copyright 1993, CICNet, Inc. / Reprinted with permission

Title:  CICNET DEVELOPS ELECTRONIC JOURNAL ARCHIVE
Author: Glee Harrah Cady
Source: CIRCUIT (Ann Arbor, MI: CICNET), Winter, 1993, p.1

The growth of the NSFNET, the regional networks, and the 
Internet has led to development and rapid growth in the 
publication of electronic journals across the network. The 
first _e-journals_ began in 1986, and the total number of 
different information resources that might be labeled as 
electronic journals today is in the hundreds. CICNet, 
acknowledging the importance of these resources as well as 
the need for a comprehensive archive, instituted a project 
in April, 1992 to build an archive of e-journals. Currently 
the archive, which is available through the CICNet <gopher>
server and anonymous <ftp>, includes more than 200 different
journals.    

The project, initiated at the request of the CIC Library 
Collection Development Officers, is now managed by Billy 
Barron of the University of North Texas Computing Center, 
who serves as a consultant to CICNet. Billy is well-known 
in Internet circles for his development of a comprehensive 
list of on-line library catalogs and his active participation 
in a number of electronic discussion groups.

The current goal of the project is to develop both a comprehen-
sive collection of e-journals and provide easy access to the 
journals from CICNet sites. Both of these goals present problems 
that are somewhat different for electronic information archives 
as contrasted to paper/material archives. In developing a 
comprehensive archive, policy must be developed which defines 
an electronic journal. Unfortunately, in today's world of 
"info glut" there are many streams of information available 
via the Internet that might be considered electronic 
journals. CICNet considers electronic journals as those streams 
which are published in discrete intervals and contain components 
that could be reasonably construed as articles. Not included in 
this archive are those sources which are simply dialogue from 
<usenet> _Netnews_ or a listserv which have been repackaged into
a "volume".

Another important question is the manner in which the journals 
should be stored. Since they are available under CICNet's <gopher>
Information Server, the journals need to be arranged in a 
hierarchy for access through the menu system. Initial work on 
the division of the archive into categories (or taxonomy of 
the archive) divided the collection into 17 categories, 15 of 
which are collected on CICNet's server or mirrored there from other collections. These 15 categories are in turn divided into the 
categories that describe the individual ejournal.

CICNet expects to use the CIC Collection Development Officers to 
set collection policies with answers to such questions as:

    1.      Should it be a priority to attempt to archive journal
            that do not seem to have a good archival method?

    2.      Should non-English language materials be archived here?

    3.      Should non-ASCII formats be kept? If yes, should they be
            kept in both ASCII and non-ASCII formats? etc.

Billy Barron maintains a CICNet <gopher> Electronic mailing list.
If you are interested in participating in this list, send email 
to Billy@cic.net. Further information about this project is also 
available from Glee Cady (glee@cic.net) or Paul Holbrook 
(holbrook@cic.net).
