Blog now offers access to e-journal content

The library scientists here at goldwaterlibrary.org are constantly experimenting with new ways to make our library's contents more accessible. Here's one we hope will catch on with our readers.

Starting today a new feature appears in the blog's sidebar. Four links appear under the heading Online Journal Contents. Each covers a different segment of the library's collection scope. Click on a link and you will get a constantly updating list of articles from academic journals that are available electronically.

The ten most recent articles appear on the first page. Click "Read More ..." at the bottom of the page and a new page will appear. As you continue through the pages successively older articles will appear.

For now this list is limited to those titles published electronically for which the Museum has a subscription and that have RSS feeds. As new RSS feeds become available those titles will be added to the mix.

If you already aggregate feeds into a feed reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, you can use these four feeds to add links to individual journals, or feeds from these four links themselves. (For the time being this seems to work best in Google Reader, but we're working on a solution to that.)

Access to the full-text version
Citations and abstracts for each article should be available to everyone. However access to the full-text of the articles is limited.

Those reading the blog from within the Metropolitan Museum or by proxy from another computer should have access to the full text. (Please let us know if it isn't.) Likewise those accessing the blog from an institution (college or university or museum, for instance) that also subscribes to a specific journal, everything should be accessible. Of course, your institution's subscriptions may vary; all the titles may not be available.

Every experiment needs its guinea pigs. Please let us know (goldwater.library (at) metmuseum.org) what your experience is with these journal feeds: what works and particularly what doesn't work. In the meantime we'll continue to tinker with it to make it better.