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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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.