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Resources edited by
JCE Online
Jon L. Holmes University of Wisconsin–Madison Madison, WI 53706
Scanning and Indexing this Journal For the last two years JCE staff members have been actively scanning the back issues of this Journal. Mostly through the work of a dedicated team of undergraduate students, we have managed to scan all of the issues back to 1932 and are in the process of getting these issues online for access. Here is a summary of the current status of this project. We hope it will provide you with information you will find helpful in using JCE back issues. What is Available Previous issues of JCE dating back to 1945 are currently available at JCE Online (see www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/ or click the “Previous Issues” link found on any JCE Online page). Each article is presented as an Adobe PDF file and can be viewed using the ubiquitous Adobe Reader application or browser plug-in. Through the use of Adobe Acrobat technology, an exact facsimile of the scanned page is presented as an image. Associated with the image is an invisible text layer. The Adobe Reader application allows you to search and to extract this text. The text layer is produced using optical character recognition of the scanned image. No effort has been made to correct the recognition errors. You need to be aware when searching and extracting text that you are searching and extracting “dirty” text. Thus, search results might not be exactly what you expect and text extracted from the scanned articles will need to be edited. We believe this is small price to pay for such a valuable search tool. Responsibilities of Readers With the ability to easily extract text from articles comes the responsibility to make attribution for the source of the information and to respect intellectual property rights. As an education journal, JCE promotes the fair use of the copyrighted material we publish. We additionally give all subscribers to JCE the license to make copies of Journal articles for classroom use. You can make as many copies as you have students in your class. In the digital realm of JCE Online, “class-
room copies” takes on new meaning. Our policy concerning digital copies of JCE materials is that you can not distribute them as you can paper copies. You may print out the digital file and make paper copies available to your classroom. However, you are not allowed to distribute the digital copies (PDF files). This is not as restrictive as it may sound as many institutions and libraries subscribe to JCE. If your institution or library subscribes, all the students, faculty, and staff can use the institution subscription (IP number subscription) to access JCE articles, thus providing classroom copies. All you need to do is provide the link to the articles on your class WWW page or in an email sent to class members. This policy applies to all subscriber-only materials available at JCE Online. We encourage those who wish to provide digital copies of JCE articles to their class to do so through an institution or library subscription to JCE (http://store.jce.divched.org). Browsing the Online Table of Contents While we have been busy scanning these back issues we have also been working to make finding those articles easier and more efficient. One way is by providing an online table of contents for each issue. This table of contents is like those of current JCE issues except that the links go directly to the PDF full-text version of the article. In issues since 1996, links in the table of contents go to the article home page where a link to the full-text PDF is provided along with an abstract, links to any supplemental materials that may have been provided by the author, and other information such as the article citation and keywords associated with the article. Previous to 1996, articles do not usually have abstracts or supplemental material, so there is no need for a home page. Therefore, the table of contents is linked directly to the article. Searching with JCE Index Browsing tables of contents does not get most of us to our destination as quickly as we would like. We need to have a way to search for articles of interest. The JCE Index pro-
Find it FAST! Locating articles in back issues of JCE. Year(s)
Figure 1. Every HTML page at JCE Online links to the Previous Issues and Search JCE Index pages.
Vol(s)
Browse an article, issue, or year
Search for all articles that meet search criteria
www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/
www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Search/
1996–2006 73–83
Table of Contents; abstracts with links to full-text PDFs and supplemental material
Title/author searching; keyword searching from controlled vocabulary; links to abstracts with supplemental material and full-text PDFs
1965–1995 42–72
Table of Contents; full-text PDFs
Title/author searching; keyword searching from controlled vocabulary; links to full-text PDFs
1945–1964 22–41
Table of Contents; full-text PDFs
Title/author searching only; links to full-text PDFs
1924–1944 1–21 (scanning in progress)
Will be full-text PDFs, to be released a decade at a time
Title/author searching only; no links in results (yet!)
www.JCE.DivCHED.org
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Vol. 84 No. 2 February 2007
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Journal of Chemical Education
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vides this service and has undergone some significant changes that we know will make it more useful in locating and discovering Journal resources. One improvement is that there are more search fields in the Index. The JCE Index has always allowed searching of titles, authors, and keywords; searching within a particular year and issue or range of years and issues has been available for some time. Now with the new version of the JCE Index you can search additional fields: description and feature. Short descriptions of all JCE articles have been provided, most of them written by Kevin Cunningham, who has dedicated a significant measure of his time these last three years to reading JCE articles, applying keywords and writing short descriptions. Another significant improvement is in keyword searching. Keywords have now been grouped into the areas of domain, audience, pedagogy, and topic. The makes it much easier to find a JCE resource in the domain of laboratory instruction with an intended audience of high school that uses inquiry-based methods (pedagogy) on the topic of acids and bases. All keywords have been applied from a controlled vocabulary that was developed for the JCE Digital Library (1), a collection project of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) (2). We have learned a lot from participating in the NSDL project and you are benefiting from the knowledge we have obtained. Keywords from this same controlled vocabulary have been applied to each article dating back to 1965 in a uniform manner. Thanks go to Kevin Cunningham for accomplishing the bulk of the work, and also to Julie Cunningham and Mithra Beikmohamadi for their contributions to keyword assignment. Current and future articles are also catalogued using this same vocabulary. Definitions for each item in the vocabulary can be found by clicking the “List of keywords” link or the field labels on the JCE Index search page. The uniform application of keywords from a controlled vocabulary to each and every article in the JCE Index is our goal. We have made significant progress, but it is a large job. If you would like to volunteer in this effort and thereby provide a significant benefit to the community of chemical educators, let us hear from you (email
[email protected]). Accuracy—Please Report Mistakes In addition to more information to search for and the use of controlled vocabularies, we have put forth a lot of effort to increase the accuracy of the results. An audit of each JCE Index record dating back to 1965 has been done to make sure that it links to the proper resource. We are sure that mistakes remain, but the results are much improved over the previous version. I would like thank those of you who notified us when search results did not produce a correct link and of other errors in the JCE Index. Your willingness to take the time to do so results in a benefit to the entire community in providing a more accurate service. Please continue to point out errors in this new version as we seek to make it more efficient and accurate. At the same time, please make use of the table of contents feature described above to locate articles for which the JCE Index provides an inaccurate link. More times than not you can find the article in the table of contents using the information returned from the JCE Index search results.
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Figure 2. Search page for the new version of JCE Index.
Found! Non-Indexed Treasures Lastly, we have discovered a wealth of knowledge in the back issues of JCE, articles that were not indexed and did not appear in the tables of contents. We have added records for these “lost” resources to the JCE Index. Although many, but not all, of these resources are short (many of them are “fillers”) they contain much useful, and in some cases essential, information. Indeed, the number of records in the new JCE Index (~40,000 and growing) has increased by about 25% compared to the previous version (~30,000 records). As we continue to audit past issues of the Journal I am sure we will continue to find many more “lost” resources of interest. Back Issues Available to All Subscribers Though it has taken much time and effort and expense to undertake the project of making back issues available to JCE subscribers, we have done so with no added cost to you. All back issues are provided with your subscription. With each additional volume added to the back issue archive, your subscription becomes more valuable. We hope that you appreciate the efforts and that you continue to support JCE with your subscription. Literature Cited 1. JCE Digital Library, dlib.jce.divched.org (accessed Dec 2006) 2. National Science Digital Library is a project of the National Science Foundation, nsdl.org (accessed Dec 2006)
Vol. 84 No. 2 February 2007
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