Previous by Date Index by Date
Threaded Index 		Next by Date
Previous by Thread Next by Thread


Re: Ads in online journals-reply 

The Nov/Dec issue of Educom Review has an interview with Clifford A.
Lynch, developer of the University of California's Melvyl system. This
quote addresses Kathrine MacNeil's initial question to some extent: "if
you look at your typical abstracting and indexing database, it started
probably somewhere between 1970 and 1980. And there's a sense in which the
journal articles prior to the inception of that electronic abstracting and
indexing database may as well not exist, because they are so difficult to
find. Now that we are starting to see, in libraries, full-text showing up
online, I think we are very shortly going to cross a sort of critical mass
boundary where those publications that are not instantly available in
full-text will become kind of second-rate in a sense, not because their
quality is low, but just because people will prefer the accessibility of
things they can get right away." 

We have had patrons come to our library with printouts from weeks or
months ago of information they've read over the web, often from government
'documents,' and now they want to see the print version, so they can cite
it in a research paper! 

Surely schoarly journal publishers and advertisers can come up with
profitable ways to advertise in this new format. For example, they could
resell advertising space for the same issue year after year. Sell space in
the April 10, 1998 issue of Science in 1998 for one calendar year. Sell
that very same space again in 1999. People are still going to be looking
at 1998 issues in 1999. Shoot, if you have what turns out to be a hot,
highly-cited article, resell links from that article for a premium. (Feel
free to send me commissions for this idea.)

Donna O'Malley
Dana Medical Library
University of Vermont
Burlington, VT  05405
(802) 656-2200
(802) 656-0762 (fax)
Donna.O'Malley@vtmednet.org


http://www.library.yale.edu/liblicense
© 1996, 1997 Yale University Library
 Please read our Disclaimer
E-mail us with feedback