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A few comments are offered in the light of about thirty years of activities linked to the information flow in astronomy and of about two decades of blossoming of electronic networks and tools including the World-Wide Web. Some points are emphasized (such as the changing sociology of data centres) and wrong expectations are pointed out (such as the all-electronic era).

This paper explains the meaning of e-journals: they are usually called by American literature such as “electronic journals” or “e-journals” and they are digital objects that are on the cyberspace only. A pragmatically discussion about e-journals must define them even using a summarize definition. What is actually an e-journal? Starting from we working in a changing environment, we have to strongly reflect because nowadays there isn’t a standard definition about e-journals. This definition should consider the status, function and quality of these materials but “if a definition hasn’t drown yet, it happens because e-journals are objects so that difficult and with an ephemeral consistence”.

The Computer Society Digital Library is presented by the author, where the access for the New Bulgarian University Library was acquired with the financial bid of Stemo Company and the kind assistance of Mr. Boicho Kokinov – Vice-rector in Research at the University. Library users have the unique chance to access the leading journals of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in computer systems and technologies.

One of the most interesting themes for information specialists is the examination of electronic journals and the related consortia. AIDA showed its interest with the tutorial at the Ecia meeting in Pontignano, October 1999.

This paper analyses the problems encountered by electronic libraries to cope with long term keeping of on-line documents. What is the best solution not to fill in a library system with non persistent addresses? Different possible solutions are studied, based on the experience of the CERN Document Server and its library. This paper will stress the importance of using a Link Manager for any long term Web server. It will explain how the CERN SetLink Link Manager is designed to handle a wide range of document types and formats, from photos in JPEG to eprints in PDF. It will also focus on other possibilities offered by using such an application, like automatic figures extraction or concatenation, full text searching and on-the-fly format conversions

The comparison between electronic and print journals is a very present problem, and it is not always simple to interpret in the right way the demands of our users in order to find the most appropriate tools to satisfy them. In his study, Enrico Martellini analyses the most important characteristics of electronic and print journals using the physics journals of the library of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The study analyses in particular the contents and the full-text standard formats of e-journals, the number of back years available in electronic version, the search tools and additional services that e-journals offer, the timeliness of publication and the possible use of the data contained in the e-journals. These data are compared with those pertinent to the print journals.

I collect here some thoughts on the value and usability of the electronic versions of commercial Physics Journals. These critical remarks are the result of my own experience with their use, and were provoked by the sudden disappearance of several important journals from the CERN library. These thoughts are intended to promote a closer interaction between publishers and users, in order to ensure that user's needs are fulfilled before the complete (and irreversible!) transition to a fully automated journal.

This paper explains how, after many temptations to define what is an “electronic journal”, nowadays we haven’t a standard definition about it yet. This is caused by the nature of these objects; in fact they have an ephemeral consistency and consequently is very difficult to hand out a specific and only one definition. Like Crossman (a philosopher from Oxford, but better known as a politician and military strategist during the Second War World) wrote: “if we don’t know a specific meaning of any words that we use every day, we can never discuss about anything”.

In order to define what is an e-journal, as well as to define any other kind of tangible or intangible object, it is to understand the form of it. First of all, it is to be said that neither the form, nor the card bin of e-journals can be compared to the paper journal every one knows. The paper journal item division doesn't exist in the database, that collects and organizes the full-texts. Actually, the full-texts are available in an easier way than the physical bookcase access (item/volume/year). This is the difference between the physical card index and the OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue) access.

E-journals are a very topical subject, considered - in our framework - with a mix of enthusiasm and concern; on one hand there's the enthusiasm for media and technologies more and more in the van and more and more close to research needs, on the other there's the consciousness that in our country some contexts are still too far from these settings. Among the topics covered at the conference: the existing deviation – at least in our Italian outline – between the materials offered by the market and the objective difficulties that libraries have to cope with; organizing/management problems and cooperative settings of library systems in front of the new reality of electronic journals; the old role of the 'serials librarian' who can and must survive this "electronic revolution", provided that this figure is supported by collaboration, coordination and communication with the whole organization that gravitates around him; the future trends in the publishing market; the peer-reviews problem; the role of the author in the scholarly community. Moreover two Italian experiences were illustrated: CIBER (Coordinamento Interuniversitario Basi Dati & Editoria in Rete) and that one by University of Bologna Biomedical Library about the indexing of about 170 e-journals.

After a period of discussion influenced by technological innovation that called into question the role and function of information operators, first of them librarians and documentalists, the discussion is now on the strategic importance of Knowledge Management. KM is a whole of activites of location, collection, management and diffusion of a conjunction of knowledge at the basis of businìness management.

This paper explains that about digital documentations treatment we must read the Ann Okerson’s literature: in fact, she has a lot of relevant experience in this topic and gives us many suggestions for working with. Recently, Ann Okerson took part in a meeting in Geneva (Switzerland). This paper analyses what she said in that occasion and from working groups at the University of Padua, too. Ann Okerson, since 1995 joined at Academic Library of Yale, with her studying and articles, defined a turning point about subscriptions to digital journals thanks to the cooperative contracts. During her fifteen-year experience, she has been studing the development of collections as digital journals, in particular about negotiation. She has been playing a fundamental goal for NERL (NortEast Research Libraries) in the United States of America, which involves 18 academic libraries and centres of research.

The transition of scientific journals from print to electronic open new sceneries, offers new opportunities, but also creates uncertainties, brings new challenges, requires new attitudes. My paper intends to reflect on the meaning of this transition for the scholarly community: on the needs which it satisfies and the expectations which it creates, but also on the problems which it brings. In particular, the aim of the paper is to underline the necessity – from the scholarly community – of a bigger awareness of the problems and of an activer participation of universities, research institutions and researchers, as they are authors, in the production, circulation and archiving of scholarly information at reasonable costs. If a bigger consciousness by authors is joined by a bigger cooperation between the various partners, scholarly communication will be advantaged. Commercial electronic publishing predominates in a market in which the other partners – in Europe more than in the US – are quite passive. But maybe the moment of the 'revolt' (which must be a cooperative one) has come...

The concept of consortium has been expanding in the United States since the beginning of the 1990's as a way to confront the tremendous increase of subscription costs to electronic journals. This increase was due to monopoly abuse. The widespread dissemination of electronic journals will lead to the following developments: author's right - different from copyright - but both will be excluded by contract law; document consultation and not document preservation could become the sole object of negotiations; contracts management will take a growing place in our professions because of the variety of rights they propose and the financial risk and weight they involve. The consortia, very developed in English-speaking and Nordic countries, have not been adopted in France for several reasons. It is the Common Documentation Service of the Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, by leading the way in negotiations with Elsevier, and using the methods developed in the framework of consortia, that created the first library French consortium with the Angers, Aix-Marseille II and Nancy I universities. Contract negotiations and consortia will certainly be the unique means to manage digital information sources. A new information economy and new management methods will predominate. They will create an unstable, disconcerting, even dangerous area.

In the last years we saw great changes in the bibliographic information access and distribution, in Italy and all over the world. There is the risk, in Italy, of a disappearance of the national contribution to knowledge production, and of the need to access information through Italian sources digitalized somewhere. Today we assist to forms of partnership between Universities and some information provider, and to the first attempts to electronic resources acquisition in cooperative ways. New solution must be found to allow libraries to continue their function in information organization, access, archival.

Discussions and thoughts from the Tenth Fiesole Collection Development Retreat held in March 2008 in Fiesole. The issues of integrating digital and physical collections to meet the manifold needs of the library users.

Scientific literature is growing unattainable for any medical professional who wants to be up to date with developments in their field. Access to the more than four hundred thousand biomedical articles that are published annually in the world, with chapters in papers or dissertations, it is an impossible task without the help of computer technology. Subscriptions to magazines prestigious interrogation to bibliographic databases, or revision of bulletins summary prepared by libraries and documentation centers are some systems used by professionals that try to keep abreast.

In Cuba, since 1980, was a great advance in the field of the biosciences - genetics, molecular Biology, inmunology and biotechnology - that opened excellent technological and economic opportunities.

The National electronic Library for Health (NeLH) is gearing up for its national awareness week. This article looks at NeLH's activities over the past year.

The main universities of the world maintain subscriptions of electronic journals and these have remained by almost one decade, in resistance, for example with the electronic book commercialization, that has evolved more slowly and with smaller acceptance.

The article presents the results of a survey on the usage about electronic journals at the Austrian Central Medical Library.

This note is writen at the beginning of the Open Access movement era. PLoS has been founded a few months ago with its model "authors pay", and everybody is questioning the rol that publishers should play in the scientific information flow. Authors begin to be allowed to deposit their articles on their own web sites.

Due to the history of the scientific journal "El profesional de la información" (EPI), which from its foundation in 1992 to 1997 was called "Information World en Español" (IWE), and changed its editorial twice, two teachers in cataloging Assumpció Estivill and Jesús Gascón --from the Faculty of Library and Information Science of the University of Barcelona - show how it should be cataloged. The ISBD and Ibermarc registries of IWE and EPI are presented. The article is accompanied by the history of the journal 1992-2000.

The study makes a quick survey of the major agricultural information systems and services existing in the world. Examines the objectives of three major systems AGRIS, CAB and NAL operating at the international level. Points out that they should avoid duplication of efforts and step into the days of cooperation so that the world will get a reliable improved agricultural information system. Analyses the changes taking place in scientific information transfer with stress to databases and abstracting services in agriculture. Observes that primary publishers in agricultural sciences are beginning to realize that abstracts in addition to their utility in transferring information related to content of primary journals; are also saleable commodity and that the original publishers should themselves take advantage of this business instead of allowing others to benefit from their efforts. Also observes the increased use digital technology by publishers and information systems. Developments in digital storage, publishing and transmission technology is analyzed and predicts that with the availability of low cost high capacity digital recording media, by the end of the century most of the specialized journals in agriculture will change to electronic form and that all secondary information services in the sector will be based on electronic databases. The study opines that these changes will also force the publishers and information service providers to ensure quality of services.