Access versus ownership is the new dilemma facing most librarians in view of the rising costs of serials and not equally increasing budgets. But, is giving access to articles through document delivery really a viable alternative to journal ownership? The Life Sciences Library at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, decided to test the viability of using commercial document delivery as compensation for discontinued ownership, as a complement to ownership, and as a supplement to ownership by providing access to cancelled, owned-but-unavailable, or never-owned journals through a commercial document delivery service. This article documents the evolution of that procedure and the results of the project.
Providing convenient access to journals for users in a geographically dispersed university was a challenge for the Pennsylvania State University Libraries’ Full‐Text Implementation Group. The group established and implemented procedures for providing full‐text access to general interest periodicals to all Penn State users, both in the libraries and remotely. This paper discusses the formation of the group, addresses the decisions made about providing full‐text, the procedures established to implement and promote full‐text, the problems encountered during implementation, and the future of full‐text access at Penn State.
A study was conducted to characterize the sources of references found in ZR that are not found in BIOSIS Previews. Zoological Record (ZR), published jointly by the Zoological Society of London and BIOSIS, is the authoritative and most comprehensive source of zoological information (Zoological Record web page 1998). It covers nearly 6,000 international journals, review annuals, newsletters, popular magazines, monographs, meeting proceedings, books and reports. Despite the seemingly ample coverage of biological information, some Penn State zoologists feel that the cancellation of ZR in 1995 deprived them of access to much of their literature. The characterization of the unique references is necessary to fully understand the value of such references to a comprehensive literature search.
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