Periodical prices coniinue to rise at a rate that surpasses inflation. Escalating periodical prices, fueled ty higher paper prices and other publishng costs, force libraries to cancel subscnp-tions. This may. in turn, force publishers to increase prices even more. The resulting vicious cycle, combined with decreasing or stagnant library budgets, erodes th number of periodicals offered to library users. While interlibrary loan (ILL) and commercial document delivery offer lime-tested, viable alternatives, most librarians and end-users agree that there is no substitute for owning the physical periodical.
Periodical ownership normally implies that a paper or microform copy is available in the library. Electronic or online access through digitization of the journals, however, makes it possible to purchase or lease fulltext periodical databases and to offer end-users simultaneous entry to hundreds of journals at a set price. Consideration of a fulltext database, however, raises many questions and dilemmas. What are the costs in terms of software, hardware, and staff time? What risks arc involved? What journals will be supplied on the database next year and in three years? What if the database vendor stops production of the database? What if important or expensive publications arc dropped from the database?
These questions and many more related to fulltext periodical access are being studied at the University of the Pacific (L'OP) Libraries. Information Access Company's (IAC) Expanded Academic Index and Business Index have been accessible through the Libraries' online public access catalog (OPAC) since 1994. but students arc frequently dismayed to discover the Libraries do not own many of the indexed .journals. Most undergraduate students are unwilling to wait for ILL and are reluctant to pay the libraries' charge for CARL UnCover commercial document delivery.