The library is a charter member of Project Muse, a collaborative project of the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Homewood Academic Computing, and Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP). JHUP's journals are being made available electronically through Project Muse, which seeks to provide electronic journals that are easy to use, reasonably priced, and more widely accessible within the academic community.
"Project Muse is the first example of a major scholarly press publishing in print and electronic form," says Azariah Root Director of Libraries Ray English. That libraries are involved in "working out means of access to [electronic] journals is really quite new," he says.
Along with 56 members of the Oberlin Group, a consortium of leading liberal arts college libraries, the College has entered into an agreement with Project Muse that allows the library to receive electronic subscriptions to all 40 JHUP journals at half the regular electronic subscription rate. When it was launched in August, Oberlin's subscription included five electronic journals; Project Muse is adding about one title a month to those available electronically. Once all titles have been added, the library will work with faculty members to determine which subscriptions to keep.
Readers can link directly to the Project Muse journals from the "What's New" button at the library's Oberlin Online home page: http://www.oberlin.edu/~library_OCL_homepage.html . Each title will eventually be cataloged in OBIS, the library's online catalog , and the catalog records will be linked directly to the journal.