Julie O’Keeffe spoke to the group about the library’s role in providing assistance to faculty
who use Blackboard course management software. O’Keeffe provided an overview of the software
and explained how faculty can add library resource links to their Blackboard course pages. She
specifically demonstrated linking to discipline-related pages of the library web site, linking to course
reserve material, linking directly to discipline-specific databases, and linking to information intended
for remote users of our databases.
O’Keeffe also discussed the severe limitations of the Blackboard-hosted collections of
discipline-based articles. These articles have been pre-selected as an additional feature of the
software package but only provide a glimpse of the fields of study chosen for inclusion. O’Keeffe
indicated that faculty may wish to direct their students away from Blackboard's integrated
collections and steer them towards more fully-developed scholarly article databases, such as those
which the library makes available.
A brown bag session covering the above material has been scheduled for March 14 from 12:00 to
12:50 in Cudahy 001. Further information is located on Marquette’s Blackboard Support Page at
http://its.marquette.edu/blackboard/ under
the link “Faculty: training and brown bags.”
Kirk briefed the Board on the current status of the electronic collection and discussed the
migration from print to online journals.
The Libraries now provide more online serials than print serials and all are cataloged and linked
in MARQCAT. 4,175 journals are linked in the catalog and 1,944 books are linked in the catalog.
Some publishers offer purchase of online access alone, while most offer online access with purchase
of print issues. Nature offers print issues with purchase of the online version. A few have begun
charging more for access to both formats. It appears that the migration from print to online access
is inevitable for most scholarly journals. It seems preferable to control the migration, rather than allowing
it to happen to us. The building of Raynor may provide the time to move vigorously in this direction.
The primary advantages of online journals are two service enhancements: availability at any time
and at any location equipped with a workstation connected to the Internet. Concern has been expressed
about the quality of the graphics in online journals. For many journals, the graphics of online
journals appears excellent with the resolution of the images superior to that of print journals.
Creation of presentation materials is generally easier. For example, instead of slides, PowerPoint
can capture graphic displays for lectures, presentations, papers, etc. directly from the online
sources.
Another concern is access to the archive of online journals. Many publishers are committing to
long term archives and other options are beginning to surface. A major archival endeavor is
JSTOR – a full text, full image database. Earlier this year, the American Physics Society shared
an archive of its online journals with the Library of Congress to be used if the Society can not
provide access.
Secondary gains for the University include reduced costs for storage, binding, etc., however,
these may be offset by increased cost for hardware and networks. Access via the Web can fail
occasionally, however, print issues are often not available because the library is closed, the
issues are at the bindery or someone else is using them.
Document delivery is a backup option for journal articles not retrievable because the Web is down
or because the Libraries do not have an online or print holding of a journal. Articles may be
retrieved from UW-Madison via interlibrary loan/document delivery. All articles requested from
Madison are sent via Ariel, an electronic article delivery system developed by the Research
Library Group, a small group of the largest U. S. libraries. The quality of he articles received
is excellent and rapid. Requests are sent electronically and articles are returned electronically to
the requesting library.
