MOVING WITH THE TIMES:

E-JOURNALS IN BRITISH ACADEMIC LIBRARIES

INTRODUCTION

Will Wakeling

There is a certain timeliness to the appearance just now of an issue of Serials Review focusing at least in part on serials work in the United Kingdom, and I am grateful to the long-suffering but ever-understanding Editor, Cindy Hepfer, and JAI Press for granting me the oppor-

tunity to gather together the accompanying papers and to introduce them. The focus they give is admittedly a narrow one, concentrating on the academic library environment, but with that narrowness comes a level of detail which may be illuminating in showing both underlying similarities and differences between the UK and the US. The timeliness lies in the dynamic nature of serials publishing and management at the moment

across the globe, and the shared sensation (the familar topic of conversation whenever and wherever two or three serials librarians, vendors and publishers are

gathered together) that several important corners are now all in the process of being turned at the same time; and not only does this involve us all in immediately uncomfortable contortions, but also no-one is quite sure what lurks around those comers, no more in the

UK than elsewhere.

It is natural enough that the balance of content in these papers should favor developments on the elec- tronic front, where things are moving quickest. But Jill Wakeling is Assistant Director for Collection Man-

agement, Information Services, The University of Bir- Taylor-Roe’s summary of approaches to serials pur- mingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2lT, United chasing puts matters in a broader context, and includes Kingdom, +44 121414 5809 indications of the continuing serials funding crisis and

cw.m.wakeling@bham.ac.uk>. of a growing importance of procurement exercises and

-MOVING WITHTHETIMES- Vo~.24,No. ~(SPRING 1998) 1

consortia1 activity which will be familar to US readers. An interesting extension of this phenomenon is the bur- geoning numbers of UK institutions linking into US- based associations or consortia such as RLG, to exploit particular facilities or to exchange resources. It is tempting to see, in these trans-Atlantic connections and other interactions at a supra-national level,’ genuine evidence of global customer/consumer solidarity in the face of the more threatening, merger-ridden commer- cial publishing environment. The same applies to moves to increase purchasing power overseas by con- sortial means, for example via deals secured in the UK by the national negotiating body called CHEST (Com- bined Higher Education Software Team), through whom contracts forUK access to networked US-based information products are now proliferating.

Tony Kidd writes about the exploitation of e-jour- nals in academic libraries, and the impetus created by the national Pilot Site Licence Initiative (PSLI) which from 1996 opened up a wealth of opportunities. A suc- cessor program to the PSLI, the National Electronic Site Licence Initiative, is even now under construction, with a wider remit, and with a managing agent in the process of being selected.2 At the same time librarians in the U.K. are as interested as any others in how things will shake down in the market for intermediary and vendor products to provide single-point-of-access common user interfaces to e-journals. At the close of 1997 the issue is being forced in the U.K. by the agree- ment struck between CHEST and Blackwell’s Informa- tion Services providing advantageous terms for the use of the latter’s Electronic Journal Navigatog-institu- tional responses to this deal over the next few months will be an interesting reflection on the comparative product evaluations that are currently being carried out in libraries up and down the country.

Hazel Woodward’s contribution on the key role e- journals are playing in the national Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme bears witness to some important basic differences in approach to digital library research and development in the UK and the US. Among the “thousand blossoming flowers” of the eLib programme there are both successes and failures, in each of the Pro- gramme areas. Much of the benefit of the Programme derives from the very diversity of the undertakings that have been supported, and the wide range of institutions

that have been drawn into the partnerships that have run each project. As the next round of projects is launched for the extension of eLib into areas of further digital complexity it is just now becoming apparent which of the first round of projects have matured to viability beyond the protection of their initial grant, and from which projects genuinely ground-breaking develop- ments have resulted-but the impact of involvement for the many dozens of participants has been deeply educational and formative in its own right.

The detailed paper from Steve Hitchcock and his co- authors on hypertext linking in the e-journal environ- ment illustrates the work of one such ambitious initia- tive, and several characteristic elements of elib’s general philosophy - it is collaborative, a joint commer- cial/academic undertaking, multi-disciplinary, progres- sive, exploiting the latest IT and related technology, and, importantly, committed to producing working models and demonstrators that can be put to the test.

For those engaged in producing and managing seri- als publications it is further proof, if such were still needed, that the world of scholarly communication to be inhabited by the next generation of our scholars and researchers will have a landscape very different from the one we now recognize; and this will be true in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. In order that we as infor- mation managers are able to see the contents of that landscape fully exploited, it is important that we give ourselves every opportunity to become familiar with developments across the globe-I hope this selection offers some insights that will broaden that familiarity, and my thanks to the authors for their sterling and valu- able contributions.

NOTESANDREFERENCES

1. For example the international support being offered to

those libraries in the Netherlands and Germany who have

collaborated to develop a set of protective Licensing Princi-

ples in reaction to the recent proposed Reed ElsevieriWolters

Kluwer merger.

2. http://www.jisc.ac.uklpub97/c8_97.html

3. http://www.chest.ac.ukldatasets/navigator/

contents.html

2 SERIALS REVIEW