New E-Resources Generate High Levels of Faculty Satisfaction


"We have continued to expand our collection, mostly in the area of electronic journals. As of now we have about 15,000. Faculty love these products, but seem to want the ‘security blanket' of the paper as well. It is impossible for us to keep all formats. When a decision must be made between print and electronic, invariably electronic wins." Susan Vaughn, Associate Librarian for Collection Development

  • Science Direct
    http://www.sciencedirect.com/

    The coup of the year was the Science Direct subscription. Owing to downright persistence--not allowing the Elsevier rep to mention "SUNY" without adding "CUNY"-- we were able to slide into the vendor's arrangement with the State University, which brought us more than 876 new science subscriptions at a cost to Brooklyn College of $13,700. This product should also save the University a great deal of money in its budget for commercial document supply, as the journals the package contains include many of those most frequently requested. Brooklyn's science faculty are delighted with this arrangement: today, they have access to material they never thought they would experience.

  • Jstor
    http://www.jstor.org/

    Jstor, the journals package most requested by Brooklyn College faculty, became a reality on February 1, 2001, thanks to the University's willingness to pay the $36,000 development fee for this digital archive of important core scholarly journals.

    The Brooklyn College Library must support the annual and on-going Jstor subscription price from its own budget. For this reason, we selected only the arts and humanities collection (117 titles; $4,000). While the development fee includes access to the science titles as well, and faculty would like to have them, we cannot afford the annual subscription fee. Libraries with substantial paper archives of Jstor journals report that the Jstor titles are used much more in e-form than they ever were in print; it is suggested that usage increases by a factor of 10.

  • Emerald
    http://rosina.emeraldinsight.com/vl=3578988/cl=16/nw=1/rpsv/cgi-bin/emeraldft

    This package includes 110 journals in the fields of economics, computer science, and library science, published by MCB. The Library funded this product by canceling print subscriptions.

  • Wiley InterScience
    http://www.interscience.wiley.com/

    New York State struck a deal with Wiley InterScience for its electronic journals, a deal very beneficial to Brooklyn College. At the time the e-subscription began early in 2001, we subscribed to 17 Wiley journals; under the e-arrangement, we gained access to 73 titles.

  • America: History & Life and Historical Abstracts
    http://sb1.abc-clio.com:81/

    The History Department is very pleased by these new resources, which offer an interesting example of the arbitrariness of e-text pricing models. For years we've subscribed in paper to America: History & Life. However, during a budget crunch a few years ago we were forced to cancel Historical Abstracts. In subscribing to both products electronically through the Westchester Academic Library Directors consortium, today we are able to get two for the cost of one in paper.

  • EBSCO Host
    For some time the University has subscribed to a large collection of full-text e-journals (more than 1,000 titles) designed to support general undergraduate study and research. This aggregation (representing journals published by many different companies) was vended by the Gale Corporation. In the spring 2001 another company (EBSCO) entered this same arena, offering CUNY terrific pricing. As librarians across the University began to compare and contrast the two packages, an out and out bidding war for CUNY's business ensued, with each company offering more and more titles as it vied for our business. The Electronic Resources Advisory Committee evaluated Gale's Expanded Academic ASAP and EBSCO's Academic Search Premier and Business Search Premier. In late May 2001, the decision was made to go with EBSCO. This meant that the Library's subject specialists had to scurry to alert instructors (many of whom had links to the Gale product embedded in their course sites) about the change.

  • Gale Literature Resource Center
    This new product provides access to biographies, bibliographies, and critical analyses of authors from every age and literary discipline. The Literature Resource Center covers more than 120,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,500 of the most-studied authors. LRC is the premier Internet resource for information on literary figures from all time periods. This product links to the full text of many humanities periodicals.

  • Miscellaneous New Products
    Other new products include:
    Biological and Agricultural Index
    Encyclopedia of Human Nutrition
    Encyclopedia of Immunology
    Encyclopedia of Food Microbiology
    Encyclopedia of Spectroscopy
    Encyclopedia of Virology
    New Groves Dictionary of Music