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I absolutely agree that reading articles online from a database is nothing like reading a magazine or a journal. But why must the experience be "atomized"? For example, I find reading The New York Review of Books online to be very nearly as satisfying as reading it in print was, and plus I don't have to recycle it. Online databases are not currently configured to simulate a journal's website but, as we used to say in the embedded systems world, SMOP. It's just a Simple Matter Of Programming. On 7/16/07, K.G. Schneider <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I'm doing some exploratory poking around an issue that is of dual importance > to me as a librarian and writer: the fidelity of the print journal in online > databases. I feel as if this is such an obvious issue that there must have > been EXTENSIVE discussion about this over the last ten or fifteen years, so > bear with me if I am missing the fly on the end of my nose. > > Here's the issue in narrative form: a library subscribes to a small-press > journal. The journal's articles are also indexed in some database or other. > The library runs out of space and money to physically house the journal, and > drops the print edition. > > But... > > The journal issue itself now has no physical representation in the database. > It's a series of articles. It is (and we now move into the alternate > universe where Michael Gorman and I think alike and even use the same > vocabulary) atomized. Even if you can force the database to bring together > the related articles, it is a kludge at best. > > For some journals, maybe that never mattered anyway. But for many journals > in the humanities, the issue is the experience. There are some very nice > online journals, and increasingly, small presses, which operate just barely > above cost-recovery, are reinventing themselves online. But take the recent > issues of Missouri Review or The American Scholar... like a book, a journal > issue is its own event (though unlike most book-length narratives, one that > can be enjoyably experienced incompletely and in the reader's own preferred > order, which is part of the fun as well). Even though the individual content > of the journal may be preserved piece by piece, the totality of the journal > has not. > > Let's set aside some of the characteristics that can't be dragged to the > online medium (the feel and smell of paper, for example) or arguments I find > specious (how many people take baths any more, anyway?). That said, to what > extent do databases (or do not...) recreate the "issue experience"-that > sense of aboutness and completion for a journal issue? Do we care? > > I see some work is done in metadata that can express the relationship > between articles in a journal. But I'm curious how much we (librarians) care > about this business of fidelity or whether it's just another silent victim > of change. I worry that without intending to we could hasten the death of an > entire area of literature. > > Though with some intentionality, we could also help save this literature, as > well (because mailing and printing costs are the obvious threats to the > small presses-a number have moved online, or started online, and thrive > there in their small-press manner; if a database could represent, say, The > American Scholar in a way that did it justice, that might be a very good > thing). > > Again, maybe I'm just missing something really, really obvious... please do > step in to say, Karen, where have you been? ... or perhaps there are some > e-humanities initiatives already working in this area... but the more and > more I engage with small presses, the more this concerns me. > > K.G. Schneider > Free Range Librarian > AIM/Email: [log in to unmask] > http://freerangelibrarian.com > -- Sharon M. Foster, B.S., J.D., 0.5 * (MLS) F/OSS Evangelist Cheshire Public Library 104 Main Street Cheshire, CT 06410 http://www.cheshirelibrary.org My library school portfolio: http://home.southernct.edu/~fosters4/ Any opinions expressed here are entirely my own.