Re: Electronic availability

[David Goodman <dgoodman@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

I am certainly prepared to say and demonstrate  that (at least in my
academic field and related ones) some Elsevier journals are good and some
are poor, and also that  some non-Elsevier journals are good and others
are poor. I know as well that for the research needs of my University
some journals, both from Elsevier and other publishers, are good but
not relevant.

The general and continuing excellence of Columbia's collections makes it
hard to believe that Tony actually cannot tell good from bad, or relevant
from irrelevant.

David Goodman, Princeton University Biology Library				
dgoodman@princeton.edu            609-258-3235

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On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Tony Ferguson wrote:

> Our job is to bring people and information together.  We do this by owning
> some information, buying some on demand, and by showing people the way to
> interlibrary loan for the rest.  E-journal packages that bring people and
> information easily and quickly together are not a bad thing.  One would
> have to have a lot more faith than I do in the scholarly screening process
> to project that some Elsevier journals are poor and other non-Elsevier
> journals are especially good.  We have authors whose careers are rooted in
> publishing. The same authors publish in Elsevier and non-Elsevier
> journals.  Librarian dreams of selecting only the best and presenting it
> to their patrons are only dreams.  Journals are packages of hundreds of
> articles, some great, some not so great, some will prove to be great only
> with time.  We are taking ourselves too seriously.  tony
> 
> ______________________