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SpringerLink, Blackwell Synergy, Wiley InterScience.

Article Excerpt
Academic libraries with digital versions of the thousands of scholarly journals to which they subscribe too often find these are underused because the library does not have a federated search engine. Even with one, there is no "connector" for many of the mega collections of the largest publishers. Users are unaware of their availability. Although a large proportion of these articles may be available in one of the multidisciplinary research databases--Gale's Academic ASAP, ProQuest CSA, EBSCO's Academic Search Premier, or H.W. Wilson OmniFile--these aggregators might lack the most current issues-the last 12 months or so--because of publisher moratoriums.

Publishers' individual digital collections offer additional advantages, such as the prepublication versions of articles, or functional advantages, such as the automatic inclusion of lists of cited articles. Then again, some publishers do a poor job in terms of content and in terms of software. This month's picks and pans include two very good publisher collections (the new versions of SpringerLink and Blackwell Synergy) and a disappointing one, Wiley InterScience. I can only hope that the acquisition of Blackwell by Wiley will not mean the incorporation (and thus the partial incapacitation of the features) of the digital collection of the former into the poorly performing Wiley InterScience collection.

the picks

SPRINGERLINK

Springer was among the first to make its journal collection available in digital format to subscribers (the bibliographic descriptions and abstracts offered to non-subscribers as well). It successfully implemented the expensive, but capable, Verity software for this purpose. Somewhat surprisingly, a few years ago it outsourced its digital library maintenance to MetaPress. After getting off to a good start (it was my pick a few years ago), it then started to decline to the level that I was considering choosing it as one of my pans. Late last year, however, it rebounded and now offers a completely rewritten, state-of-the-art version of its software to handle the 3.2 million item digital library subset of Springer, covering more than 1,840 periodical publications. I use "subset" instead of "journal," as its largest "periodical" is the...

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