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Hi,

This has been bothering me for a while now (one of many little problems
to be sorted), so I thought I would seek advice from this list.

We recently took out a subscription to OpticsInfoBase at:
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/, which gives us online only access to the
Optical Society of America's online journals.

Up to now we have had no problem linking to their titles. That was until
they completed the digitization of the Journal of the Optical Society of
America (and Applied Optics). For those who don't know Journal of the
Optical Society of America split into Journal of the Optical Society of
America A and Journal of the Optical Society of America B in 1984.
Applied Optics also split into 3 sections in 1990, although Ulrichs
still record this title as one journal.

Now although we can link to each of the parts for the current titles,
there is no way on OpticsInfoBase that we can link to the original
titles i.e. Journal of the Optical Society of America and Applied
Optics, from either our OPAC or our Virtual Learning Environment.
Instead the only option we are being given is to advise users that they
can search for that particular journal on Optics InfoBase and then
browse the results in date order. That is the best that they can do to
provide a means of browsing these former titles. However it doesn't seem
very helpful to just point our users to the OpticsInfoBase site for
these former titles and hope that they can figure out how to just pull
up a list of that journals contents.

Now whilst it is helpful to be able to search all or some of the OSA's
journals through OpticsInfoBase and many users will choose to do that,
should we not be able to link specifically to the older titles? I have
emailed OSA on several occasions, pointing out that it does seem to be
normal practice to be able to link to a former title. The American
Physical Society's journals have many former reincarnations of titles,
but each of them has a home page, even though that title no longer
exists. Why are the OSA choosing to do things differently

1. How have other people dealt with this on their OPACS? Do you just
link to OpticsInfoBase?
2. Should OpticsInfoBase not have a means that one can link to the
former titles?

I hope this makes sense and look forward to your replies!

Cheers
Lesley


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant,
Learning and Information Services,
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB UK
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e-mail: [log in to unmask]
phone:  01707 284662      fax: 01707 284666
web: http://www.herts.ac.uk/lis/subjects/natsci/ejournal/
list owner: [log in to unmask]
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