CAUL
Council of Australian University Librarians.
MEDIA RELEASE
1/95
Universities trial new forms of electronic information delivery
Library services in Australian universities are set to improve
as a result of funding to be provided by the Federal Government
through the National Priority (Reserve) Fund.
The funding will be used to run five projects in a set of trials
running for 4 months from 1 July 1995. The trials are being coordinated
through the office of the Council of Australian University Librarians
(CAUL) in Canberra.
The funding, designed to improve library services supporting learning
and research in the university sector, will support the introduction
of innovative services for which recurrent funding will be provided
by individual institutions.
Mr John Shipp, CAUL president and convenor of the Database Access
Working Group of the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee's
Standing Committee on Information Resources said that the aim
of the four trials was to provide all staff and students of Australian
universities with improved access to a range of information databases.
"We need to do this in a manner which is cost-effective,
takes advantage of cooperative purchasing, complements institutional
and national infrastructure investment and improves the quality
of support for teaching and research," he said.
Other aims of the Database Access Program include:
- providing gateways to a range of bibliographic, full-text
and multimedia databases;
- promoting information literacy among members of the scholarly
community; and
- developing mechanisms which will improve the dissemination
of information, particularly the works of Australian scholars.
The five projects identified for funding from the National Priority
(Reserve) Fund are:
- Twenty SilverPlatter databases, including INSPEC, PsycInfo
and ERIC, mounted on a SCO Unix host server at the offices of
ALDIS in Melbourne, are each accessible to 8 simultaneous users
from Australia's universities. Search software is available for
Macintosh, Windows and DOS-based PCs, as well as VT100 terminals.
- The full-text business file from UMI, ABI/Inform, is mounted
on Unix hardware at the offices of Ovid Technologies in Sydney.
Thirty simultaneous users across Australia will use Ovid software
to connect via the Internet.
- Information Access Company's Expanded Academic Index / ASAP
includes the full-text of 500 periodicals of scholarly and general
interest, plus indexes and abstracts of a further 1000. Access
is via the Internet to California for an unlimited number of university
users.
- Access to the Lexis/Nexis Educational Menu, with full-text
of legal, news and business information, is via the Internet or
modem to Dayton, Ohio, for 8 simultaneous users from each university.
- The Cambridge Scientific Abstracts Internet Journal Service
is managed locally by DA Information Services. Subscriptions to
the CSA electronic journals by individual universities are discounted
by 50% for the first twelve months, and subsidised further by
the Fund.
Media contacts:
John Shipp, University Librarian, University of Wollongong,
tel: 042 213 546, fax 042 214 663, email: j.shipp@uow.edu.au
or
Diane Costello, Executive Officer, Council of Australian University
Librarians, tel: 06 249 2990, fax: 06 248 8571, email: diane.costello@anu.edu.au
3 July 1995
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