If you were asked to identify the most rapidly increasing commodity in the financial marketplace, you would probably name health care. While health care costs have increased greatly in the past decade, you might be surprised to learn that they are not first in terms of inflation. That dubious distinction belongs to scholarly journals. In the past decade, the price of the average academic journal subscription has increased 147%! In this same time period, the Consumer Price Index increased by only 41% and health care costs by 84%.
Scholarly communication has become an extraordinarily complex business increasingly controlled by commercial publishers whose primary purpose is to generate profit. The inflation generated by these publishers has placed a tremendous burden on academic library budgets. Very few libraries, if any, have budget increases that keep pace with journal inflation. The result is that libraries are forced to cancel journal subscriptions, even as the demand for journals from faculty and students continues to grow. Many librarians and university administrators believe that the entire system of scholarly communication is in danger of collapsing unless there is a concerted effort by the academic community to address this problem.
The Tisch Library is using several strategies to deal with this budgetary crisis. These include taking part in cooperative buying initiatives and supporting alternative means of publication. The Tisch Library has formed partnerships with the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) and other library consortia to control the costs of electronic resources. These partnerships have resulted in significant savings on titles such as LexisNexis, the Encyclopedia Britannica Online, and the Web of Science.
Recently all the Tufts libraries joined a new coalition entitled SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). SPARC, an offspring of the Association of Research Libraries, seeks "to create a more competitive marketplace for research information by providing opportunities for new publishing ventures." One of SPARC's major goals is to urge administrators and faculty to submit articles to professional society publications, support ventures into electronic publishing, and pay close attention to and question pricing policies of the publications in their specialties.
SPARC is partnering with scholarly societies to create lower priced alternatives to high-priced journals. Thus far, three journals have resulted from these partnerships: Evolutionary Ecology Research and PhysChemComm, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and Organic Letters, published by the American Chemical Society. By subscribing to these peer-reviewed journals, SPARC members, including the Tisch Library, hope to promote less expensive outlets for the publication, dissemination, and archiving of scholarly research, while maintaining the integrity and quality of academic publications.
The Tisch Library has acquired a number of notable social science databases. All are accessible from the Research Tools link on the Tisch Library homepage (http://www.library.tufts.edu/tisch/) by choosing the Electronic Research Tools A-Z list or the appropriate disciplinary listings.
Ethnic NewsWatch, a full-text collection of the newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press is now available in a Web-based version. This database is searchable in English or Spanish and goes back to 1997.
Ethnic NewsWatch offers both free text searching and indexed searching. The indexed fields available for searching include title words, subjects, authors, publication names and dates, article types, names of people and places, ethnic groups of publishers, and language of articles. Ethnic NewsWatch has 1200 terms in its subject thesaurus. The Author/Byline field may be searched for all attributed writers, including syndicated columnists and other contributors. Article types include biographies, reviews, business articles, syndicated columns, editorials, interviews, and obituaries. A search may be targeted or limited to articles written in either English or Spanish, based on the language of the publication. No articles are translated.
Tisch also provides Ethnic Newswatch through a CD-ROM accessible through CD-ROM workstations in the Tisch reference area. The CD-ROM covers 1985 through 1997.
GenderWatch, a vital resource providing an historical perspective on the evolution of women's and gender issues over the last twenty years, is a new Web-based database. This full-text collection of international journals, magazines, news-letters, regional publications, special reports and conference proceedings provides extensive coverage of subjects that are important in the daily lives of women, including family and personal concerns, work and workplace issues, and social and societal roles. Daycare, childbirth, birth control, domestic abuse, sexual harassment, aging parents, body image, and eating disorders are sample topics covered. It also includes articles and materials on gender and gender roles in such areas as the arts, popular culture and media, business and work, crime and criminology, education, research and scholarship, family, health care and medicine, politics, policy and legislation, pornography, religion, sexuality and sexology, sports, and leisure.
GenderWatch allows both free text searching and searches of title, author, publication and other fields. It archives material dating back to the mid-1970s with additional material continuing to be archived.
CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online) is another newly acquired database. It provides searchable access to the full text of working papers (up to 400 each year) and conference proceedings (estimated to be 40-50 papers per year) from forty-five leading research centers in the field of international policy and scholarship going back to 1991. CIAO also provides abstracts from key foreign policy journals and the texts of twelve books on various aspects of foreign affairs. Included as well are information on economic indicators, links to Internet resources, maps and country data and a calendar of meetings and conferences. CIAO is updated regularly.
Statistical Universe offers the ability to search over 100,000 statistical publications, many of which are available in the library's ASI microfiche collection. One particularly handy source is the Statistical Abstract of the United States, which includes both abstracted information and actual tables. A tutorial provides another good starting place with its links to appropriate areas of the site for searching. Additionally, the database provides a set of links to statistical sites chosen from state, federal and international sources. Statistical Universe, formerly available on CD-ROM as Statistical Masterfile, is provided by the same company that developed LexisNexis and Congressional Universe and so will have a familiar feel to users of those popular databases.
Students of modern languages and literatures, education, and geology will be pleased to know that the MLA, ERIC and GeoRef databases are the newest electronic indexes to move to the Web. They are now accessible from the Tisch Library homepage by choosing the Research Tools link and finding them through the A-Z list and their disciplinary categories.
A frequent look at What's New on the Tisch homepage will apprise you of the newest database arrivals. Listed and briefly described there at present are Associations Unlimited, Biography and Genealogy Master Index, Contemporary Authors, Dictionary of Literary Biography, and Peterson's GradSearch. These new databases are also accessible from the Electronic Research Tools A-Z list.
The coming year will see the four Tufts libraries reach a milestone: the acquisition of our millionth volume. Watch in future issues of this newsletter for notice of celebratory events.
The Tufts Online Catalog has a feature allowing you to renew books checked out, cancel outstanding requests and review fines due to the library. This feature is most easily found in the Web catalog, though it is also available in the Gateway version.
When using the Tufts Web Catalog, select My Account from the navigation bar at the top of the screen. Next click on Check Your Record. You will be prompted for the barcode number from the back of your ID card (entered without spaces) and the last four digits of your Tufts ID. You can select particular items to renew by checking the box before each title and pressing the Renew Items button. Or you can renew all titles by making no selection, then pressing the button. You can also select requests to cancel if you no longer wish to have an item held for you.
If you check your account at a public PC, don't forget to move totally out of the Account screens to protect your personal information from access by anyone else.
Filling vacancies in the Access Services Department created by two staff promotions, Sean Murray and Lynne-Marie Whipple joined the Tisch team in March. Sean is a Library Assistant in Circulation while Lynne assumes the role of Reserve/ Billing Library Assistant. Both individuals have a wealth of customer service experience to their credit.
After thirteen years of service, Cataloging Associate Librarian Maria Grinblat announced her retirement. During Maria's impressive career, she held numerous library positions including Chief Librarian at the Library of Biophysics, Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Maria is looking forward to spending more time with her grandchildren.
Document Delivery Library Assistant Jessica Bell has accepted a position at Northeastern University's Snell Library. Jessica, a Tufts alumna who is pursuing her Master of Library Science degree at Simmons College, will be broadening her library experience with her new reference job. We also extend best wishes to Michael Forney, Coordinator of Microtext and Current Periodicals, who is moving to supervise document delivery for a library outsourcing company in Philadelphia.
Tisch Library celebrated National Library Week (April 11-17) with an exhibit in the library lobby featuring photographs submitted to our local contest. The winning photo will be entered in the national contest sponsored by the American Library Association and the Library of Congress.
The 1998/99 Berger award has gone to a proposal to create an electronic Bolles archive on the history and topography of London. The University Archivist and four faculty from the departments of Classics, English, Electronic Engineering and Computer Sciences, and Psychology will collaborate to make electronically available the materials pertaining to Victorian London in the Bolles collection of the University Archives. Their winning award proposal is accessible from the url: at http://www.library.tufts.edu/tisch/Berger/bergerhome.html.
BiblioTech Connections is published three times a year: in the fall, winter, and spring. It is also available at bibliotech.htm.
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