Library's research holdings boosted

Several new sources of scholarly research have boosted Trent's library holdings and provided electronic desktop access to hundreds of online journals and indexes for Trent students and researchers.

The most significant acquisitions are being made possible through the Canadian National Site Licensing Project (cnslp). Funded through cfi and member institutions, cnslp is a collaboration of 64 universities nation-wide that negotiates and purchases pan-Canadian site licenses for electronic versions of scientific, technical, and medical journals. The collaborative buying power means considerable reduction in costs as well as access to resources that previously were unaffordable.

Small institutions have always had more difficulty in acquiring large numbers of research journals because of the prohibitive cost, said Marisa Scigliano, Acting University Librarian. "Our budget for journals has been low ­ the new site licenses add a lot to our collection, including journals we would never have been able to acquire. It puts all institutions on par for research and teaching."

The new holdings made possible by CNSLP include Royal Society of Chemistry journals and the Web of Science, which encompasses the Science Citation and Humanities Citation indexes. Scigliano says that the Web of Science alone would have cost the university over $100,000 dollars if they had had to purchase it. "It would be impossible to bring this to Trent." She estimates that as new site licenses are obtained the dollar value of library holdings could increase by millions.

The Web of Science and Royal Society of Chemistry journals are expected to be online by February. More electronic resources will be added in the near future.

Further access to scientific journals was made possible this month when the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) announced they were providing free online access to 14 National Research Council journals. Journals of Earth Science, Physics, Biology, and Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences are among the selection available at
http://researchpress.nrc.ca/.

The library has also acquired more than one hundred full-text electronic journals in the humanities and social sciences. These are contained in Project MUSE, a database of scholarly publishing from a variety of highly regarded university presses such as MIT and John Hopkins. Project MUSE is accessible through the library link on Trent's Web Site.