Dear SERIALSTers,
The following is excerpted from the most recent issue of _Current Cites_
(Jan. 1998) and contains several review items that should be of great
interest serialists -- or to anyone interested in electronic publishing,
the sphere of digital libraries, and the impact of these occurences on our
profession. Forwarded, FYI.
Birdie MacLennan
Coordinator, Serials & Cataloging bmaclenn@zoo.uvm.edu
University of Vermont bmaclenn@uvmvm.uvm.edu
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 1998 16:50:00 -0600
From: CITES Moderator <citeschk@library.berkeley.edu>
Sender: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU>
Subject: Current Cites, January 1998
_Current Cites_
Volume 9, no. 1
January 1998
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1998/cc98.9.1.html
Contributors:
Christof Galli, Kirk Hastings, Terry Huwe,
Margaret Phillips, Richard Rinehart, Roy Tennant
Jim Ronningen, Lisa Yesson
<snip>
DIGITAL LIBRARIES ...
Crawford, Walt. "Paper Persists: Why Physical Library Collections
Still Matter" Online 22(1) (January 1998)
(http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/JanOL98/crawford1.html). - For
many years the library community has benefited from Walt Crawford's
reality checks. No technophobe, he analyzes information systems for
the Research Libraries Group. With this Online essay, he addresses an
audience which may see total digitization as imminent, but he gently
deflates that notion by citing examples of digital media limitations
and library usage patterns. He makes a convincing case that, for now
and the forseeable future, the value of online resources will be to
enhance and extend library collections. For those administrators and
others who demand that an argument be put succinctly, he offers the
simple phrase "and, not or" as a reminder that any good information
center will combine appropriate technologies, including the printed
page. - JR
Klemperer, Katharina and Stephen Chapman. "Digital Libraries: A
Selected Resource Guide" Information Technology and Libraries 16(3)
(September 1997): 126-131
(http://www.lita.org/ital/1603_klemperer.htm). - An excellent selected
guide to digital library resources for anyone wanting an overview of
digital library issues, draft standards, and technologies, as well as
strategies for staying current in the field (full disclosure: Current
Cites is mentioned). The sources cited here serve as good background
Main sections include general resources, bibliographies, retrospective
conversion and preservation, electronic publication of current
materials, initiatives to follow, listservs, conferences, journals,
and workshops. - RT
ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
Gilpin, Kenneth N. "Concerns About an Aggressive Publishing Giant" New
York Times (December 29, 1997):C2. - Although buried in the business
section, this article on the aggressive business practices of Reed
Elsevier, one of the world's largest publishers of science journals,
is really more about the nature of scholarly communication and about
how consolidation among publishers is stifling competition and driving
up journal prices -- in other words, it's about the "Microsoft-zation"
of the science publishing industry. With Purdue University at the
lead, libraries and academic communities may be starting to fight
back; when Reed Elsevier's president offered to lock in the annual
increase in the price of 350 online publication to 9.5 percent, Purdue
University balked and ended up cancelling many of its Elsevier titles.
(For more on the burgeoning grassroots efforts to fight back against
the publishing industry, see a letter by Professor Rob Kirby of the UC
Berkeley mathematics department:
http://math.berkeley.edu/~kirby/journals.html.) - MP
[note from SERIALST ed. : this letter was also reprinted in _The
Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues_, no. 199 (Jan. 21, 1998), see:
http://www.lib.unc.edu/prices/1998/PRIC199.HTML ] -bml
Rosenblatt, Bill. "Solving the Dilemma of Copyright Protection Online:
The Digital Object Identifier" JEP: The Journal of Electronic
Publishing 3(2) (December 1997)
(http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-02/doi.html). - Publishers have
long desired a standard way that individual intellectual objects
(journal articles, for example) can be uniquely identified without
using a physical address (which is what a Uniform Resource Locator or
URL is). Books have International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) that
perform this role for printed books, but a similar system was needed
that provides the same service but in a networked environment and for
a much broader range of material. This article describes the process
that the publishing community went through, and the outcome of their
efforts in the form of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Rosenblatt
gives us a good start, but I wish he had provided more links to the
resources that are required to truly understand how these are
constructed. For example, he repeatedly refers to the Serial Item and
Contribution Identifier (SICI, more information at
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SICI/) as a part of the syntax of the DOI,
and yet neglects to mention where one can go to figure out how one
should be constructed. Nonetheless, this article is a useful
introduction to both the reasons for, and the use of, this object
identifier. - RT
Schad, Jasper C. "Scientific Societies and Their Journals: Issues of
Cost and Relevance" The Journal of Academic Librarianship 23(5)
(September 1997):406-407. - It seems that for-profit publishers are
not the only ones to blame for the rising cost of journals (see cite
for Gilpin in this issue). In this perspective piece, Schad questions
the publishing motives of scholarly societies. For instance, the
American Chemical Society states that one of its top priorities in
publishing a journal is to preserve the archival record of research in
their disciplines. Another spin on this motive might be that journals
published by scholarly societies are simply a service for scientists'
quest for tenure, promotion and grants and as such, some of what is
published in these journals may be of archival use but may not
necessarily be of use to currently active scholars. Yes, scholarly
societies should continue to publish journals since journal literature
is an important part of scholarly communication; journal prices could
be reduced, however, if they were downsized and were to publish only
the best of the professions' scholarship. Schad goes on to suggest
that if scientific societies want to continue to preserve an archival
record of research in their discipline, they can do so cheaply by
providing access to this material in electronic form. - MP
Turner, Judith Axler. "Pioneering an Online Newspaper: Lessons from
the Chronicle" JEP: The Journal of Electronic Publishing 3(2)
(December 1997) (http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-02/chronicle.html).
- In this piece the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education
describes the process and the lessons learned from moving a print
publication to the Internet. As a pioneer (Academe Today was one of
the earlier online publications), they learned a lot, and this article
shares a good deal of that experience in an informative and engaging
way. What they learned about online user behavior is well worth the
time it takes to read the article. But then you get to the "missed
opportunities" section, in which Turner shares her regrets. Now this
is candid and informative stuff, and not to be missed. Her ending
section is titled "Pioneers Are the Ones with Arrows in their Backs",
but because of the lessons learned from pioneers like Turner's outfit,
those who follow in their footsteps will have a much better
opportunity to dodge them. - RT
<snip>
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 9(1) (January 1998) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright ©
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