GROUP (Sunday, 6/28/92, 8:30 -
11:00 a.m.)

     The focus of this IG discussion was electronic journals.
This was the topic of several programs/discussions at the
conference, some conflicting with each other in the same time-
slot and most conflicting with CC:DA meetings I was obligated to
attend.  Because of conflicts I was late in arriving at this
discussion and missed much of Charles Bailey's presentation.  (He
is Asst. Librarian for Systems at the University of Houston and
founder of PACS-L, an electronic conference, and of two
ejournals, Public-Access Computer Systems Review and Public-
Access Computer Systems Newsletter).   When I arrived he was
talking about the range of options for treating the current first
wave of ejournals.

     1.   A single workstation loaded with text management
software.
     2.   A LAN server, also loaded with text management
software, that can provide concurrent multi-user access.
     3.   Mainframe or minicomputer platform with information
retrieval software.

     Among the points he made were that it is as important for a
library (or group of libraries) to archive electronic material as
it is to do so for print material.  The CIC libraries are working
on a common archival project.   Libraries cannot depend on the
ejournals themselves to provide archives as they have different
policies; their home institutions may change their policies, etc.
Psycoloquy, for example, archives refereed articles but not
newsletter articles.  The Online Journal of Current Clinical
Trials will provide back volumes on microfiche for archival
purposes.

     Someone from the University of California system then spoke
about the TULIP project, a three-year experiment between Elsevier
and 15 universities (Harvard, MIT, California, VPI, Stanford,
Michigan, and some others) to provide on-demand bit-mapped images
of articles from some 43 journals in the area of materials
science.  Brief bibliographic records would be created for each
article.  The participating university libraries have to provide
Elsevier with use statistics.

     The University of Michigan has loaded some ejournals and
accesses them via GOPHER.  Cornell is in the planning stages.

     At OCLC Eric Jul is conducting a research project on
cataloging computer files.  Among the questions being studied are
how to represent electronic location information (e.g., log-on
information, log-on scripts).

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