LIBRARY NEWS, number 7, September 1999. An electronic newsletter published by The University of Texas at Austin General Libraries to share news about library collections and services.
THIS ISSUE
UT SYSTEM DIGITAL LIBRARY
The libraries of the nine academic and six health science components of The
University of Texas System regularly cooperate with one another in order to
fund purchases that none of the single libraries could afford on their own.
The fifteen libraries pool their funds and license scholarly resources that
they agree would benefit the 150,000 students and 8,000 faculty within The System.
Participation and leadership in this program is one of many efforts the General
Libraries employs to stretch every available library dollar to its furthest
extent.
NEW WEB BOOKS
The library has purchased 500 web books originally published by university &
scholarly presses, and has committed to the purchase of an additional 9,000
titles. These books are currently in-print from Cambridge University Press,
MIT Press, St. Martins's etc. The web versions of these books were acquired
from "netLibrary" and may be viewed online or checked out. The first 500 titles
are available to all UT System faculty and students and were funded through
the Regent's Academic Library Collection Enhancement Program. The additional
9,000 titles are a cooperative purchase by 80-90 Texas "Amigos consortia" libraries
who will share access to the titles. The library is interested in determining
whether web e-books can be an effective response to the needs of distance education
students, as well as determining their effectiveness for electronic reserves.
NetLibrary joins Early English Books Online (96,000 English language books published between 1475 and 1700) and Past Masters (collected works of major philosophers) as early examples of commercial firms bringing scholarly books to the web. Both of these other resources are also available throughout UT System. NetLibrary may be found on the Indexes, Abstracts, and Full-Text page of UT Library Online [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/Online.html]. All of these e-books will be cataloged and available through UTNetCAT and UTCAT.
NEW WEB JOURNALS
"ScienceDirect" provides access to over 700,000 full-text articles
and 750 electronic journals published by Elsevier Science and its subsidiaries.
Many of these journals are society publications and several are edited at UT.
Subjects covered include the life, physical, medical, technical, and social
sciences. Together the information in these journals constitutes the largest
collection of published scientific full-text electronic materials currently
available. Access is currently available from the test page of UT Library Online
[http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/tests.html]
ScienceDirect, is a consortium purchase by the libraries of the UT System Digital Library. Serious contract negotiations for this collection have been ongoing between the library and Elsevier since early 1997. For those of you who are aware of the often rocky relationship between Elsevier and those in the academic community concerned about the future of scholarly communication, additional information on this contract may be found at the bottom of this e-mail newsletter.
NEW WEB INDEXES
The "Web of Science" covers more than 8,400 journals in the arts, humanities,
and social and natural sciences. It provides web access to all three ISI citation
indexes – Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded,
and the Social Sciences Citation Index. Negotiation for this premier scholarly
index have been ongoing for almost three years. In the future the journal linking
feature of this database will allow nearly seamless web movement between the
index, the electronic journal, and the cited material. On the Austin campus
links from the Web of Science to approximately 500 e-journal titles are currently
active with more to come. The Web of Science is a consortia purchase by the
libraries in the UT System Digital Library, with the ten year backfile financed
by special Regental funds through the Academic Library Collection Enhancement
Program.
NEW WEB FULL-TEXT
"Business & Industry" indexes over 1000 trade and business publications covering
business events in over 190 countries around the world. Full text coverage is
included for over half of the items. This is a consortia purchase by the libraries
in the UT System Digital Library.
The IEEE/IEE Electronic Library (IEL) provides full text access to IEEE and IEE journals, conference proceedings, and standards covering electrical and computer engineering, electronics, computer science, and physics. It includes more than 4,000 titles with over 520,000 full text articles. This is a consortia purchase by the libraries in the UT System Digital Library.
"TableBase" provides access to tabular information on companies, industries, products, countries and markets. Data is drawn from privately published statistical annuals, trade associations, non-profit research groups, government agencies, international organizations, industry reports prepared by investment research groups, and more than 1000 trade and business publications. This is a consortia purchase by the libraries in the UT System Digital Library.
RECENTLY ADDED RESOURCES
Since last May the library has added more scholarly content to UT Library Online
than was contained in an average college library during the 1970's. The additions
include access to over ten thousand journals, periodicals and newspapers, hundreds
of thousands of books, tens of thousands of maps and images, and indexing for
millions of articles. The additional pages of full-text scholarly information
runs into the tens of millions. Keeping up with the exploding amount of new
scholarly resources added to UT Library Online can be daunting. You can check
recent additions with this continually updated web page of new resources at: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/indexes/new.html
NEW THINGS ARE MADE FAMILIAR, FAMILIAR THINGS ARE
MADE NEW
UT Library Online currently provides access to well in excess of a hundred million
pages of scholarly information. This content includes traditional library genres
such as books, journals, maps, manuscripts, audio, images, etc. which are now
being made available in digital form, as well as newly developing knowledge
and scholarly tools that have no direct parallel in the traditional library
or print world. Bringing the best of both traditional and emerging scholarly
resources to the students and faculty of The University is part of the mission
The General Libraries – a library where both traditional and emerging methods
of scholarship are nurtured and supported.
NEW FACULTY
If there are new faculty in your department, please forward them a copy of this
newsletter so they have a chance to subscribe if they desire. Subscription instructions
are at the bottom of this e-mail.
*Additional information regarding Elsevier ScienceDirect: Our license with Elsevier gives every school in the UT System electronic access to a journal, as long as one school subscribes to that journal. There are approximately 250 journals that Austin does not subscribe to, but that some other school within UT System does, so Austin is able to access these journals without paying additional subscription fees. This is one of several advantages to Austin of this contract. There are many reasons why the library is so careful in negotiating these contracts for scholarly web resources, but in Elsevier's case there are additional reasons for caution. Elsevier's pricing and business practices have been the cause of much comment in the academic community. Elsevier's prices are a direct cause of a significant portion of the budget squeeze experienced by research libraries worldwide. The library's current contract with Elsevier for ScienceDirect in no way changes the library's practice of continually evaluating each journal title on the basis of quality, usefulness to current university programs, and whether or not the journal is a wise expenditure of scarce library funds. Every title in ScienceDirect will continue to be evaluated on this basis, by each of the 15 component schools.
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