News
| Pages | 261-268 |
| Published date | 01 April 1995 |
| Date | 01 April 1995 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045372 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
News
The electronic library
scene
The country in which this journal is
published, the UK, happens on this oc-
casion to provide some major news on
the electronic library scene. Approval
has just been given for an Electronic
Libraries Programme aimed 'to trans-
form the use and storage of knowledge
in higher education institutions.' A total
of £15 million will be spent over the
next three years on 30 projects involv-
ing document delivery, new forms of
publishing, training/awareness, and ac-
cess to network resources.
Further details are given on
p.
411
of
this issue in our recently introduced
regular feature on 'The Information So-
ciety,' and you can be
sure
that this jour-
nal will follow up progress on selected
projects as they unfold.
In the library world in general, site
licensing of databases and other new
media resources is increasingly fashion-
able,
but unfortunately each vendor ap-
pears to have a different policy and each
agreement needs to be separately nego-
tiated. To ease the growing confusion
and workload, librarians and publishers
have agreed to try to create a model
contract for the site licensing of elec-
tronic products. This follows a meeting
in Amsterdam in July organised by the
European Bureau of Library, Informa-
tion and Documentation Associations
(EBLIDA).
Of particular concern to publishers is
the digitising of backlogs of journals
and the sharing of this data between li-
braries. One suggestion from librarians
is that on-site electrocopying should be
free of charge, but that delivery to exter-
nal users should be paid for by the end-
user on a fair-use principle. Publishers
have agreed to consider this further, and
a report and follow-up meeting are both
planned by EBLIDA this autumn.
For record: the Amsterdam meeting
was organised as part of the European
Copyright User Platform initiative,
which has been funded for a year by the
European Commission, but future fi-
nancing of which has yet to be clarified.
Talking of site licensing, InfoTrac
Searchbank is a substantial revamp of
Information Access Company's pro-
gramme. It combines the user's choice
of reference databases and document
delivery services with a common user
interface — although libraries can stick
with their own client software and infra-
structure so long as it is Z39.50-com-
patibile. All the existing IAC InfoTrac
2000 databases are available through
the new service, and many more ones
are spoken of for next year.
Another commercial initiative dem-
onstrated for the first time recently is
TRW Search Access, which provides a
common interface to databases held on
fileservers, the Internet and CDROM.
There are several features which go be-
yond the average Z39.50 client/server
setup,
according to TRW. One is that
the librarian can centrally configure
what users see on their individual desk-
tops without needing to go to each
workstation. Another is that searching
across multiple databases is speedier
than usual because it is asynchronous:
the client does not have to interrogate
each file in turn.
Until November, SilverPlatter is of-
fering free access via the World Wide
Web to
thousand-record subsets of 63 of
its databases, as well as free trials of a
'working-draft' of its new WebSPIRS
client software. The aim is to acquire
feedback which will influence the shape
of the company's future Internet serv-
ice.
See http.//www.silverplatter.
com/sampler.
In an ownership change of note:
Knight-Ridder Information is acquir-
ing the library automation vendor
CARL Corporation and the UnCover
Company, a specialist in document
supply. They will join
a
portfolio which
includes the Dialog and Data-Star on-
line information services and the KR
SourceOne document supply service,
which already incorporates the former
Article Express International and Infor-
mation on Demand.
CARL is a spin-off of
the
Colorado
Alliance of Research Libraries, while
UnCover is CARL's joint venture with
Blackwell Ltd. It is planned that Black-
well will continue to market UnCover
and that the management of both serv-
ices will stay in place. The proceeds of
the expected sale will go to various edu-
cational institutions and libraries in
Colorado.
Oxford University Press has an-
nounced that it will publish its 140 aca-
demic journals electronically. Human
Reproduction
Update
will
be the first to
appear simultaneously in electronic and
paper forms, using software from Inter-
leaf which can preserve the look and
feel of a printed journal. Both CDROM
and Internet distribution will be pursued
and there are plans to add multimedia.
This will mean, for example, users be-
ing able to call up three-dimensional
molecular models, or video clips of a
medical operation to illustrate the re-
search paper they are reading.
Special libraries in the UK are get-
ting connected:
60%
are now connected
to in-house e-mail,
14%
to the Internet,
10%
to CompuServe and 2% to the aca-
demic network, JANET. In a year when
budgets remained relatively flat,
CDROM spending in special libraries
went up by 9% and CDROMs lead the
list of anticipated expenditure for the
current year with a projected 5.3% in-
crease. So says the newly-published
Survey of Acquisitions in Special Li-
braries Research Report, which sum-
marises findings of a July-August 1994
survey.
About half the responding libraries
have CDROM drives with an average of
4.6 CDROM titles owned, while just
over three-quarters of respondents sub-
scribe to an average of 4.3 online hosts.
In all 325 special librarians responded
to the survey, sent to 1554 librarians in
commercial organisations, and avail-
able as British National Bibliography
Research Fund Report
71.
The Electronic Library, Vol. 13, No. 4, August 1995 261
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