LIBRARY NEWS, number 10, August 2000. An electronic newsletter published by The University of Texas at Austin General Libraries to share news about library collections and services.
THIS ISSUE: evolving forms of scholarly communication, part II
LIBRARY CLASSES:
The Fall schedule of classes explaining library resources can be seen at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/services/instruction/.
Anyone may attend these sessions.
E-JOURNALS UPDATE:
The library currently has over 2,000 e-journals available through UT Library
Online at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/journals/.
Each of these journals has an unchanging URL as do the individual articles
within these journals. If you provide students the URL to a particular article,
they
will all be able to access that article just like any other web site. Since
these e-journals have stable URLs, the library has cataloged them in UTNetCAT
so that they can be accessed with a simple click of the mouse.
E-JOURNALS
USAGE:
UT-Austin e-journal usage has increased steadily each year. Campus use of the
humanities e-journals assembled under the J-STOR project, for example, were
used 19,917 times in 1997, 75,674 times in 1998, 173,321 times in 1999, and
a projected 230,000 times in 2000. A typical example among the sciences is the
group of 27 American Chemical Society e-journals from which 60,332 articles
were downloaded during their first year of availability. With several years
of statistical data now at hand, librarians around the country are able to confirm
what they have long suspected: that just a few articles in any particular journal
account for most of the usage, while other journal articles are seldom if ever
read.
17,000 ADDITIONAL
E-JOURNALS: http:
The library also provides access to the contents of 17,000 additional journals
which are included in one of the library's online full-text databases. A database
advisor at http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/
can direct you to the appropriate database that contains journals your
are interested in. These databases may not contain every article from a particular
journal, so librarians draw a careful distinction between full-text databases
and actual online journals.
E-JOURNALS, FUTURE
PLANS:http:
The library has recently entered into a relationship with a new vendor that
promises to enable the campus community to view most of our e-journals through
a single centralized web page with a consistent interface. Bringing up this
interface will take 9-12 months, but because this resource will also contain
indexing for the specific e-journals in the UT collection, we expect this to
be a popular new research tool. Once we have brought this new service online,
the library plans to steadily increase the numbers of e-journals available.
EXTENDED
LOAN PERIODS FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS:
Beginning this fall loan periods for graduate students and all staff will be
extended to an entire semester. Longer loan periods were recommended by the
University Library Committee in April 2000 and approved by the General Libraries
last spring.
E-BOOKS UPDATE
& FUTURE PLANS:
UT-Austin currently has access to over 14,000 scholarly e-books accessible through
UT Library Online via e-book vendors netLibrary and ITKnowledge. All of these
titles are readable over the web. The netLibrary titles are primarily of three
types: university press titles in all subjects, general consumer computer titles,
and nursing/medical related titles. The ITKnowledge titles consist of current
computer and networking titles. We expect the number of titles accessible in
these campus programs to double over the next 12 months. The library plan is
to have all of these titles represented in UTNetCAT alongside records for printed
books. Several thousand e-books are in the catalog already and more are being
added all the time. Usage of these e-books has been good, with some titles used
as often as thirty times a month. Among the represented books are titles from
UT Press and Texas A &M Press.
OTHER RELATED
E-BOOK NEWS:
Questia, http://www.questia.com,
a well-funded Internet start-up company, will begin marketing a service directly
to students in the coming months that consists of tens of thousands of e-books
that students typically use in term paper preparation. This "research service"
will also include various online aids to help students in the preparation of
their term papers. Students will subscribe to this service. Ebrary, http://www.ebrary.com
another deep-pocket Internet start-up company, will have hundreds of thousands
of texts online in which a student will pay to print out a PDF copy of a chapter
or article, essentially like an online photocopy service. Users of this service
will pay by the page. Both of these services will be marketed directly to students.
The companies have no plans to work through institutions or libraries. Publishers
are also currently readying plans both to sell chapters of e-books to consumers
and to allow consumers to combine chapters of different e-books together, and
then have the resulting books printed on demand and shipped to the consumer's
address. It is expected that the first publisher to bring this service to the
market will be IDG, publisher of the Dummies guides, Frommer's travel series,
and similar consumer titles.
LAPTOP COMPUTERS
AVAILABLE FOR CHECKOUT IN PCL:
Nine laptop computers are available for checkout and use within PCL by UT students.
The laptops may be used with ethernet ports located throughout the building.
A UT EID
is required for network access. For more information see http://www.lib.utexas.edu/pcl/computing/laptops/.
THE DEEP WEB:
The web accessible through browsing and search engines is estimated to contain
a billion documents. Recent studies have estimated the size of what is called
the "deep web" or the "invisible web" at 550 billion documents. To use
the ocean as a metaphor, the popular web may be compared to the surface of the
ocean, and the deep web to the volume of water underneath. Web-based services
that the library provides to the campus such as databases, e-journals, and e-books
are part of the deep web. The deep web consists of proprietary information,
documents which are available only under special contractual terms, information
that resides within interactive databases, and other types of information that
has to be sought by special means. Access to some of the specific information
contained within the deep web is available via UT Library Online and from the
many thousands of proprietary URLs cataloged on UTNetCAT. The library will continue
to expand its access to deep web documents on behalf of the campus community.
FACULTY/STAFF
BOOK EXHIBIT:
The General Libraries annual Faculty and Staff Book Exhibit will open October
16, 2000. Faculty and staff members are invited to leave a copy of book(s) published
after April 1, 1999 (on loan) in the Reference and Information Services Department
Office, PCL 2.430, before October 2, 2000. Please include a small informal photograph
(no 8 x 10s, please) for display in the exhibit. The Exhibit's web location
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/about/news/fsbookexhibit.html
will provide a listing of books on view.
FACULTY TECHNOLOGY
SEMINARS:
Taught by the Center for Teaching Effectiveness, ACITS and the General Libraries.
Library sessions include:
Detecting and Preventing Plagiarism.
Wednesday, August 23 9:00 - 10:30 am in FAC 227
Information Literacy: What
Every Faculty Member Should Know. Wednesday, August 23 4:00 - 5:00
pm in COM 8
E-Library Collections and Resources.
Thursday, August 24 1:00 - 2:00 pm in COM 8
Prevent a Mob Scene: Designing
Effective Research Assignments. Friday,
August 25 11:00 - Noon in COM 8
The calendar for this entire series is at: http://www.utexas.edu/its/training/facres.html.
DIGITAL LIBRARIES,
MICROFILM & TEXAS ARCHIVAL REPOSITORIES ONLINE:
In the early days of the web there were expectations that vast amounts of research
material would soon be digitized and made available to scholars worldwide. Microfilm
publishers who had assembled valuable research collections over the last five
or six decades and sold them to libraries quickly geared up to make these collections
available over the web. Unfortunately, this early promise soon crashed on the
rocks of reality as producers discovered that it was extremely expensive to
convert content from print or microfilm into web-ready form, and that hardware,
software, routine maintenance, and the skilled technical employees required
to provide web access all added to the costs. Under funded research libraries
wanted to purchase web access to these types of research materials but simply
could not afford it.
Nowadays, the number of these types of new commercial projects has slowed to a trickle. Libraries around the country continue with their individual digitization projects, but because of the costs, these projects are largely funded through grants. In focus group meetings held around the country by the National Endowment for the Humanities, NEH found that scholars said they would be content if they had access to finding aids for the nation's manuscript and microfilm collections, until such time as full-scale digitization became more realistic.
One of the library's current projects (working alongside The Ransom Center) is to collaborate with other research libraries in Texas to bring these finding aids to the web. This project, Texas Archival Repositories Online, has been funded by the Texas Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund. Further information may be found at http://taro.lib.utexas.edu.
RECENTLY ADDED
WEB RESOURCES AVAILABLE ON UT LIBRARY ONLINE:
Look under the menu entry -- Indexes, Abstracts and Full Text:
ARTbibliographies Modern
- Web Access, 1974 - present. (ABC-CLIO)
African American Newspapers:
The 19th Century - Web Access, 1827 - 1902 (Scholarly Resources)
AUSTLIT (Australia)
- Web Access, 1988 - present. (ADFA)
CASSIS Patents Classification,
1790 - present. (U. S. Patent Office) This database is available only in UT
libraries on UT Library Online Stations.
Environmental Periodicals Bibliography,
1972 - December, 1999. (NISC) This database is available only in UT libraries
on UT Library Online Stations.
Library and Information Science
Abstracts (LISA) - Web Access, 1969 - present. (SilverPlatter)
Music Index - Web
Access, 1979 - 1998. (Harmonie Park Press)
NBER (National Bureau of Economic
Research) Working Papers - Web Access, November, 1994 - present.
(NBER)
TRANSPORT - Web
Access, 1960 - present. (SilverPlatter)
Oxford English Dictionary
- Web Access 1989 -. Science Next Wave - Web Access, Current issue. (AAAS)
______________________________________________________
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