Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Rebecca R. Simon

Assistant Journals Manager
University of California Press

Over the past year, the University of California Press has created a five-year plan to guide new electronic publishing efforts, focused on the development of both networked and stand-alone scholarly products for research and teaching purposes.

In line with this Plan, we have already begun a pilot networked project called SCAN (Scholarship from California on the Net) in which we are mounting two journals on the UC Berkeley Library's gopher server. This will be followed over the next two years by electronic dissemination of monographs in the same fields (19th century studies and classics) and by the addition of other monographs and journals. We have also begun work on several promising stand-alone projects, including two floppy disk and three potential CD-ROM projects.

The SCAN project is an institutionally-based partnership bringing together the Press, UC systemwide administration and the UC Berkeley library in a collaborative effort to publish humanities journals and potentially monographs on the Internet. In the pilot phase of this project, we are offering two journals, which we already publish in paper form -- Nineteenth Century Literature and Classical Antiquity -- in enhanced, electronic versions.

Our goals in this pilot project are to provide an easy to use, easily accessible, value-added electronic journal which we would be able to offer eventually on a cost recovery basis. We chose to work with the Library because this partnership would help us understand the needs of one of our primary customer bases better and provide the opportunity to work with them in exploring access, cost reduction and cost-recovery issues. Working with the Library also provides a valuable opportunity for alpha testing during which we will offer the electronic journals free in exchange for feedback from user and Library groups.

Currently, we have mounted Nineteenth-Century Literature on the UC Berkeley Library gopher server in ASCII and RTF (Rich Text Format) files along with a readme document. We decided to use ASCII as source files for indexed searches because the lack of formatting allows for easier on-line viewing. However, we also wanted to offer future subscribers RTF files which would preserve formatting that the greatest number of users could download.

We have learned a great deal in the process of creating this first stage product, experimenting in the process with file-naming, searchability and downloading. In the next phase of our project we will also explore, collaboratively with the Library, other platforms that will support our goal of cost-recovery publishing and image transmission on the Net. We will continue to maintain a presence in gopherspace, including mounting our Books in Print and Catalog there.