Take a look at JSTOR!

List of JSTOR Journals

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Take a look at Elsevier ScienceDirect

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The Library is taking another major step in providing electronic resources to UNF students and faculty. For the last several years, patrons have been able to find electronic full text journal articles from aggregators such as General Academic Index, Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, and the Proquest Medical Collection. Beginning this January, we will provide more and more scholarly journals in electronic full-text format. These journals are published in their entirety electronically, cover to cover, not just selected articles.

This is a propitious time for the UNF Library to begin a format shift for two reasons. The turmoil created in the publishing industry by electronic publishing has begun to calm down, and many of the problems and difficulties encountered by publishers and libraries three years ago have been resolved. Relations between for-profit corporations and academic libraries, who were at each others' throats over pricing and copyright issues, have become more polite, if not friendly. Both sides are at least listening to each others' problems and attempting to solve them together. However, the continuing high cost of electronic subscriptions, coupled with most publishers' insistence on maintaining concurrent paper subscriptions, greatly concerns academic libraries, whose budgets must now support both print and electronic materials. UNF Library's budget is stretched especially thin. Secondly, the UNF Library needs more space to accommodate its growing collection and the university's growing student population. Since a library addition is not in the near future, providing electronic access to materials is an immediate solution to our space problem.

What are the electronic titles we have purchased? The first is JSTOR, an electronic archive of about 120 important journals in the social sciences and humanities stretching back to the nineteenth century. Titles include The American Economic Review, Journal of American History, Journal of the American Mathematical Society, Journal of Philosophy, Political Science Quarterly, and the American Sociological Review. While coverage varies from title to title, each journal has its complete backfile online up through the early 1990s. The equivalent print volumes owned by the Library will be boxed and sent to storage, thus freeing up shelf space in the Periodicals area on the third floor.

The UNF Library, in a consortial purchase with 8 other Florida State University System libraries, now offers electronic access to approximately 700 journal titles published by Elsevier, the giant Dutch publishing house and a major provider of scholarly journals. The collection is called ScienceDirect. Any Elsevier title owned by one of the 9 SUS libraries will be accessible by all of the other university libraries; this means for UNF an increase from 66 Elsevier titles to more than 700, covering many disciplines, including computer science and engineering, physics, biology, medicine, chemistry, education, and other social sciences.

The third acquisition is a subscription to OCLC's Electronic Collections Online, which provides access to electronic journals from publishers not able to mount their own servers. UNF Library, over a period of time, will be converting many of its current print subscriptions to electronic subscriptions accessible via OCLC. Patrons can link to articles either directly from UNF's online catalog, from OCLC's FirstSearch service, or from participating indexing services, such as the Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. OCLC will also guarantee archiving services for available backfiles.

What is the practical impact of all this to our faculty and students? You will be able to obtain journal articles not only from workstations located in the Library, but also from your offices, dorm rooms, and homes. Often you will be able to link to these articles when you find them in online indexes and the Library's OPAC, and you will be able to print the articles from your own workstations. Electronic backfile coverage will depend on each journal publisher's offerings. With the Elsevier subscription, you will be able to access many more journals than this Library is able to afford. However, for most electronic titles, there will be no paper volumes on the shelf, and many print titles covered by equivalent electronic access will be placed in storage.

The emerging information formats promise exciting opportunities for easier and broader dissemination of knowledge. As more and more publishers enter the electronic market, the UNF Library hopes to be able to provide our students and faculty with the appropriate materials, in any format, which will take advantage of these opportunities.

-- Kathleen Cohen

For more information, contact a Reference Librarian at 620-2616 or libhelp@unf.edu

FAQs
about JSTOR

What is JSTOR?

JSTOR (an acronym for Journal STORage) is a major electronic backfile database containing the full text of 117 core academic journals, primarily in the social sciences and humanities. JSTOR is unique among other full-text databases because complete backfiles, many of which date from the 1800s, have been digitized and are available AND searchable over the World Wide Web.

What years are included in the backfiles?

Currently coverage starts with the first issue of each title and extends to 1993-95. As each year passes, another year of issues is digitized and added to the archive (what they call their "moving wall" of three to five years). In other words, this is not a database to search for recent articles.

Are full page images available?

Full pages were digitized, including tables and captions. What you see is a high resolution scanned image, which is a perfect replica of the original journal page.

What about search capabilities?

JSTOR has both basic and advanced searches of keywords, topics, titles, authors and dates. You can even restrict searches by journal title and publication date range.

The interdisciplinary nature of JSTOR becomes evident upon searching. Search all 117 journals on a specific topic and in a few seconds potentially retrieve economic, ecological, anthropological, cultural, historical, political, philosophical, educational and literary research. Compare that to manual research!

Can anyone access JSTOR?

JSTOR is accessible only to those researchers at libraries which have purchased site licenses to the database. JSTOR is available to users in the UNF library and on campus. Remote access is available to UNF affiliates through the SUS proxy server.

-- Eileen Brady

More New Databases

Computer & Information Systems Abstracts, Microcomputer Abstracts, Computer Abstracts, SoftBase