The Effectiveness of providing electronic journals in JAERI

Nozawa, Takashi ; Habara, Tadashi; Itabashi, Keizo; Ishikawa, Masashi; Yonezawa, Minoru  

The JAERI has 10 branch research sites in Japan. Because of the resent budget shrinkage and increasing journal price, it becomes more difficult to keep sufficient journal coverage at each branch library. Some of the users can read printed journals for their research work while the others are obliged to request a photocopy of journal articles from the central library of JAERI or affiliated libraries. It is necessary to improve this information gap among the sites. One of our attempts was to provide the electronic journals through the intranet. We carried out the qualitative analysis on the trend of journals usage both in printed and in electronic form, from the viewpoint of the effectiveness of providing electronic journals. It was found out that the users having less printed journals more frequently access to the electronic journals. This means that electronic journals are useful for the solution of information gap among the sites. The analysis also indicated that there exists a cost-effective compromise between providing printed journals and providing electronic journals.