TOWARD AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL ARTICLE DELIVERY SERVICE

IV. RECOMMENDATIONS

To enhance the current level of access to citations and improve the capabilities for delivering articles electronically, the following recommendations are offered in priority order. Costs for each of these recommendations are presented in Section VI.

A. Priority 1:

Enhance the LUIS search software by developing the following functions:

search logic improvements - provides more precision in searching and helps make the search results more relevant. For example, some key features that need to be added are
adjacency - allows a user to request that two (or more) words be side by side. Converts word searching into phrase searching. E.g., "higher education".
search limits - allows a searcher to limit retrieval to citations that meet additional requirements. Examples of such limit features are language (e.g., Spanish only), type of material (e.g., technical report), date of publication (e.g., later than 1990), and location (e.g., Sarasota campus, Law library, reference collection).
hook-to-holdings - once a journal citation is selected as relevant, this feature would allow the searcher to enter a simple command to learn if the library has the journal issue containing the article.
download - allows the searcher to copy relevant citations to a user-provided floppy disk to incorporate later into a paper as references or bibliography. This feature requires PCs as LUIS terminals in addition to software development.
print - same function as download only the citations are sent to a printer instead of to a floppy disk.

Rationale: Adding these features will make LUIS searching as powerful as the CD-ROM products and the commercial remote systems. The SUS libraries have identified these features as a top priority for LUIS development.

B. Priority 2:

Provide PCs as public terminals.

Rationale: Most of the current base of LUIS terminals are now seven years old. These terminals and the controllers needed to support them are no longer manufactured and within the next two or three years, the vendors will no longer provide maintenance. We have to replace this nearly obsolete equipment, and it only makes sense to purchase replacements that meet the libraries' needs. It positions the libraries for the future and reduces dependence on decade-old technology. PCs are necessary to support the download function, to migrate to a client/server architecture, and to receive, decompress and display images as discussed above in section III.D. Funds for the PCs would be allocated to the campuses because the logistics of managing an inventory of PCs which support multiple information access functions warrants delegating the purchasing and inventory-control activities to the libraries.

C. Priority 3:

Acquire complete electronic articles for approximately 400 popular academic titles covering the humanities, social sciences, and sciences at the undergraduate level and next acquire electronic articles for 400 business journals. Also purch ase PCs and printers capable of handling bit-mapped images. The articles would be stored at NERDC and delivered over the FIRN T1 network to designated areas of the libraries for display and printing. FCLA would be responsible for the software to store, retrieve and deliver the articles. The PCs would be located in the SUS libraries to receive the articles.

Rationale: This would be a significant pilot project to test the usefulness of this form of delivery for instruction and term paper research. Over time, as the costs of computer storage, computer processing and network bandwidth drop, this repository o f articles could evolve into a central journals library. This pilot project will not compensate for the journals that the SUS libraries have had to cancel. The libraries have been canceling the least used, most esoteric titles in their collections. The re are four reasons that this proposed pilot does not seek to provide the lost esoteric titles: (1) The esoteric titles are, by and large, not available in electronic form. We have to start with what is available, and what is available are the heavily u sed popular titles that are the core titles in every library collection. (2) The popular titles will be useful to the off-campus academic programs. (3) The popular titles will provide an electronic back-up to their print counterparts. As they are heavi ly used, issues of popular titles occasionally get misplaced or stolen from the library. Having these articles in electronic form will ensure availability. (4) The titles that have been chosen are the ones that are most relevant to the new tenth univers ity, namely, journals in a broad spectrum of liberal arts and business disciplines. Since the libraries will be keeping their subscriptions to the printed versions of these popular journals, it will give most of the undergraduates a choice, i.e., the stu dent may choose to go to the shelf or purchase printer-generated copy. Maintaining the printed versions will allow libraries to choose how current the electronic journal database should be, e.g., past five years, or more, or less. In addition, it will e nsure the archive while the technology sorts itself out by cost comparisons between various formats: paper, microfilm and electronic. With increasing expertise and improvement of the software, hardware and state-wide telecommunications that store, retrie ve and deliver electronic articles, it should be possible to expand the service to the more esoteric journals. Electronic journal article delivery is a major new service. It cannot be mastered all at once. This pilot is an important first step and is t he best way to begin.

D. Priority 4:

Add two or three more citation databases to the LUIS system and increase the FCLA budget to cover them.

Rationale: The general agreement among the SUS libraries is that LUIS should provide the databases that have high applicability across the SUS and then each SUS library will supplement LUIS with specialty databases on CD-ROM that are uniquely attuned to the academic programs of a campus. There are a number of citation databases of wide applicability across the SUS that are not in LUIS. Some of the ones most frequently mentioned databases and their coverage are

Psychological Abstracts - 1,300 journals in all disciplines of psychology.
Current Contents - 6,500 journals in sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.
Compendex Plus - 2,200 journals in all aspects of engineering.
INSPEC - 5,200 technical journals in physics, computer science and engineering.
This recommendation seeks to expand the coverage of subject disciplines available on LUIS. The funds requested will not be sufficient to load all the databases of interest but will make a significant advance. Since the availability and prices of pro cts are changing rapidly, the actual selection of databases will be done by SUS reference and collection development specialists when the funds are available. However, we can say now that the databases chosen will be those in highest demand which cover a cademic disciplines not covered thus far.

E. Priority 5:

Provide an Electronic Reference Collection. Although not strictly related to journal article delivery, LUIS could provide an "electronic reference collection" which would include an encyclopedia and dictionary and possibly a gazetteer, alm anac and statistical abstract.

Rationale: These items would support the entry-level student as well as the advanced scholar in all nine institutions. The Florida Community College Center for Library Automation (CCLA) offers Grolier's Academic American Encyclopedia in electronic form , and it is quite popular.

F. Priority 6:

Improve the gateway from LUIS to the commercial firms which offer rapid article delivery.

Rationale: These services, from companies such as CARL, Faxon, OCLC and RLG, would provide access to more journal citations than can be loaded at NERDC. These services provide fast delivery of articles that are not available in the SUS and that would b e needed more rapidly than out-of-state ILL could provide. The above recommendations do not include a request for funds for PC-based scanning systems to replace the traditional fax machine. The cost of the new PC-based machines, at $6,000, is such that several of the SUS libraries have already decided that they can afford to purchase and install them with either existing funds or grant funds. Within the next six to twelve months, more than half the SUS libraries will have these systems installed and operational.