News
| Pages | 89-98 |
| Date | 01 February 1995 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045347 |
| Published date | 01 February 1995 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
News
The Electronic Library
scene
Elsevier and OCLC have agreed to
make all 1100-plus Elsevier Science
journals available electronically. A
planned service called Elsevier Elec-
tronic Subscriptions will offer libraries
complete electronic editions either in
addition to or instead of paper ones.
There will also be the option to use
OCLC's SiteSearch system, which al-
lows building, maintaining and search-
ing databases locally, and OCLC's Gui-
don graphical user interface. This year
will comprise a pilot scheme at five sites
in North America, and the service
should then launch commercially if the
trials go well. On offer will be Group 4
facsimile images of pages plus
searchable text and tables of contents.
The scheme builds on Elsevier's TULIP
project, extending the scope to cover all
journals.
In
a
parallel
move,
OCLC has agreed
with EBSCO Publishing jointly to cre-
ate a
database of full-text article images,
to be made available to their respective
users in various electronic formats. In-
itially 1000 general-interest journals
will be involved, later to expand to
1500.
Articles will be available for fax
delivery from OCLC late in 1995, and
both online and CDROM products will
follow.
That ISI's Electronic Library
scheme is still a distant prospect com-
mercially is clear from the an-
nouncement made recently about pilot
site participants. The first live test will
be in the United States this August,
while the first trials elsewhere will not
be until next January. Once operational,
all trial sites will participate for a mini-
mum of
18
months, testing data access,
retrieval and usage, billing, accounting,
and pricing scenarios. The behaviour
patterns of librarians and users will also
be studied to see if the electronic journal
changes traditional information pur-
chasing and use. For the record: pilot
site participants announced so far are
Brookhaven National Laboratories, Le-
high University, New York Public Li-
brary, Purdue University, University
College London, and Glaxo Research
and Development Ltd.
UMI has meanwhile clarified details
of how its Advanced Document Deliv-
ery System (ADDS) will unfold. The
first beta-test sites commence in late
April with most of the information cur-
rently in Business Periodicals, General
Periodicals, Social Sciences Index, and
the ASCII text that UMI now distributes
through other online vendors. Users
will be able to search across the entire
system, by defined collections such as
ABI/INFORM or by a list of titles they
define themselves. They will be able to
subscribe on a per-simultaneous user
basis,
or else search and pay by the indi-
vidual document.
The information search
and
hit list
on
ADDS will be free of charge by UMI,
while pricing for selected documents
will depend on the format. Abstract-
only will be the least expensive, fol-
lowed by the full-text ASCII, and full
article image. The highest price will be
for a combination of enhanced ASCII
text and images. Delivery options will
include
e-mail
(for ASCII only), fac-
simile, or downloading to a designated
printer or PC.
'Late 1995' is scheduled for release
1.1 of
ADDS,
to include gateway access
for Online Public Access Catalogue
vendors, while release 2.0 in 1996 will
support English natural-language
searching as well as expanding the con-
tent to include biomedical titles and es-
tablishing gateways to business infor-
mation providers.
A two-year project which begun in
February
aims
to help librarians to make
better professional decisions. Library
schools in Barcelona, Manchester and
Parma will research the decision-mak-
ing needs and practices of library man-
agers in a range of organisations. Based
on their findings, Inheritance Systems
Ltd will create a Decision Support
Module which will integrate with its
own Heritage management system but
also be adaptable for use with others.
Tony Oulton of the Department of
Library and Information Studies at the
Manchester Metropolitan University
will lead this project, which has a grant
of 225 000 ECUs from the European
Commission. Its name is DECIMAL.
What does the acronym stand for? 'DE-
CIsion-MAking in Libraries' of course!
The UK retail chain
W.H.
Smith says
that customer book
orders
have doubled
since installing its Bookfinder facility in
400 stores. The CDROM-based system
allows full-text retrieval of information
on over 800 000 books, so that custom-
ers can identify a title from only sketchy
knowledge. This gateways to a central
book-ordering system so that stock is
reserved at the moment the order is
placed. Dataware Technologies'
BRS/SEARCH software is used for the
CDROM part of system.
The National Library in Prague has
become the first Eastern European na-
tional library to contribute records to
OCLC. The Czech National Bibliog-
raphy is added to the OCLC Online Un-
ion Catalog starting with 1995 data, but
loading of the backfile from 1983
is
also
being considered. Last year 110 librar-
ies in Asia and the Pacific region be-
came new OCLC users to add to 229
existing members in the area. Of the
newcomers, 35 are in Australia, 34 in
Japan, 19 in Korea, two in Malaysia,
nine in New Zealand, eight in Taiwan
and three in Thailand.
Sad news: a pioneer of computer-
based systems for
libraries,
archives and
museums, Alan M. Tucker, has died in
California after a short illness at the age
of just
52.
Early in his career, as head of
library automation at Trinity College,
Dublin, he directed the implementation
of one of the first machine-readable
cataloguing systems in Europe, based
on the international MARC format.
From 1980 he held senior positions with
the Research Libraries Group and at
the time of his death was leading the
joint project to enter Russian archival
material into the RLG database. Memo-
The Electronic Library, Vol. 13, No. 2, April 1995 89
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