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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 43 | February 2000


APAIS goes totally electronic

Copies of the printed edition of the Australian Public Affairs Information Service (APAIS) have been arriving in many Australian libraries each month since 1945. This valuable guide to the literature of the social sciences and humanities will cease to be published in printed form at the end of 2000.

The National Library’s decision to cease publishing the printed APAIS is due to a combination of factors. While subscription numbers have been rapidly falling (resulting in price pressures), electronic versions of the data on CD-ROM and online are available and increasingly popular, as they provide more flexible means of accessing the information. The cancellation of the printed form reflects user expectations of better search capabilities than are possible with a printed index. Increased indexing of Internet journals, with live links from the online database to the full text, provides further impetus to the move to electronic forms. This last feature is a precursor to the impending development of a service that will provide links from many APAIS citations online to an image of the full article for many of the major APAIS journals. This service, Australian Public Affairs Full Text, is being developed by RMIT Publishing and is expected to be launched later this year.

A survey of subscribers to the printed APAIS was carried out during September. The results of the survey indicate that nearly all APAIS users with more than a very occasional need to search APAIS already subscribe to it in an electronic form. Most of those not subscribing to an electronic form cite low use of APAIS as the reason, and most respondents to the survey believed cancellation of the print APAIS would have little impact on their library users. All current subscribers will be contacted and provided with information about the electronic forms of APAIS.

APAIS is available in online and CD-ROM formats from RMIT Publishing. The 1998 change from the National Library’s STAIRS-based Ozline service to Informit Online’s service using WebSPIRS has been received enthusiastically by users wanting online access, and AUSTROM (the disk on which APAIS appears) continues to be one of RMIT Publishing’s most successful CD-ROM titles.

Full details of RMIT Publishing’s products and prices are available from:
RMIT Publishing
PO Box 12477, A’Beckett St
Melbourne VIC 8006
Fax: (03) 9349 3508
Ph: (03) 9341 3251

| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |

Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: tford@nla.gov.au

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