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Re: Yes, it's time (RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?)

On 5/1/07, David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu> wrote:
But there are such services--and Proquest and Ebsco and Wilson and others have been providing it very successfully for a number of years now.\\
Indeed, there are such services, but they are usually (?) repurposed and without the illustrative material and the ads. They are very useful for what they do -- which is basically to provide a text-database version of the magazines. They are probably more useful to libraries which dont need to have the full magazine (ie the magazine including the ads, diagrams and pictures), but fashion or design school library is not going to limit its magazine collection to text sans-illustrations. Though for some analytic and academic purposes it is useful and may be sufficient just to have a version of the text, minus illustrations and ads.

Similarly 15 years ago there was quite widespread support for full-text versions of scientific periodicals which excluded illustrative material. Such databases had their uses then, but we would not have raised the possibility that one could therefore stop printing the actual journal.

I was rather thinking that digital versions of magazines could replace and displace the print versions, which will only be a real option when the digital version includes ALL that the magazine contains. The print version becomes at least moot, when the digital version covers all the printable content.This seems to have been accepted in STM libraries and the institutions they serve: many consumer magazine publishers would be surprised at how quickly that change has taken place.

Adam Hodgkin

On 5/1/07, David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu> wrote:

But there are such services--and Proquest and Ebsco and Wilson and others have been providing it very successfully for a number of years now. They have among other things greatly facilitated the ability of libraries to keep intact files of this material, and for university to provide access to a wide range of material to which they would not ordinarily subscribe.

At a more popular level, the problem has been solved by the (usually free) web editions of many magazines and newspapers, and their aggregation via RSS. And in many fields, the growth of web-only magazine-like services--for me, the most important of them is slashdot--there has ever been an equally good way of access to this sort of material.

It is not only librarians and conventional publishers who can figure out effective ways for distributing content.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: adam hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>
Date: Friday, April 27, 2007 10:18 pm
Subject: Re: Yes, it's time (RE: Is it time to stop printing journals?)
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

A rather delayed response to this thread, which I found very
interesting. It has been leading me to puzzle out why the
consumer magazine market has not gone in the same direction (at
least it has not gone there yet)

http://exacteditions.blogspot.com/2007/04/journals-and-consumer-magazines.html

I have also been wondering why a similar aggregation solution for consumer magazines, seems so unattractive. Can one imagine a Science Direct for all the major consumer magazines? It would be a rather monstrous compilation, but does that not tell us something about how much the big research libraries really wanted/needed solutions like Science Direct? Only with big and efficient aggregators such as Elsevier could the STM library world have moved so quickly towards an electronic solution for their patrons. Libraries are of course vastly more important to the STM market than they are to the consumer magazine publishers.

However, it seems likely that there is some role for comprehensive aggregation services for digital books and digital magazines. Adam