University Times

ULS expands 'holdings' with on-line services

Pitt has expanded access to its library holdings — without adding buildings or shelf space.

This month, the University began subscribing to two services that give faculty, staff and students online access to 1,400 recently published monographs and reference books as well as 650 scholarly journals that had previously been available here only in print.

Until now, "very few" books and monographs had been available electronically through Pitt libraries, according to University Library System (ULS) Director Rush Miller.

About 1,800 journals already were available here electronically. The 650 new ones include some of the scientific world's most highly respected (and highly priced) journals.

Books and monographs

Pitt is the first university to contract with NetLibrary for its entire online array of books and monographs, which is growing at the rate of 300 books per month.

NetLibrary converts hard-copy books to electronic form and converts them to HTML as users request them.

Electronic books can be viewed, searched and checked out via the Internet and a Web browser. Pitt students and employees have full access to the company's 1,400 books by connecting from PittNet to www.netLibrary.com.

Additional titles are being added monthly from 40 major scholarly publishers, including the University of Pittsburgh Press, Cambridge University Press, Harvard Business School Press, St. Martin's Press, MIT Press and Libraries Unlimited.

Users who wish to borrow an e-book can first download Knowledge Station software. Knowledge Station is a Windows client viewer and may be downloaded free from NetLibrary. With this software, users can view and annotate text with highlights, notes and bookmarks.

Users also can employ any Web browser to view books online without downloading them, but those users won't get access to Knowledge Station's special features such as highlighting and bookmarking.

NetLibrary software ensures that only one person at a time can "check out" an e-book for two weeks. Borrowers are legally entitled to print hard copies, but they must type a new print command for each page.

NetLibrary is the first commercial service to digitize new titles from scholarly publishers, Miller said.

Journals

Through Elsevier's Science Direct, Pitt faculty, staff and students now have access to 650 electronic journals from Elsevier, a leading journal publisher.

Science Direct is a Web database of the full text of journals in life, physical, medical, technical and social sciences, including articles published during the last two years.

Through Science Direct, articles can be searched by keyword, or users can browse tables of contents. The full articles can then be viewed online or printed in either HTML or PDF formats.

Science Direct allows web access to any Elsevier journal to which any Pitt library subscribes.

Pitt personnel can get to these electronic resources in several ways.

Each journal in Elsevier's Science Direct and every book in NetLibrary will be listed in PITTCAT, with an automatic URL "hotlink" to the full-text article or book. Also, both services will be featured in library Web pages. In addition, the journals will be listed alphabetically in the e-journal list maintained on Pitt ULS Web pages.

University libraries plan to buy hard copies of most of the books available through NetLibrary, and the University will continue buying print copies of journals available electronically through Elsevier's Science Direct.

(Print subscriptions to Elsevier journals run as high as $30,000 per year.) So the University isn't subscribing to the two digital services in order to save money, Miller emphasized.

"Let me disabuse you of the notion that the electronic journal or book is helping to solve the problem of soaring costs for library materials," he said. "Scholarly and scientific publishers are in the business of making money. We have not found a case yet where a publisher will give us a cheaper electronic version of a hard-copy book or journal they were charging us for before."

But Miller said the University got "a really good deal" in subscribing to NetLibrary (paid for by ULS) and Elsevier's Science Direct (jointly purchased by ULS and the Health Sciences Library System).

"Our contracts stipulate that we can't publicly reveal the price, but in each case we made out very well," Miller said.

Increased access is the real advantage of providing e-books and e-journals, he maintained.

"Especially for journals, the access level is so much better online than it is in print. Instead of having to go to the library and pull a journal off the shelf, you can call it up on your computer screen," he said.

So why continue to buy print versions of journals?

"At this time, it's still the only way to guarantee archival access," Miller replied. "There's a serious concern about leaving the archiving or the preservation of this information to the publishers, who are mostly concerned with their bottom line. When a title grows old and is no longer heavily used, it becomes less profitable for the publisher to maintain it on a database.

"Here at Pitt, we have 100-year-old journals on our shelves," he continued. "How many people believe that a century from now, the online journal that we're using today will still be available in the same way it is now? No one. The migration paths for electronic data are changing so fast. Already, we have a very difficult time reading videotape that is 10 years old."

Maurine Greenwald, an associate professor of history who serves on the University Senate's library committee, said acquisition of NetLibrary and Science Direct "should be enormously helpful" to Pitt researchers.

"Even if, in the short term, you don't benefit from these new services, moving in this direction [of increasing electronic access to research materials] is extremely important for the University," Greenwald said.

As a historian, Greenwald said, she won't use the journals available through Elsevier's Science Direct. But as for NetLibrary, Greenwald commented: "Anything that can expedite acquiring research materials for the humanities and social sciences is, I think, very important."

— Bruce Steele