The provision of electronic journals (e-journal) is accelerating in recent years. The paper reviews how to search electronic journals on the World Wide Web and the major titles of electronic journals in the area of medicine. It is clear that many new electronic journals are simply electronic editions of paper journals. Such journals require a new and radical concept of the journal as an interactive, hypertext-linked, multimedia product. Issues considered are novel electronic features, the style of publications in medical field, the volume of material available electronically. Also, discussed are the pricing structure of electronic journals and the future relationship between document delivery service and electronic journals. The shape and publication processes of future electronic journals should go beyond the electronic editions of paper journals.

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Recently most of the major commercial publishers have started to provide electronic journals. A number of academic societies such as AIP (American Institute of Physics), ACS (American Chemical Society) and IOP (Institute of Physics) are also promoting the provision of journals in digital form. On the other hand, subscription agents and database providers have launched various “one-stop shopping” systems or aggregation services, Now it is a real challenge for academic libraries to integrate electronic journals into the existing services. In this article, we examined the advantages and disadvantages of e-journals. Next we considered some issues in academic libraries, based on the experiences in the Tokyo Institute of Technology Library. Moreover, we made some comments on the new developments by publishers or aggregators.

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Many publishers have begun to offer full-text electronic access to their journals. The Science Direct platform offering full-text access to Elsevier Science's journals and bibliographic databases is designed to do much practical work. Here in, described its pricing scheme, and its benefits to researchers and libraries.

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Medical libraries must collect various kinds of materials and retain them to satisfy the user information needs. However, it is very difficult for one library to collect and preserve all materials because of journal price increase and stack shortage. The main activities of JMLA were inter-library loan and publication of several union catalogs. However, JMLA did not pay much attention to cooperative collection development. Medical Information and Media Center, Keio University is a member of the Kanto District Chapter of JMLA. As a member library, the Center participates in the cooperative collection program. This program was designed to share resources and coordinate minor serial titles within Kanto District. This report described the Center's present cooperation on the program and pointed out the reasons why the program is not successful. In addition, this report discussed several possibilities and perspectives on cooperative collection/preservation development.

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Today, a number of libraries has increased who can open their Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) to the public on the Internet. An investigation was conducted, through World Wide Web OPACs, regarding the setting of conditions of search fields, varied fields for keywords access, and appropriate methods for creating keywords. The findings suggest that present OPACs are not capable of storing subject-oriented information. Currently available keywords access are merely retrieval systems of titles, and nothing further. Contents data should be added to the bibliographic data of NACSIS-CAT for each library in order to effectively access to subject data on OPACs. There are some advantages in adding contents, such as: they remain unchanged once published; they need no maintenance; they offer a broader scope of technical terms; they give no room for subjective elements of those who input the information. On the other hand, working closely with publishing houses to key data into computers will certainly become inevitable. Moreover, standardization of words needs to be resolved. In order to put the idea into actual use, estimating the cost for adding contents information and evaluating its effectiveness must be made as an initial step.

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Under severe library finances, it is very important to get accurate data on the utilization frequency of each periodical. Utilization consists of lending, reading, photocopy and interlibrary loan. For library management and business, this information is as indispensable as citation analysis on Impact Factor and 2-Step Model. This report explains an outline of a survey on the optical character reader system of LICSU-UX (NEC) at Medical Library of Fukuoka University since April 1995. Also this introduces activities based on the results. These activities are, for example, display of newly-arrived periodicals, bookbinding, selection of electronic journal, choice of delivery system, making a list of discontinuance of subscription and other things. And this report proposes to start a survey of utilization throughout libraries of Japan Medical Library Association, to establish a market of recycling of disused periodicals, and to introduce an information retrieval system through the campus local area network in its early stage.

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There was an interesting article requested for photocopy many times through the interlibrary loan at Kawasaki Medical School Library. The article was in the field of statistics, and applicants for photocopy were doctors or researchers in clinical medicine. What is the article? Why do they request it? How do they use it? This paper was written to analyze and evaluate the field of statistics and citation data to solve these questions of a librarian. Results showed that the article was highly esteemed in the field of statistics and that the number of times the article had been cited was absolutely more than any other in the same field. Also, this paper shows that the number of times the article is cited and photocopies requested will increase.

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