---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1993 17:11:21 EDT
From: Judith Hopkins <ULCJH%UBVM.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu>
Subject: Serials Section Program on Electronic Journals, 6/27/93
Here is a report on a program that I attended at the ALA Annual
Conference in New Orleans. This report has no official status; I attended
as a member of the audience and my notes reflect what I thought I heard;
that is not necessarily what the speakers thought they were saying!
*******************************************************************
ALCTS Serials Section Program on "Electronic Journals: Meeting the
Challenge"
Sunday, 6/27/93, 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm. New Orleans CC 38
Marcia Tuttle, Head of the Serials Team, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, spoke about "The Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues"
which she founded and edits. The Newsletter originated in 1989 in the
ALCTS Publisher/Vendor - Library Relations Committee as a vehicle to
provide timely information on serials pricing matters. It was distributed
over three networks: Bitnet/Internet, ALAnet, and Faxon's DataLinx.
In April 1991 the Newsletter became independent of ALA. Because of
concern that it seemed slow in comparison with the electronic discussion
lists it joined forces with SERIALST@UVMVM. Many messages go out on
SERIALST but the most relevant ones are redistributed through the
Newsletter.
In 1989 the Newsletter had 50 electronic subscribers and 100 more who
received it in hard copy; today it has 1394 electronic subscribers in 15
countries and hard copy distribution has been discontinued.
Ms. Tuttle described some of the problems encountered in issuing the
Newsletter: looping messages, maintaining the address list, etc.
The next speaker, Gail McMillan, Serials Cataloging Maintenance Team
Leader at Virginia Tech, described the status of "Electronic journals at
Virginia Tech today". The recommendations of the March 1991 electronic
journal report have been largely implemented. Mainframe access to
ejournals is now routine and the University is moving in the direction of
distributed computing. The Library has obtained a DEC System 50 with Unix
OS; its address is NEBULA.LIB.VTU.EDU. Ten journals in 228 issues have
been loaded; they occupy 20 MegaBytes of space.
She described some of the problems encountered in providing ejournal
access, e.g. Some journals, such as PostModern Culture, often publish
articles in several files.
Special routines have been set up to receive and process "CHIP News"
from the CHile Information Project (a daily newsletter) without human
intervention. (Cf. description by Harry Kriz distributed over PACS-L
(message 8156) on 3 March 1993 with subject line: Electronic journal
system).
The Virginia Tech Library supports the Scholarly Communications
Project which joins traditional library roles with publishing. With a
staff composed of one fulltime director and one partime staff member it
publishes three ejournals: 1. The Journal of the International Academy of
Hospitality Research. The latest issue had illustrations using Adobe
software and distributed as a PostScript file. 2. Community Services
Catalyst. Twenty years of the back issues of the quarterly print journal
are being scanned. 3. Journal of Technology Education was founded in
1989. The articles are received as well as disseminated electronically.
All issues are available in ASCII and PostScript. Electronic subscribers
receive the issues two weeks before the print issues are mailed. The
number of electronic subscribers is rising while the number of print
subscriptions has not dropped.
Ms. McMillan described some other electronic projects carried out by
the Scholarly Communications Project. In the Modal Analysis Project (?)
hard copy journals are scanned to create GIF images of texts interspersed
with mathematical symbols.
The SCP also disseminates the electronic discussion list:
VPIEJ-L@VTVM1 [Publishing Electronic Journals List] which has some 800
subscribers.
The third speaker, James O'Donnell, Professor of Classics at the
University of Pennsylvania and Co-Editor of the Bryn Mawr Classical
Review, entitled his talk "From the Editor's Disk" which is the title of a
regular column is his journal.
BMCR is a journal of book reviews by scholars in Greek and Roman
studies. Some 130 reviews are distributed annually to 700 electronic
subscribers; a print version containing 6 issues (totalling 450 pages and
costing $15.00) goes to some 200-300 subscribers. The market will
determine when it is time to stop issuing the print version.
Another journal, the Bryn Mawr Medieval Review, will soon start
publication. There will be a slight overlap between the two. Electronic
subscribers to both will be able to set an option so that they receive
only one copy of any review.
The largest and most pleasant surprise he has found in publishing the
BMCR is the sense of community it has engendered. The community of readers
and the community of reviewers are beginning to merge. The list of books
received elicits offers from readers to review specific titles. Those who
complain about reviews are asked to become reviewers themselves. There
is, however, no necessary place for libraries in this community.
Libraries, if they wish to be involved, must make their own place there.
Some librarians have done so, e.g., Kenyon Stubbs and John Price Wilkins
(sp?) at the University of Virginia are archiving past issues of the
journal and indexing it via WAIS.
To a question from the audience on the relative start-up costs of an
electronic journal vs. a print one, Prof. O'Donnell said that it would
depend on what values are added; electronic journals with editorial boards
and paid editors, that do copy- editing, etc. will have many of the same
costs as a print journal, avoiding only the final design, print, and
distribution costs.
The last speaker was John Ulmschneider, Assistant Director for
Library Systems at North Carolina State University. His topic was "The
electronic non-serial: the future and fate of periodicals in an electronic
world."
Limiting his focus to the future of the scholarly journal, he noted
that it is very easy to use currently accessible technology to do unusual
things that can't be provided through the print medium, e.g., multimedia.
The future is constrained by four factors:
1. How long serials will exist in their present forms (print
and electronic, mostly ASCII). The pace of change is slow
because there are strong conservative interests, both
intellectually and technologically. Among the pressures for
change are user demands. The telecommunications industry is
using entertainment as a carrot to create new user demands.
2. The evolution of architecture and standards (Z39.50; TCP/IP,
etc.). No standard can capture all the elements that make
up a print journal but lots of experiments are underway.
The next five years will see experiments in expanding the
use of the existing standards.
3. Economic models that govern publishing are pressing to move
to electronic journals. Ejournals offer ways for publishers
to preserve and improve their revenue flow. While print
journals are based on subscriptions, ejournals are based on
licensing agreements. Licensing eliminates Fair Use; every
use has to be paid for.
4. Evolution of scholarly communications. Publishing is only
one way to communicate electronically. Information is often
shared prior to publications and there will be more and more
of this pre-publications exchange of information over the
networks. There will be new ways to conduct peer reviews
and new ways to provide for the tenure and promotion process
in the new electronic world.
The serials of the near future will continue to be in print form,
print that is captured electronically. Some attempts will be made to
expand that by use of SGML (Standardized General Markup Language) and
proprietary efforts to disseminate graphics. There will be very few new
standards; instead there will be a proliferation of proprietary
experiments that are application and vendor specific.
The long-term (25 - 50 years) future will see the disappearance of
serials as we know them. They will be replaced by articles loosely joined
together by subject which will be retrieved from archived databases.
Libraries can become database publishers. The value that publishers added
to journals by printing them will disappear.
The economic picture of the serials of the future will see articles
on demand instead of "just in case". The value of an individual article
will change over time, depending on demand; markets respond to the profit
motive.
How will we handle these changes? The present system of publishers
producing journals for income will give way to a different distribution
method in which libraries and producers of the content will have a larger
role because the tools will be available to us as lower costs. Serials
cataloging will disappear, but we will have a more important new role: to
develop other new powerful tools for making knowledge accessible.
*******************************************************************
Judith Hopkins
Technical Services Research and Analysis Officer
Central Technical Services
Lockwood Library Building
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260-2200
Phone: (716) 645-2796
FAX: (716) 645-5955
BITNET: ULCJH@UBVM.BITNET
INTERNET: ULCJH@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU
Listowner: AUTOCAT@UBVM / AUTOCAT@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU
