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Northern Light: The Future of Finding Journal Articles?

By Richard Wiggins

hen John Landau first saw a young Bruce Springsteen perform in 1975, he wrote that he'd seen the "future of rock and roll" that night. That phrase became famous, even infamous, in the annals of rock writing. Since 1992, when I first started paying attention to the Internet, several developments have called that phrase to mind, such as:

• In early 1993, I saw Adobe's Acrobat product, then code-named Carousel. This promised to take us out of the world of boring flat ASCII and into Internet delivery of rich formatted text and graphics

• In March of 1993, I was lucky enough to see a demonstration of Mosaic by Rob Raisch (then of O'Reilly and Associates) and the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee. NCSA Mosaic was but a month old. My guess was the Web would take over the world within 5 or 10 years. My prediction was pessimistic by several years.

Recently, I've had another "future of rock and roll" experience. I believe I've seen the future of searchable full text periodicals, and the future is named Northern Light.

How Do You Search High-Quality Databases Online?

A number of companies sell online databases that consist of the full text of journal articles, made available online and in a searchable fashion. As of a few years ago, many of these solutions were packaged as collections to be mounted on the customer's premises, for instance using CD-ROM jukeboxes. Customers included universities and big corporations with research divisions. Vendors of these solutions included University Microfilms (UMI), SilverPlatter, and others.

A different group of information vendors sold online access to newspaper and journal archives, typically over dialup connections. An example is Lexis-Nexis, known for its legal and newspaper archives online. Customers include law firms, journalism schools, and newspapers. Lexis-Nexis isn't geared towards a mass audience, however -- it is marketed primarily to small groups of subscribers within an organization. Services like Lexis-Nexis can be invaluable; an online search is the only efficient way to search for a set of legal precedents or newspaper articles on a particular subject. Consequently, Lexis-Nexis commands high fees for carrying on searches.

Both camps have moved towards the Web. For instance, UMI sells a collection of the best business journals as a searchable full text archive under the trade name ABI Inform. In the past, a business school might install a CD-ROM jukebox with ABI Inform loaded locally. Now, that school might subscribe to the same collection of journals with access over the Web. No longer does the school need to install hardware on site, nor do they have to worry about periodic updates. In order to make the whole archive available to its students and faculty, the business school orders an annual subscription, and a simple Web-based authentication procedure makes sure only licensed users get in.

Similarly, dial-up information vendors such as Lexis-Nexis and Dialog are providing access over the Internet, and are rushing to provide highly functional Web-based gateways to their many gigabytes of searchable content.