+ Page 1 + ----------------------------------------------------------------- Public-Access Computer Systems News Volume 3, Number 15 (1992) ISSN 1050-6004 Editors: Dana Rooks (LIBL@UHUPVM1) and Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (LIB3@UHUPVM1). Issued on an irregular basis by University Libraries, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-2091. ----------------------------------------------------------------- CONTENTS ONLINE JOURNAL OF CURRENT CLINICAL TRIALS IS DATABASE'S PRODUCT OF THE YEAR, 1 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS TO PUBLISH POSTMODERN CULTURE, 2 INDIANA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES ESTABLISH SCHOLARLY ELECTRONIC TEXT SERVICE, 2 FIRSTSEARCH AND EPIC ADD SOCIAL SCIENCES INDEX AND EVENTLINE, 3 ONLINE JOURNAL OF CURRENT CLINICAL TRIALS IS DATABASE'S PRODUCT OF THE YEAR Database magazine has named The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials (OJCCT) its Product of the Year. OJCCT is an electronic, full-text, peer-reviewed science journal that includes graphics. OJCCT, which began publication on July 1, is a joint venture between the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which developed the editorial content and focus, and the OCLC Online Computer Library Center, which developed the interface and distributes the journal on its international telecommunications network. The electronic journal publishes medical findings as soon as they have been reviewed by medical experts, giving physicians faster access to results of research on new and re-examined medical treatments. Subscribers access the journal using GUIDON, a graphical user interface developed by OCLC. GUIDON supports searching by subject, title, author, keyword, date, and a full range of Boolean and proximity operators. It displays full text, figures, tables, and equations in quality that rivals the printed page. OJCCT is available on a subscription basis to individuals or institutions. + Page 2 + OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS TO PUBLISH POSTMODERN CULTURE Oxford University Press and Postmodern Culture have announced a new partnership in electronic publishing. Beginning in January 1993, Oxford will publish Postmodern Culture. Postmodern Culture is a peer-reviewed electronic journal of interdisciplinary criticism on contemporary literature, theory, and culture. It is currently published at North Carolina State University, and it is supported by the NCSU Department of English, the NCSU Libraries, NCSU Campus and Engineering Computing, the NCSU College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the NCSU Research Office. Postmodern Culture has appeared three times a year since September 1990. Currently, it has over 2,300 subscribers in more than 40 countries. Oxford University Press established an electronic publishing research unit in late 1985 and released their first electronic products in 1988. Oxford currently publishes more than fifty electronic packages in science, medicine, general reference, and the humanities and social sciences: Postmodern Culture will be Oxford's first electronic journal and its first networked electronic publication. INDIANA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES ESTABLISH SCHOLARLY ELECTRONIC TEXT SERVICE The Indiana University Libraries have recently established a Library Electronic Text Resource Service (LETRS), coordinated by Mark Day, to provide a focus for the increasing number of faculty and students in the humanities who need to work with scholarly texts in electronic form. Among the first texts to be made available in electronic form are: (1) the Bible in a variety of English translations and in the original Greek and Hebrew; (2) the sacred writings of other religions, such as the Islamic Quran and Hadith; (3) the complete corpus of classical Greek literature from Homer up to 500 AD; (4) various editions of the complete works of Shakespeare; (5) numerous works by well-known American writers such as Jefferson, Emerson, Twain, and Cather; and (6) the literary output of many other world-famous authors, such as the complete works of the German author Johann Wolfgang Goethe. + Page 3 + Numerous tools in electronic form for aiding scholars and students in their interpretation of these original sources also have been acquired. There are four basic types of tools: (1) reference works on computer, such as the Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on Compact Disc; (2) writing tools, such as multi-lingual word processors that can work with a variety of non-Roman scripts; (3) text analysis programs that can manipulate natural language data and output scholarly aids such as a complete concordance of all the words used by a particular author; and (4) instructional programs that help students and scholars to study anything from a single text up to entire languages and cultures. An example of the later is the recently acquired multimedia Perseus Compact Disc for the Macintosh that provides an interactive gateway to ancient Greek literature, history, art and archaeology. In addition to facilitating the acquisition of these electronic texts and tools and the hardware needed to support them, LETRS also plans to provide: (1) basic assistance to patrons in their use on both PC and Macintosh computers at its central location in the Reference Department of the Main Library; (2) faculty and graduate student workshops on available electronic text resources as part of the Library's Instruction and Orientation program; (3) consultations with individuals on scholarly research projects; and (4) development of campus-wide network access to electronic texts when and where feasible. FIRSTSEARCH AND EPIC ADD SOCIAL SCIENCES INDEX AND EVENTLINE OCLC's online reference services, The FirstSearch Catalog and the EPIC service, now provide access to Social Sciences Index and EventLine. Produced by the H. W. Wilson Co., Social Sciences Index (SSI) covers 350 English-language periodicals that are considered to be the core of the social sciences literature, covering such fields as anthropology, economics, geography, international relations, political science, psychology, social work, and public welfare. + Page 4 + EventLine, from the Elsevier Publishing Group, contains information on 120,000 international conferences, trade shows, symposia, workshops, and seminars. EventLine can be searched by the subject of the meeting, its location, or the time period. It is compiled from news of international meetings covered in Elsevier's 1,000 publications. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Public-Access Computer Systems News is an electronic newsletter that is distributed on BITNET, Internet, and other computer networks. There is no subscription fee. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to LISTSERV@UHUPVM1 (BITNET) or LISTSERV@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU (Internet) that says: SUBSCRIBE PACS-P First Name Last Name. PACS-P subscribers also receive two other electronic serials: Current Cites and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. Public-Access Computer Systems News is Copyright (C) 1992 by the University Libraries, University of Houston. All Rights Reserved. Copying is permitted for noncommercial use by academic computer centers, computer conferences, individual scholars, and libraries. Libraries are authorized to add the journal to their collection, in electronic or printed form, at no charge. This message must appear on all copied material. All commercial use requires permission. -----------------------------------------------------------------