d-lib is an ejournal I check out on a regular basis. This month's issue has two articles of note for us here today. First of all, "Comparing Library and User Related Costs of Print and Electronic Journal Collections: A First Step Towards a Comprehensive Analysis" more or less confirms what seems to me to be fairly obvious: that a library's total cost of managing journal subscriptions is less for ejournals than for print journals. The study also indicates that faculty and students make heavy use of ejournals, especially in terms of reading a wider range of journals than they would have before. Like I said, this seems obvious, but it's nice when reality works out like it should. I can certainly say that my experience with my own research-related work tells me that I much prefer using ejournals to print journals, almost to the point where I won't use a journal if I don't have access to the electronic version. At York, most of the library science print journals are at the humanities/social sciences library, about a five minute walk from my branch. The idea that I should have to get up and walk five minutes, find the location in the stacks of the journal I want, find a free photocopier and actually stand around photocopying the thing flashes me back to my old MLIS days at McGill. It seems so studenty. I have to say, I understand why faculty prefer ejournals because I do too.

The other interesting article is "Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward," about which I have no accompanying rant but is still well worth the attention of anyone interesting in the whole Open Archives movement.