Information
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Textbooks
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Media
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Resources edited by
JCE Online
Jon L. Holmes University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, WI 53715-1116
JCE Back Issues—Here Come Some More! Your subscription to JCE has just become much more valuable. You now have online access to every article published in JCE from January 1978 through the present. Here is how to find this newly available treasure trove of ideas about chemical education. Go to the JCE Index online (http:// www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Search/index.html) and search for articles as you normally would. For any article published since January 1978, you will find a link to “Full text”; click that to view the full text of the article. Within a month or so, you will also be able to reach issues from 1978 on in the Previous Issues section, so that you can browse through them as you now do with issues published since September 1996. To make this happen has required much effort on the part of JCE staff and JCE student workers, as well as collaboration with the University of Wisconsin System Libraries. To bring digitized back issues to our community in the speediest and most cost-effective fashion, we are delivering the issues in three different formats. The purpose of this article is to explain those formats and why the exact image that you see will differ depending on the date when an article was printed. We are continuing to scan and digitize back issues, and we would be very happy for anyone with unbound copies from the 1920s through the 1940s to lend them to our scanning project. September 1996 to Present Since September 1996 the JCE editorial staff has prepared portable document format (PDF) files from the desktop publishing (DTP) system used to produce each month’s printed issue of the Journal. These PDF files are placed in JCE Online so that you can view, download, and print any individual article. Clicking a “Full text” link on a JCE Index search result page for an article from this period downloads the entire article as a PDF file. PDF files are usually displayed and printed using the Adobe Reader (formerly Adobe Acrobat Reader) program, which can be downloaded without cost from the Adobe WWW site for all popular computer platforms. PDF retains all the resolution of the text of the printed version—the text appears crisp at all sizes. The resolution of the images is reduced in order to attain a reasonable size for the downloaded file. Each article in the Journal is a separate file that starts at the top of the page, which may be different from how the article appeared in the printed Journal. The text in these PDF files can be searched for words, partial words, and phrases.
1376
Journal of Chemical Education
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January 1984 to August 1996 Journal issues for the period 1984–1996 are being delivered at JCE Online as graphic image format (GIF) files. The GIF files were produced from scanned issues by the University of Wisconsin System Libraries. Each page of the Journal is displayed as a separate GIF file called an “electronic facsimile”. The pages are not grouped into articles. Navigation is provided to move from page to page, from article to article, and to a listing of the issue contents. Clicking a “Full text” link on a JCE Index search result page for an article from this period takes you to the GIF image of the first page of the article. All WWW browsers that can display images can display GIF files without the need for a helper application or browser plug-in. GIF files use file compression to reduce the size of downloaded files, but retain all the information in the original uncompressed file. GIF files do not retain resolution-independent text as do PDF files. This means that text is displayed at the resolution of the GIF file and may look fuzzy at other resolutions or when printing. To alleviate this problem, the GIF files are available in four sizes. January 1978 to December 1983 Articles from issues previous to 1984 are delivered as PDF files that were produced from a scanned image of each page of the Journal. Because the images were scanned and did not come directly from a desktop publishing system, the text may not appear crisp at all sizes. The scanned images undergo optical character recognition (OCR) to obtain the text of each article for searching. The output of the OCR has not been edited or corrected, so searching is done on “dirty text”. If the OCR did not recognize a character in a word, then the word is misspelled and a search for the correctly spelled word will not find it. The scanned pages are grouped into articles, but the article may or may not start at the top of the page. The files are compressed for quicker downloading, but the file size is larger than produced from the DTP system. Clicking a “Full text” link on a JCE Index search result page for an article from this period downloads the entire article as a PDF file. Please go to the JCE Index online and try out your new capabilities. As always, if you have comments and suggestions, or if you would like to lend back issues to our project, please contact
[email protected]. We anticipate additional enhancements to your JCE subscription in the near future. Keep watching!
Vol. 81 No. 9 September 2004
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www.JCE.DivCHED.org
