Lessons Learned from Full-Text Journals at OCLC

OCLC operates many services and programs for libraries, but the major ones are an online cataloging system, an interlibrary loan system, and a reference service. The reference service (FirstSearch) includes full-text databases as well as databases of abstracts and indexes. We currently serve more than 25,000 libraries, have more than 1,100 full-text with-graphics journals online, and the FirstSearch databases contain more than 250 million records. We started working on full-textjournals by examining new approaches to information display. We felt that there would be a gradual movement from the availability of only metadata electronically to the full text of reference works, journal articles, and finally books. We started investigating and working with Donald Kuth's Metafont and TeX as soon as they were available, even to the point of doing our own ports of the systems. In general, this is the progression we have seen, although the wide availability of journal articles has taken longer than we expected twenty years ago.published or submitted for publicatio