Blackwell's will make the journals available to all the Royal Society's subscribers around the world. The Royal Society, as the U.K.'s Academy of Science, is an independent body promoting the natural and applied sciences. Four additional publishers Jossey-Bass Publishers, the Ohio State University Press, Plenum Publishing, and Sage Publications have agreed to contribute their journals to the OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online service. This brings the total number of journal providers to 21, and the number of journals to over 850. Libraries using Electronic Collections Online subscribe to journals directly with publishers or subscription agents and access them remotely through the World Wide Web at OCLC's headquarters in Dublin, Ohio.
Users can browse lists of journals, selected issues, or a selected topic area.
OCLC says that Electronic Collections Online combines the cost benefits associated with remote access to data with the advantages of local collection management, reducing information costs for libraries by centralizing storage and access, and enabling libraries to share the cost of loading, archiving, and providing access to their electronic journal collections. The ITC Bookstore collection includes titles from The Brookings Institution, Center for Strategic and International Studies, the World Bank, Bureau of Export Administration, International Trade Administration, and more. The ITC Bookstore can be searched by keyword or by specific collection. International trade-related subjects in the Bookstore include agriculture and food, behavior and society, business and economics, communication, computers, energy, environmental pollution and control, health care, military sciences, and transportation. The advanced search interface and new Internet pricing from the AGI make the COS version of GeoRef a good value, COS says.