In recent years, the diminishing library material budget has forced us to cancel journal subscriptions. It has become frustrating trying to help our patrons with what we have. Once in a meeting, we were complaining how insufficient our collection budget was. A library administrator from a large research library looked troubled while listening to us. She said,

"this budget problem is very much universal. There is not much we can do about it. Let's look at it from a different angle. Think about this: we as library administrators and many others have been putting money into electronic resources. I consider that as a contribution to your collection budget. By now, I would think all these electronic resources should have eased some of your burden in terms of collection development."

I picked the World Wide Web for my research, because the Web has the most complete function in displaying and retrieving CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) journals. Besides, it usually does not cost anything searching the web. I focused my investigation mostly on Chinese electronic journals because they are most available. I made some notes as I came across Japanese journals. Because of my very limited language skill in Korean language, I had to give up compiling any information after a few tries.

There are several types of electronic journals or article databases on the web. I have divided them into three categories:

1. Full-Text Journals & Newspapers (Non-Searchable)

Examples include Jiushi Niandai, Huaxia Wenzai, Dangdai Zhongguo Yanjiu, Renmin Ribao, Zhongguo Shibao, Mingbao, Xingdao Ribao, Asahi Shinbun, Yomiuri Shinbun, etc.

Although journals in this category have full text, some of them are somewhat different from their printed counterpart, usually not as complete. They meet users' general information needs. For scholarly research unless one knows exactly when the information being sought after was released, the only way to find it is to go through each issue one by one. For instance, the death of Deng Xiaoping -- if you want to know how newspapers or magazines with different political stances cover this event, this would be a great resource. However, if you like to do a research on the topic: "Women's status in the history of China or Japan", you would be much better off to go for a database which you can systematically search by subject or key words or title words.

My favorite site for Chinese journals in this category is "Worldwide List of Chinese Publications (http://www.wt.net/~alex/html/mediatxg.htm)", which lists about 190 Chinese journals and newspapers published around the world, including from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, U.S., Sweden, Germany, U.K. Netherlands, and Canada. For Japanese journals, Duke University has a very good collection on their East Asian Collection Web site (http://www.lib.duke.edu/ias/eac/mag.html).

2. Table of Contents

University of Minnesota has been very famous for establishing a "Table of Content" database for Chinese and Japanese scholarly journals. Yuan Zhou, creator of the database, points out that he is providing a current awareness service and the intent is to reach out to students and scholars who may otherwise have no access to these journals. And it has served well that purpose. For instance, if you have faculty doing research on Japanese language while your library cannot afford or does not want to buy Bungaku Gogaku, you may refer them to this site to check the "Table of Content" regularly. If they find anything useful for their research, you can get the article through ILL (Inter-Library Loan).

University of Minnesota (http://ealib.lib.umn.edu) has 65 Chinese and 23 Japanese scholarly journals and kept the "Table of Content" database up to date. University of Michigan and the Australia National University (http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/AJC/CHIN/titles.html) have also scanned or input some journals' table of content into their individual web sites.

3. Article Databases (Searchable + Document Delivery)

I have found at least four sites under this category:

• CARL has included some CJK journals in its Uncover Database (http://uncweb.carl.org:80/cgi-bin/unCover) since 1990. However, all of these periodicals have table of contents pages in English. They enter the English language toc (Table of Contents) and include the note "Text in Japanese" or "Text in Chinese" to each article. This informs the customer when they are ordering the article of the language difference. According to Teresa Mullins, Uncover's Database Development Coordinator, there are almost 1,000 CJK journals in the database. Unfortunately, document delivery is not available for many of these titles, either because the publishers have forbidden it, or have not responded to their requests.

• Index to Chinese Periodical Literature by National Library in Taiwan (http://140.96.83.16/cgi/m_ncl3) indexed over 2,000 scholarly journals and provides document delivery. I have tried searching the database at least twenty times and the result is always "no matching records", or "Server Error". According to the information on its Web, the National Library will deliver articles either online or through fax after the user fills out its document delivery application, and if the Library holds the journal.

• Australian National University Chinese Serials database (http://coombs.anu.edu.au/SpecialProj/AJC/CHIN/titles.html) indexes 109 scholarly journals mostly in the business and economic fields. This database works very well if you go to individual journal and browse its table of contents. It is supposedly a searchable database. But lately, its search engine was removed due to some programming error. ANU Library does not have direct document delivery service but does supply information on document delivery service provided by the National Library of China in Beijing.

• The most successful searches I have conducted so far is in the Dangdai Wenxue Shiliao (Contemporary Chinese Literature) database (http://192.83.186.7/cgi/m_comment) created by the National Library in Taiwan. This database includes both journals and newspapers. The search is fast and the result precise, although not error-free. The subject coverage is limited to contemporary Chinese literature. There is no mentioning of document delivery service.

If we expect that the electronic resources can fulfill what our collection budget fails to -- in the area of CJK journals access, my findings suggest we need to wait a little longer and work harder. For leisure reading or acquiring daily news items, electronic journals on the Web have generally met our needs. For research and scholarly purpose, we have achieved a certain degree of resource sharing. However, we are still unable to do research with the CJK article databases on the Web as we can with the English article databases, that is, to be able to search by subject, key words, author, or title in a wide range of subjects.