The Committee on Institutional Cooperation’s resource, Electronic Journals Collection (CIC‐EJC) is a prototype electronic journal catalogue system established in 1997. The CIC‐EJC ultimately will list “all freely distributed scholarly electronic journals” and will also include listings of restricted access serial titles of the CIC member libraries (includes members of the big ten athletic conference and the University of Chicago). All records have been fully catalogued by the CIC member libraries and are contributed to the OCLC database. Unfortunately, the last update of this database appears to have been made on 27 June 1997. E‐mail contact has been attempted by the reviewer; but no response was received.
The database was originally created using FileMaker Pro version 2.0 and then exported to a UNIX server. As a World Wide Web product, it uses any web browser as the user interface. Searching the CIC‐EJC is extremely user friendly with several options and very understandable screens. The main screen offers both a search function and a browse function which allow access to a listing of topics or titles. Once in any of the functions, context sensitive help screens are available, with search tips on Boolean searching, combining and limiting searches. Title, keyword and topic search combinations are available on the search screen. A stemming program is activated automatically; so truncation is not required. There is an automatic retrieval limit of 40 records; but this can be readily changed.
The topics and titles browsing capabilities are easily accessed. However, the headings under Topics do tend to be extremely broad (i.e. arts and humanities or literature and prose) and each e‐journal is only assigned to one topic heading. If this list continues to grow, narrower topic headings would be preferable, as well as assignment of multiple headings, especially for multi‐disciplinary journals. A suggestion for improving access would be to add an alphabet selection line at the top of both the topics and titles lists to facilitate movement to specific headings.
Once you have located the e‐journal and linked to its record, a virtual cornucopia of information is available. Title, URL(s), ISSN, topic, description, periodicity, holdings, first electronic issue, subscriptions and access, and date last modified are included in each journal record. I found the descriptions and the subscription especially helpful and clear. The URLs are all linked to the e‐journal site; so access is immediate for those titles with free access.
The CIC‐EJC is one of the many e‐journal lists currently on the Web. The e‐journal site guide: a metasource (http://www.library.ubc. ca/ejour/) and the electronic journals catalog (http://www.edoc.com/ejournal/) (E‐DOC) are just two that are comparable to the CIC product. The University of British Columbia meta‐site actually links to the CIC and other e‐journal sites, while the E‐DOC product is a listing of e‐journals which complements and duplicates, to a large extent, the content of the CIC‐EJC. The e‐journal site guide is described as a “snapshot” made in 1995 and does not claim to be ongoing. This metasite, however, is good at finding resources similar to the CIC‐EJC. E‐DOC has similar search facilities as the CIC‐EJC and a broad subject classification. They have also arranged their entries by peer reviewed, student reviewed, and non‐reviewed sources. The only downfall of E‐DOC’s electronic journals catalog is that they only provide a title, description and a link to the e‐journal. CIC‐EJC provides much more valuable details to the user. E‐DOC also allows outside users to enter their particular e‐journal into the system. While this potentially corrupts the database content, it does allow the listing to grow and remain current. E‐DOC well surpasses CIC‐EJC with its sheer size. There are as many entries under the Medical e‐journals heading in E‐DOC’s Electronic Journals Catalog as there are in the entire listing of the CIC‐EJC.
Overall, the CIC’s electronic journal collection was an excellent product. However, due to the fact that it has not been maintained, I would have to recommend a site like the E‐DOC product before the CIC‐EJC site.
