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Leorita, et al, On Fri, 5 Nov 1999, Stubbs, Leorita wrote: > There are a lot of ways of doing maintaining your list of e-journals. > Since I work in a biopharmaceutical company and we only read certain type of > journals/e-journals we don't have that long a list. I assume that the > e-journal list is created as a webpage. Anyway I do break them down into > category and alphabetical orders. I maintain them both manually. It's not > really a lot of work. I found it tiresome to manually maintain a list of about 3000 e-journals. Such a list cannot be fitted (realistically) on one page and so I ended up maintaining 20 separate pages. This prompted me to explore the option of building a database of this information instead. Going back a year or so things were not as stable as they are now and host services would add new titles or change their base URLs almost daily (I exaggerate but those who were there then know what I mean) which often meant changing records in each file. The IDEAL service has just gone through a similar change (changing the frontend and internal operation not the top level URLs but messing up our proxy-bypass arrangements nevertheless). However, because I recently rebuilt our list as an Access database (now containing over 7000 records - including over 3000 full text titles) I was able to make the changes required in a few minutes. The database approach has to be the way to go, it is more flexible, easier to maintain and can form the basis of a wider range of access options for the users. My colleague Chris Keene has already described some of the features of our service in an earlier note to this list so I won't repeat them. He wrote the programs that search the database and display the results including the one that generates the alphabetic lists 'on-the-fly' when a user requests one. This way it is always up-to-date. A neat little feature of his alphabetic program is that not only does it extract titles that begin with 'A' (for example) it also extracts those that begin 'Journal of A' at the same time. The current version (which we still consider as a 'pilot') is viewable at: http://library.ukc.ac.uk/library/netinfo/extservs/Default.htm Regards, John Smith, The Templeman Library, University of Kent at Canterbury. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%