Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Susan Lewis

Journals Administrative Manager
The Johns Hopkins University Press

In September 1993, the Johns Hopkins University Press, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, and Homewood Academic Computing joined forces to launch Project Muse, an effort that will enable networked electronic access to the Press's scholarly journals.

The goals of Project Muse are to make the journals of the Johns Hopkins University Press available to students and researchers from their networked desktop computers; create an e-journal environment that is powerful, elegant, and easy to use; and determine amount and types of usage for an access and costing model.

The first phase of the project will be a pilot demonstration consisting of current issues of Configurations, MLN (Modern Language Notes), and ELH (English Literary History). In February of 1994, the fully formatted text of these journals will be available to the JHU community via online access to the library's server. Features include subject, title, and author indexes, as well as instant links to tables of contents and endnotes. Users will also be able to add voice and textual annotations and download PostScript files for printing.

A public unveiling of Project Muse will be held on February 15, 1994, in the electronic classroom of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. After sufficient data have been gathered from the demonstration project, the JHU team will mount all forty-two of the Press's journals in math, the humanities, and the social sciences. These issues will appear on a prepublication basis and will be available electronically a few weeks in advance of the printed version.

Project Muse is being created with Mosaic client/server software developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Client software is available for the Unix, Windows, and Macintosh operating environments, allowing networked users to access the journals with a variety of operating systems.

Mosaic software is designed to display text that has been tagged or coded, in HTML (HyperText MarkupLanguage). These codes enable the creator to embed hidden commands in the text for both display and "links" to other parts of the document, as well as to outside text, graphics, sound, video, etc., regardless of where these items are located on the network. To save time and labor, the team is using a unique process for text markup. This process entails running a program that automatically translates PostScript files to HTML-tagged files.

For further information, contact Todd Kelley, Eisenhower Library (kelley@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu), or Susan Lewis, The Johns Hopkins University Press (suelewis@jhuvm.hcf.jhu.edu).

[ED. Note: the Project Muse presentation at the Symposium was made by Scott Bennett, R. Champlain and Debbie Sheridan Director, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University.]