Chemical Education Today
Editorial
Iceberg JCE: Exploring the Invisible Nine-Tenths This Journal is like an iceberg. Nine-tenths of it is invisible to the reader of the printed page. The rest is the vast quantity of material in JCE Online that you can see only through electronic media. Join me as we dive in to explore the other nine-tenths of what your subscription brings you. Back Issues Online I am very pleased to report that the number of JCE back issues available from your desktop via a mouse click has just increased approximately fourfold. Those who use the JCE Index online regularly will have noticed that the index now provides access to all articles published from January 1976 through the present, an increase online from eight years to 29 years. This is the result of two separate digitizing projects that were described in the September issue on p 1376. Thanks to all who made this possible: Jon Holmes, editor of JCE Online, has overseen this project from its inception; the University of Wisconsin System Libraries digitized issues from January 1984 through August 1996; and UW–Madison undergraduates Anita Boor, Nicole Broekema, Amanda Bruesewitz, Reece Goiffon, Jamie Tabaka, and Peter Throm digitized issues from 1976 through 1983 and are continuing to work their way back toward 1924. For folks like me who are old enough to have on their bookshelves all of the issues from 1976 on—and then some—this is an added convenience, but not a necessity. For many others it will provide access to JCE that would not otherwise have been available. The more recently you began subscribing, the bigger the benefit, because a subscription now brings not just one year of JCE but quick, convenient access to 29 years of it—348 issues. What used to require trips to the library is now on your desktop, only a click away. In cases where the library is miles away or a librarian has discarded back issues to make room for new ones, that’s a big difference. Such situations need no longer be difficult, and they will become even less so as our digitizing project continues. Diving Deeper: Supplemental MaterialW We are still far from the bottom of the iceberg, however. There is a great deal in JCE Online that does not simply reproduce the printed page. Since 1997 we have been requiring authors to provide Lab Supplements that contain computer-editable versions of the handouts used by students in the authors’ teaching labs. There are many other items of supplemental material, such as data, spectra, extended discussions of results, spreadsheets, and other computerdelivered material that accompany published articles and are indicated by W in the table of contents and the article itself. In 2002, for example, we published 558 articles in 1636 printed pages that occupied 217.5 MB of disk space. The corresponding supplemental material consists of 2413 files occupying 467 MB of disk space. For the first nine months of this year we have published 1376 pages (294 MB) in print www.JCE.DivCHED.org
•
and 3419 files (797 MB) of supplemental material, and we still have three months to go. The supplements outweigh the articles and are growing more rapidly.
Only@JCE Online
…the number of JCE back issues available from your desktop via a mouse click has just increased approximately fourfold.
But even that is not all. Thanks in part to the NSF, through our National Science Digital Library grant, we are greatly expanding Only@JCE Online. JCE DigiDemos, for example, is providing easy access to chemical demonstrations from the book by Gilbert, Alyea, Dutton, and Dreisbach (1) in a format that allows for discussion and incremental improvement of each demonstration, continual updates of safety cautions and disposal methods, and inclusion of new graphics and multimedia. If you have not already checked out DigiDemos, go to http://www.jce.divched.org/JCEDLib/ DigiDemos/index.html and add your contribution to the discussion of your favorite demonstration. JCE WebWare provides a broad range of spreadsheets, animations, and other online teaching tools that cannot be presented in print. JCE QBank is collecting thousands of quiz and exam questions as well as ConcepTest questions and conceptual questions. JCE SymMath is extending the Mathcad in the Chemistry Curriculum column (46 documents at present) to Mathematica (10), Maple (1), and other symbolic mathematics systems. And we have plans to add more new collections to JCE Online within the next year. Support Your Journal Not long ago a reader asked me whether the 6% increase in library subscription rates this year was justified by a corresponding increase in the quality of the product. (The reader did not ask about the 0% increase in individual subscription rates.) In fact the quality and quantity of product has far outstripped the increase in prices. If you were a subscriber in 1998, our 75th year, you received about 150 MB of content. This year you will receive more than 1400 MB. We at JCE are proud to be able to bring you this continually improved product. We hope that you will be proud to subscribe to and read that product—and to encourage your colleagues, students, and institution to do so as well. The more subscribers we have, the more good things we can afford to bring you in the future. Literature Cited 1. Gilbert, George L.; Dreisbach, Dale; Dutton, Frederic B.; Alyea, Hubert N. Tested Demonstrations in Chemistry, Volumes 1 and 2; Department of Chemistry, Denison University: Granville, OH, 1994.
Vol. 81 No. 10 October 2004
•
Journal of Chemical Education
1383
