From your 1996-97 OCLC Users' Council Delegates:
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Nita Dean +1-614-761-5002
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FAXON TO SUPPORT OCLC FIRSTSEARCH ELECTRONIC COLLECTIONS ONLINE

DUBLIN, Ohio, Feb. 14, 1997--The Faxon Company has signed a cooperative
agreement with OCLC to offer subscriptions to electronic journals available
via the new OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online service.

"We are pleased to have the opportunity to provide this critical service to
our clients," said Roy Reinalda, executive vice president, Sales and
Marketing, The Faxon Company.  "It is a natural extension of our core
business, which is to provide the marketplace with access to information
while handling financial transactions and offering the value-added service
of acting as intermediary between the client and publisher."

"One of OCLC*s goals in developing Electronic Collections Online was to
minimize disruption to the subscription management procedures that libraries
already have in place for the print versions of their journals," said Rick
Noble, OCLC vice president, Marketing and Reference Services.  "We feel that
by working directly with Faxon, OCLC can help libraries continue to enjoy
the benefits of their existing relationships."

Electronic Collections Online is designed to provide libraries with a
cost-effective solution for accessing, storing and managing electronic
journals.  The service includes print-quality article representation,
archiving, complete and timely coverage of journal content, usage
statistics, technology migration, and technical and product support.

Under the agreement, a library will be able to subscribe through Faxon to a
journal, or group of journals, available via Electronic Collections Online,
just as it would a print journal.  Faxon will then relay account information
to OCLC, and OCLC will provide the library with access to the journal via
Electronic Collections Online.  Through a single Web interface, the library
will have access to full text from the journals it subscribes to, as well as
citations from all journals available through the service.

The cooperation of OCLC and Faxon will provide libraries with centralized
purchasing for electronic journal subscriptions and integrated purchasing
procedures and collection management for electronic and paper journals.
 Other benefits include access through a service that maintains the best
qualities of print journals--archives, browsing capability, high-quality
page representation, cover-to-cover content and locally defined
collections--in an electronic form with powerful searching capabilities and
access to hundreds of titles.

OCLC FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online enables libraries to
subscribe to large collections of academic journals, from many publishers
and disciplines, and access them remotely through a single Web interface
that supports cross-journal searching and extensive browsing.  Libraries can
subscribe to the journals through the individual publishers or through
participating subscription agents.

OCLC will launch Electronic Collections Online in the second quarter of
1997.  At launch, OCLC expects 300-500 journals to be available.  Electronic
Collections Online is designed to accommodate access and storage of
thousands of titles.  In future releases, OCLC plans to fully integrate
Electronic Collections Online with the OCLC FirstSearch service and its
other pilot projects in electronic archiving.

With offices in Westwood, Massachusetts, and Oregon, Illinois, The Faxon
Company provides a wide range of subscription management services to
libraries and information centers in academic, medical, business, public and
government communities.  A subsidiary of Dawson Holdings PLC*a publicly
traded, worldwide supplier of information services since 1809*Faxon
maintains a database of more than 150,000 titles [http://www.faxon.com/].

OCLC Online Computer Library Center is a nonprofit computer library service
and research organization whose computer network and services link more than
23,000 libraries in 63 countries and territories
[http://www.oclc.org/].                      (GP)
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