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Date:         Sun, 13 Sep 1992 20:48:23 EDT
              and Access" <VPIEJ-L@VTVM1.BITNET>
From:         Ann Okerson <ann@CNI.ORG>
Subject:      Distribution of Electronic Journals
              92 10:54 am

A speculation about how libraries might handle e-journal (newsletter,list)
subscriptions for their patrons led me to review my own personal
progression in this area.  Originally, I regarded e-subscriptions --
in fact, e-communication of any sort -- as a wonder, a fleeting impulse
that I had to personally capture not only on my screen but transfer over
to my machine so I could either store the various folders on diskettes,
or even more likely, print them out.  Having achieved the pinnacle of
print, I'd then erase the logged mail & might eventually erase the
diskette while filing the paper in binders.

Things changed (all this inside two years, mind you).  More journals and
lists appeared, and to download and print became bothersome.  The speed and
capacity of our e-mail system increased, as did the ease of using a much
improved mailer.  Dazzled by our own enriched e-capabilities, I subscribed
to a few more and began to log all the messages from my subscriptions to
separate folders in my e-account.  Printing was clearly no longer practical
but like a good serials librarian, I continued to build in the security of
backfiles, only now they were electronic.  My mail logs got very fat, and
it became almost as hard to find things in them as it had been in the
paper.

Time for a quick re-assessment.  I knew, because I access them a fair bit,
that the good lists and journals, have online archives maintained by the
home machine, possibly by others as well.  Many of these archives can easily
be searched online and if not, I realized I had been bringing them tempo-
rarily into my machine to run with "find" commands.  Having Eureka-ed, I'd
take what I needed and leave the files on their home machine.  If imported
into mine, I trashed them.  At a recent e-publishing meeting held by
ARL and AMS, Dennis Egan (Bellcore) told us that "Moby Dick is a megabyte"
and Jim O'Donnell (Penn) suggested that the day was around the corner when
we would import Moby Dick to our local systems, read a chapter, delete it,
and bring it back when we were ready to read the chapter after that, and
so on.

With due respect for O'Donnell, an elegant thinker and eloquent speaker,
and his remarks of April 1992, my epiphany of this summer was that many of
us already do exactly what he predicted, with much of our electronically
accessed material.  We let only the most vital things hang around even in
our machines, and far less on paper.

A number of things have changed in a short while:  capacity, equipment,
mailers, sophistication of the various parties involved in e-journal
creation -- AND there is the beginning of a comfort level and familiarity
with e-publications on the part of libraries and individual readers.

Given this individual experience, which my colleagues tell me resembles
theirs a great deal, it would be hard not to generalize to the institutional
setting and say that:  we don't need and won't have the journals at every
site; we do need and will have them at enough sites (sort of like depository
libraries for government publications) in case the Creator's Site suffers
the electronic equivalent of a Library of Congress fire AND possibly for
"load-balancing" reasons.

Good service won't be defined by having them in the local computer, but from
the access and searching enhancements that the library or publisher or
computer service or commercial distributor can provide, not to that one
title (necessarily) but to the ideas it contains and to ideas that relate
to it in other e-publications.  Working out local transfer and storage
mechanisms, then, is useful practice in the current neophyte e-publication
world.  But it *pales* in comparison to the service directions to which
librarians and other service providers should be channelling the bulk
of their energy and imagination.

Ann Okerson/Association of Research Libraries
ann@cni.org
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU