Jacso's cheers and jeers for 2002

The following is my annual year-end roundup of the best and worst digital archives. These archives are the backbones of digital libraries, growing ever larger and more sophisticated. There are some exceptions, of course.

CHEERS for the ...

* Best bioscience archive of multiple publishers-HighWire Press (HWP). It is used for digitizing nearly 350 serials, including the most cited ones in bioscience and medicine. There are also several science journals in the HWP stable, along with a few social science journals. The abstracts (when published with the articles) are accessible-free of charge to anyone-for all of the HWP-hosted journals. In addition, all the digital issues of 16 high-impact-factor journals are also free for any user.

At HighWire Press, more than 120 other journals have substantial years of back issues free of charge-- except for the most recent 6-12 months. A few have shorter or longer embargo periods, such as Genetics (3 months) or Radiology (2 years). This free journal article subset in Adobe PDF and HTML (with hyperlinks to many cited and citing articles) is highly significant, not only because of the volume (500,000 articles) but because of the clout of most of the journals. An additional set of 200-plus journals is available for subscribers, while nonsubscribers can use very reasonable pay-per-view services for the majority of these titles.

HWP's best features are related to the handling of the citations given and received by an article. These often lead to closely related articles that may not have been retrieved by keyword searching alone. It represents the future of sophisticated literature research.

* For the most improved scholarly archive-Elsevier's Scirus. Elsevier has come a long way with this archive. It now offers free access to anyone through a single, much improved search interface to abstracts that appear in most of the journals in ScienceDirect (the digital archive of journals published by Elsevier and its imprints), Beilstein Abstracts, BioMed Central journals, and/or MEDLINE. Scirus also covers the largest preprint server, arXiv, and many smaller ones.

Beyond the free abstracts, Scirus also searches and makes freely available the full text of articles on BioMed Central and PubMed Central. There has been much progress compared to Scirus' initial offering in early 2001. (See my unfavorable review at http:/www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/ extra/infotoday/scirus/scirus.html.)

Scirus' search software is powerful and still easy to use. In the latest upgrade it adds several features, including an excellent list of subject terms extracted on the fly from the results retrieved, which can help users in reformulat- ing their queries. The variety of scholarly resources and the ease of limiting your search to your preferred source categories are excellent. While its slogan "For Scientific Information Only" is still absurd, if you exclude from the search the "Other" Web site subcategory, you can spare yourself the pain of wading through tens of thousands of inane and sophomoric Web sites posted by sorry students.

* For launching the most important newspaper archive-ProQuest Information and Learning. This includes the full-text searchable digital version of The New York Times' entire back-run from 1851, amounting to more than 25 million articles. The archive retains the original layout and context of the "paper of record," reproducing the entire content of every issue.

Although the software still has some deficiencies, as I discussed in the November/December 2002 issue of ONLINE, this is not only an immensely valuable reference tool, but a cultural heritage by virtue of the clout of the Times. A similar ProQuest project for The Wall Street Journal is also applauded. Along with the upcoming historical digital archive of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, researchers from a variety of disciplines will have unprecedented access to the most respected primary news sources.

JEERS to ...

* The managers and proselytizers of the PubSCIENCE database. They wasted millions in congressional appropriations by making this "new" database. This was done by taking records from the decent Energy, Science & Technology (ES &T) database (which was paid for with decades of tax money) and combining them with mostly low-quality records. These records were submitted by fewer publishers from far fewer and far less relevant journals in far less number than the fervent propaganda made us believe. Then again, these people could get the award for fooling most of us, most of the time in the brief 3-year life span of this pie-inthe-sky project.

The PubSCIENCE saga is, of course, just a blip on the radar when you consider the fleecing of the nation by the disgraced executives of Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and Tyson. Check out the gory details about the absurdities of the content and mismanagement of PubSCIENCE at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~jacso/extra. You will also find there a multisearch engine by yours truly that really searches and fetches the free abstracts of energy-related journal and preprint archives with links to the full documents (mostly for subscribers). This is something that PubSCIENCE failed miserably to do.

* Yahoo!, which abruptly shut down the Research Document Collection, a licensed version of a substantial subset of Northern Light's Special Collection. It did this without any advance notice or at least a postmortem message to subscribers, acting as if to preserve the company name. Undoubtedly, it was too good to be true to pay $4.95 a month for unlimited searching and downloading of up to 50 documents from this excellent collection. Luckily, the same collection and deal have subsequently become available for $7.95/ month from ZDNet (http://cma.zdnet.com/ texis/techinfobase).

* divine, Inc., whose less-than-divine management staff set off on a ravening acquisition spree and then bit off far more than it could chew. divine Information Services (aka RoweCom) became "infernal Information Services" for hun- dreds of librarians, and drove into the ground Northern Light Special Collection's superb pay-per-view service (which received my Cheers for several years in a row). divine shut it down like some backalley bodega to ring in the new year.