Got your thinking cap on, and ready to be an "academic" for a moment? Well, if you are looking for content in professional journals, you probably know by now that it's all about the availability and searchability. But not completely, because it's also nice to hold reasearch papers in your hands. Something about the personal contact and easy to read pages that's nice when you are going to spend that much time with a document. Unless you are really a whiz, and you can read the average professional journal in less than 10 minutes. Somehow, I don't even think Nobel prize winners do that.
So the question raised back in 2000 by David Goodman of the Princeton University Biology Library is whether or not the library should continue to keep bound paper copies of their journals. In fact, he even goes further and asked what journals should even be physically printed. The
presentation has just recently been made available to us, and is pretty interesting. Due to the special nature of scientific research activities, he makes the remarkable (for 2000) statement, "Rather than considering whether e-journals are desirable or not, I am assuming they are generally preferable, and am considering whether the basic mode of production for almost all scholarly scientific journals is to be electronic only, except for special purposes or temporary accommodation."
For more of this peek into the academic world of electronic content, visit
dLIST.