Students access books and journals through MeDoc

Medoc supports searching and browsing in distributed, heterogeneous digital libraries and bibliographic databases. Project MeDoc (standing for Multimedia Electronic Documents) is an experimental digital library initiative, promoted by the German Informatics society (GI). Its full title is "Development and evaluation of open fulltext information systems for computer science". The project is related to similar eeorts of other professional societies in Germany 5]. The overall activity is led by an alliance of GI, Springer-Verlag, a scientiic publisher, and the Fachinformationszentrum (FIZ) Karlsruhe, the European branch of the Scientiic and Technical Information Network (STN), a database and network services provider. The actual research and development work is being carried out in cooperation with seven universities and research institutes. As pilot users, another 21 sites were selected among universities and technical colleges (Fachhochschulen) with a computer science department. The MeDoc ooerings are being made available to all members of the department or school, respectively. In addition, three commercial institutions involved in computer science related research and consulting also participate. Pilot users are contributing to the requirements deenition, and are evaluating content, tools and services as soon as these become available. Individual surveys are typically answered by students(50largely funded by the German ministry of Education, Science, Research and Technology (BMBF) and extends over a two-year period (1995-1997). Comprehensive documentation is available 2]. The project's goal is to stimulate the use of electronic media in academic education and in scientiic research. While limited to the eld of computer science,