Increase in online journals

UCT Libraries jacked up its online journal collection, and there's more coming in 2007.

Did you know that UCT Libraries provides access to more than 30 000 full-text journals online?

"In response to demand from the academic community, we now spend approximately 30% of our budget on electronic resources," says Digby Sales, the libraries' collection development manager. "There has been a steady increase from the mere 5% spent on databases and e-journals just a few years ago."

The dearth of electronic journal collections was one of the biggest problems identified by academics and postgraduates in the LibQUAL+ survey conducted by UCT Libraries in 2005. To meet the growing need for these resources, UCT Libraries has seen an explosive rise in the number of electronic subscriptions over the past seven years.

So taken were two academics in the Department of English Language and Literature with the bumped-up journal collection that they made special mention of it at a recent meeting of Council. According to the two, UCT Libraries now subscribes to all but a handful of journals they consider essential for their department. Other departments will soon be equally impressed.

Among the new acquisitions for 2007 are the collections of 1 200 top-quality scientific, technical and medical journals, published by Springer, and the 800 published by Blackwell Synergy.

Other new packages include the often requested IEEE All-Society Periodicals, the IET Digital Library, the complete Annual Reviews collection, and 32 journals from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Some of the costs of these electronic journals have been absorbed by discontinuing their print versions. And while the libraries subscribe to most electronic journals through publishers' collections and full-text databases, they subscribe to individual journals as well.

Probably the most popular single title ordered this year will be the online edition of Nature, which the UCT scientific community has been wanting for some time.

Staff and registered students can access all these journals 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, from any UCT computer or from anywhere in the world via the EZProxy link on the UCT Libraries homepage.

To see the complete list of online journals available at UCT, just click on Electronic Journals under Electronic Resources on the Libraries homepage.