ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Internet Reviews

Sara Amato, editor

Sara Amato is automated systems librarian at Central Washington University;; samato@tahoma.cum.edu

Editor’s Note:With the ever increasing number of Internet-accessible services targeted toward libraries, this month’s column, for the first time, is including for-fee databases.

Communication Institute for Online Scholarship. Access:http:// www.cios.org.

Communication scholars will be pleased to know about the Communication

Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS) and its Comserve Web service. As a nonprofit organization, Comserve has been online since 1986. CIOS, its parent organization since 1990, also produces the ComIndex CD-ROM database. Both services have been awarded the Prize for Excellence in Information Services from the International Communication Association’s Council of Communication Libraries. Designed to enhance scholarly activity among its community, the WWW site provides a conduit to its online conferences, bibliographies, syllabi, events calendar, position announcements and an index to its 60+ journals; it also provides an electronic white pages for its members.

The online conferences are called Hotlines, and they include such specialized lists as CommGrads for graduate students, Edutel for computer-mediated communication research, and lists for pro forma topics including gender, intercultural communication, and mass communication. Broad-based lists include CommJobs, NewBooks, and Preview, which broadcasts announcements of new scholarly work.

Another feature of CIOS is its Syllabus collection, organized by date, which covers such diverse topics as Magazines in American Life and Computer, Ethics, and Society. However, the majority of these are from 1994 and earlier, with only two from 1996; one wishes more were available. The Bibliographies collection and the Description of Graduate Programs are also in dire need of updating.

Many journals are indexed from their initial issue; the earliest is The Free Speech Yearbook from 1962. Others include CIOS’ refereed, full text Electronic Journal of Communication; the Asian Journal of Communication; Communication Yearbook; Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media; Media, Culture and Society; and Women’s Studies in Communication. Currently, most journals are completed through 1995; some are also indexed through 1996. Journal citations can include abstracts, affiliation of the first author, and keywords indexed. There is also an option to search by table of contents for selected journals.

Perhaps the most valuable feature is the ability to do a full-text search of all of Comserve’s databases. However, a search for the word “mentor” yielded almost too many hits, including not only a transcript of a speech of the Dalai Lama, but also an analysis of Nixon’s “Checkers” speech; more worthwhile was a survey about online mentoring. More efficient ways to search are the keyword and context searching options, which result in a display of several lines before and after the word searched. Boolean searching is also available through the operators AND OR NOT XOR and EXCEPT; “near,” wild card, and truncation are also options.

This ability to search specifically in the Communication discipline outweighs the cost when compared to comparable paper indexes such as Communication Abstracts, which allows only single subject indexing and no cross-referencing. Per annum cost for individuals is $45; the student rate is $25 with limited services. Institutional memberships range from $200 for the basic service to $500 for the advanced, multi-user service, all of which include discounts for purchase of the ComIndex CD-ROM database.

Currently, there are 75 institutional affiliates worldwide; libraries may want to check to see if their communications faculty have signed up for the service. If they have, it is worthwhile to publicize it and make it available in-house for their users. If not, libraries that have a Communications Department as their constituency should strongly consider providing access to CIOS in collaboration with their faculty.—Marie Monteagudo, Virginia Beach, Virginia; oasisnet@concentric.net

Project Muse. Access:http://muse.jhu. edu/.

If an Internet site can be said to be at the crest of the wave that is the World Wide Web, it is certainly Project Muse, a full-text journal database of 40+ titles offered to subscribers by Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. Prototyped in the fall of 1993, Project Muse was one of the first ventures of its kind, and was designed to exploit the possibilities of NSCA’s Mosaic client software, then in Beta release. In a very real way, Project Muse is a high exemplar of the “text-hypertext” fundamental principal that is the Web.

As gopher-based resources became popular in 1993, Susan Lewis of JHUP and Todd Kelley of the Eisenhower Library began to devise a system for offering the tables of contents of the JHUP journals online. From its inception, Muse included subject indexing for each article, searching by single journal or multiple journals, and graphics options. It has kept pace with the explosion of Web technology and is offered to the user in a clean, simple format that will never be out of style, yet has no need for every HTML innovation, splashy graphics, or frenetic animation. Its look and functionality are in harmony with the scholarly nature of its content.

The journals that are the content of Project Muse are indeed high-caliber, research-quality representatives of the humanities, literature, and mathematics. As of the end of 1996, 40 titles were available with two slated for debut in early 1997. Offerings include: American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture, American Jewish History, American Journal of Mathematics, Callaloo, Diacritics, Eighteenth-Century Life, Journal of Early Christian Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Philosophy and Literature, Postmodern Culture, and Reviews in American History.

Using the Project Muse online journals is the apotheosis of the World Wide Web experience. A very intuitive WAIS searching utility called SWISH (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans) allows Boolean searching in single issues, volumes, or across all 40+ titles. Where footnotes exist in articles, the footnote number is a hyperlink to the article’s bibliography or notes section. The subject of pagination in e-journals is handled in a straightforward manner by inserting [End Page xx] at the proper place. Muse is a pleasure to use.

Project Muse is taking a leadership role in addressing some issues at the forefront of discussion on electronic resources for libraries. Subscription to Muse includes unlimited personal access and use including printing and saving to disk and multiple users at a single institution. Muse administrators also offer advice on cataloging their electronic “holdings” and linking to them via the subscriber’s online catalog. Obviously, the online availability of journals has collection development implications. The print versions are still considered to be the “edition of record” although the online edition’s contents are the same. Muse administrators advise not to cancel print equivalents of the JHUP titles, as the subscription rate structure offers an incentive to retain both formats.

Muse’s subscription rates are tailored to different institutions and levels of use, ranging from an annual $2,500 for unlimited university library use (any number of simultaneous users) to the $300-$400 range for smaller school or public library subscriptions with a limited number of users. Individual (personal) subscriptions are not yet available. Single titles from Project Muse are available at 10% off the print subscription price, while the complete print and electronic subscription cost is only 30% more than the print price alone.

Although the Project Muse Web site is still considered an experiment by many, with 350 subscribers it is full of promise and potential for the future. In the search for Internet resources of quality, scholarly content, reputation, and stable provenance, the Muse database must not be overlooked.—Kurt W. Wagner, William Paterson College of New Jersey; kurt@frontier.wilpaterson. edu ■