The electronic journal service at CERN, a first evaluation: user access interfaces and user awareness
| Published date | 01 January 1998 |
| Date | 01 January 1998 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040675 |
| Pages | 23-29 |
| Author | Eliane Chaney |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
The electronic journal
service at CERN, a
first evaluation: user
access interfaces and
user awareness
by Eliane Chaney, Catherine Bulliard
and Caroline Christiansen, CERN
European Laboratory for Particle
Physics, Geneva
The article describes work done at the library
of
CERN,
the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics, to improve access to electronic
journals for the scientists, engineers and
technicians who are their
users.
The library
catalogues electronic journals, separating the
record for the electronic version from that for
any printed
version.
Users can then access
electronic journals through the Web OPAC, or
through two browsable lists of
titles.
GO
DIRECT
allows
users to go straight to an
article, a script calculating what the article's
URL should be from the reference entered by
the
user.
The library is keen to promote the
use of electronic journals, and is undertaking
user studies based on logs and an online
questionnaire.
Introduction
CERN is the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics located in Geneva. It provides scientific
research facilities to 3000 permanent staff and
6500 visiting scientists, engineers and technicians
from all over the world, who come to explore and
study the atom.
These scientists exchange theories and participate
in large experiments. The development of their
work and the results are regularly described in
scientific articles. These are submitted as preprints
to our server and subsequently to the now famous
Los Alamos preprints electronic archive. In 1997,
some 1800 CERN articles were published in
journals or conference proceedings.
Towards a journal desktop
service
Preprints and printed journal articles are comple-
mentary publishing outlets for authors. But while
in a preprint archive it takes a matter of hours from
submitting an article to its publication on the Web,
publishing the same article in a printed journal
may take months. These delays are less with
electronic publishing. And every day new readers,
well used to online technologies, discover the
advantages of
a
digital library environment,
through working with full-text preprints and
journal collections available on their desktop.
Users value the reliability and stability of an
integrated service and the time saving.
But there is still the problem for users that journals
on the Internet are spread over the many different
publishers' web sites. The library at CERN has
recognised the need to provide effortless access to
our electronic journals collection. This has meant
that we have had to develop, integrate and adapt
specific online interfaces for these resources.
Present collections
At present, besides the paper collection which
includes some 480 scientific titles, we offer access
to 260 full-text online
journals.
Due to repeated
acquisition budget reductions and regular subscrip-
tion price increases, we have had to limit our
online journal acquisitions within the printed
subscriptions allocation. (see also: Bulletin des
bibliothèques de France; 44(2), 1999, pp. 27-32)
As a consequence, titles have been selected when
they are:
• available at the same or lower price than the
paper version;
• accessible without charge as part of the
paper subscription;
• acquired through a licence between a
publisher, Springer, and a consortium of
Swiss academic and research libraries;
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