ICI scientists benefit from electronic access to journals

This short article summarizes the experience to date of ICI as it has implemented Elsevier Electronic Subscriptions for some of its journals. ICI has recently put in place a global Lotus Notes infrastructure, and it is on this foundation that a Notes-based electronic journals system has been built. Early attempts to use page image information in TIFF file format were unsuccessful in the Notes environment and led to a move to the PDF file format. The latter gives superior ease of article navigation, all delivered as part of Acrobat Reader functionality. The server product, DocWatch, has been deployed to log usage of the system. ICI scientists are benefiting from desktop access to journals previously only available in libraries. It is expected that this first electronic library component will have major benefit for ICI sites having a small or no physical library.