Many Forum readers will be familiar with the recent accolades the Cyber Café has received from the library community for the site's ingenuity and creative design. We're happy to report that we've reached another critical milestone equally worthy of fanfare, this time related to content. Cyber Café now provides access to over 1,000 electronic resources, including journals, books and searchable database portals. Our creation has evolved over time, and we have moved with changes in the industry to provide access to the most comprehensive collection of resources possible.
In the beginning, circa 1995, there were freebies. Our initial foray into e-publications consisted of our posting links to a smattering of free 'zines on the Internet. These were listed on JEFFLINE (rather than THOMCAT), because at the time, neither users nor librarians were thinking of electronic journals as "real" things that belonged in a catalog. So, like virtually every other library at the time, a separate list of titles in electronic format was created, which included titles like Psycholoquy, AAMC Stat, and TidBITS.
Then, in July of 1996, we instituted our first paid electronic subscription for The Journal of Biological Chemistry. This title continues to be one of the most heavily used in Cyber Café, and the latest yearly statistics show it getting over 13,000 hits per year, with over 11,000 article downloads. In fact, for most of our e-journals, detailed statistics are reviewed regularly. Monitoring statistics helps our Collection Development staff continuously evaluate what our users are looking at and, at times, broker with publishers to "swap" underused titles for collections and subjects in demand by our users.
Over time, publishers have responded to the tremendous market potential and user demand for "documents at the desktop." To keep pace, our holdings for new electronic subscriptions have increased each year. At press time, our paid subscriptions include 790 e-journals and 52 e-books. We also regularly comb the Internet for free publications deemed worthy for their content, and we include links to 175 e-journals and 15 e-books freely available on the Internet.
As a sneak preview, stay tuned for these forthcoming titles:
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From Cell Press:
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Cancer Cell, Current Biology, Developmental Cell, Structure
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