He updated the Board on the progress that is being made on library planning. Current plans call for demolition of the two buildings on the building site this summer with ground breaking for the new structure in October 2001. Kirk briefed the Board on the current status of the electronic collection and discussed the migration from print to online journals. 4,175 journals are linked in the catalog and 1,944 books are linked in the catalog. Some publishers offer purchase of online access alone, while most offer online access with purchase of print issues.
Nature offers print issues with purchase of the online version.
A few have begun charging more for access to both formats. It appears that the migration from print to online access is inevitable for most scholarly journals. It seems preferable to control the migration, rather than allowing it to happen to us. The building of Raynor may provide the time to move vigorously in this direction. Concern has been expressed about the quality of the graphics in online journals.