Green, 'Electronic Resources Available through Library Information System', NCSU Libraries Newsletter v21n07 (February 1994)
 
_The NCSU Libraries Newsletter_
Volume 21 no. 7
February 1994
Green, Kathleen
"Electronic Resources Available through Library Information 
System"


Q:     What do _The Federalist Papers_, _Peter Pan_, _Postmodern 
         Culture_, _The Book of Mormon_, and this _Newsletter_ have in 
         common?

A:     All are available in electronic format through the NCSU 
         Libraries Information System.

A burgeoning number of "e-texts" and "e-journals" (e for 
electronic) are among the latest offerings on the Internet, and 
the Libraries is taking a leadership role in making them 
available to the campus and greater community. Choosing 
option #3 from the NCSU Libraries Information System 
Main Menu nets a display of more than sixty electronic 
offerings, including full-text, ASCII versions of books, 
technical reports, and electronic journals. These texts can be 
captured to a file on your own computer, read on screen, or 
printed. Texts can even be searched using features available 
with most word-processing software packages.

Many of the electronic books found on the information system 
(e.g., _Peter Pan_ and _Far From the Madding Crowd_) are made 
available by electronic-text initiatives such as Project 
Gutenberg. This organization electronically distributes works 
in the public domain (i.e., no longer under copyright 
restrictions). It has as its lofty goal the free distribution of a 
"trillion etexts by December 31, 2001." The project estimates 
it has given away more than 2.2 billion texts to date. Equally if 
not more exciting are the contributions to scholarly discourse 
offered by electronic journals such as _Postmodern Culture_ 
and 
_Journal of Statistics Education_, both originating here at 
NCSU. 
Speed of dissemination, savings in production costs (and, one 
hopes, subscription prices), and interactive capabilities are 
just some of the more obvious means by which electronic 
publications have the capability to transform academic 
publishing.

Libraries have long been in the business of acquiring resources 
for users--at first almost solely in print form but more 
recently in other media such as sound and video recordings, 
software, and CD-ROMs. Sources available on the Internet, 
however, offer new challenges to traditional acquisition 
methods. E-texts are added to the Internet almost daily. Unlike 
publisher announcements and catalogs and new title 
announcement and approval services that libraries have relied 
upon to select and purchase traditional sources, information 
about the existence and location of electronic texts may be 
exclusively via word of mouth or "word of net." Add to this the 
further complication that what is there today may be gone 
tomorrow--site locations for electronic texts and services on 
the Internet frequently change when the individuals who 
originally made them available move to new jobs with new 
computer systems and sites. How does a library let users know 
that it has access to (the electronic parallel to acquiring) an 
Internet resource? Can an online catalog entry indicate in a 
consistent and understandable format how to get to remote 
electronic resources?

While there are more questions than answers at this point, 
NCSU Libraries staff members are trying to provide organized 
access to resources beyond the library's walls. A recently 
appointed library task force is responsible for monitoring the 
Internet for new resources of interest to library users, 
creating electronic links to newly discovered texts and 
services, and ensuring that pointers to services and texts 
already listed on the information system menu still work. This 
is one of many steps in the continuing evolution of a library 
infrastructure that will provide and fully support access to 
the wealth of information on the National Information 
Highway. In the meantime, it may be comforting to know that 
you can read a Thomas Hardy novel as you travel!