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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 50| April 2001
A New Look for Australian Journals Online
The National Librarys web site was launched in May 1995, and one of the services included from the very beginning was a listing of Australian electronic journals. For several years it was simply called Australian Electronic Journals, but more recently this service has become known as Australian Journals Online (AJOL). In 1995, ejournals were just emerging as a new form of publication, and AJOL was developed to provide improved access to these items. The first listing included links to approximately 35 titles. By September 1996 the number of titles listed had grown to over 260, by June 1997 this had increased to over 900, and currently there are more than 1700 titles.
The items listed in AJOL include journals, magazines, newsletters and fanzines. Some provide full-text access to the ejournal (which may be in html, pdf or other formats), while others provide only abstracts, selected articles, contents listings, or merely an online advertising presence for a print publication.
From its inception, the AJOL listing has consisted of a series of simple html documents that can be browsed alphabetically by title. Some limited subject browsing was later added, but not all entries were included in the subject listing. As AJOL has grown, the html format has become increasingly unwieldy for updating, and has provided users with only limited searching functionality. To improve both the maintenance and searching capabilities of AJOL it has been redeveloped into a database format.
The new database version of AJOL was launched on 14th March. It provides both keyword and phrase searching by title, subject and all fields (i.e. title, alternative title, description, subject and publisher). An alphabetic browse search has also been supplied for both titles and subjects. All records in AJOL have been allocated subject headings from the APAIS thesaurus, providing much improved subject access. It is also possible to exclude titles that only offer abstracts or promotional information online. A Help section gives details about how to search the AJOL database and explains the brief and full record displays. In addition, an online contribution form allows anyone to suggest new titles for inclusion in AJOL.
The new look AJOL can be found at www.nla.gov.au/ajol/.
Come and give it a try. It is the most comprehensive record of Australian
electronic journals on any topic you can imagine. They range from the
highly technical, for example Complexity international (a refereed
journal for scientific papers dealing with complex systems research) to
the more esoteric, for example Weed witches ezine (looks at
homeopathy, herbs and society) or Electric dreams (devoted to
dreams and dreaming, with a focus on online dream sharing).
Julie Whiting
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au