Faculty Use of Electronic Journals at Research Institutions

Deborah Lenares is Electronic Resources reference librarian, University of New Orleans. Introduction The meteoric rise in the number of electronic journals published during the 1990s (see Figure 1) is documented in the ARL Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, published annually since 1991. The number of electronic journals listed in the 1991 directory was 27. The first significant increase in the number listed was a jump from 45 in 1993, to 181 in 1994. In 1995 the number rose to 306, in 1996 the number listed surged to 1093, and it surged again in 1997 to 2459 (ARL, 1997). Although the exact numbers of new journals published since 1997 cannot be reported until the release of the 8th edition of the ARL Directory, an extrapolation of the growth curve shows the expected increase (see figure 1). The popularity of the World Wide Web helped to stimulate the growth of electronic journal publishing in the mid 1990s, but much of the growth since 1996 can be attributed to the electronic debut of many commercial publishers. The growth in parallel publishing, which may be defined as the publication of an electronic version of a traditionally print journal, has greatly increased the number of scholarly journals available electronically and may possibly have affected the attitudes of acceptance toward journals in this format. Together, these changes could have a dramatic affect on the use of electronic journals within the scholarly community. Figure 1: Grow th in Ele ctron ic Journa l P ub lishing