MIT Libraries Expands Historic Access
to Electronic Journals

Anna Gold

In a November 2005 Library Services survey of faculty and students, one of the top requests for future enhancements was to “expand the historic depth of our online collection by providing more electronic access to older journals.”

While most currentresearch journals have been available electronically since the 1990s, many older journals only recently have become available for purchase. Electronic access to earlier issues (“back files”) offers many advantages to researchers, allowing them to seamlessly link to and read journal citations going back many decades, without leaving their offices or labs.

To bring these benefits to MIT, the MIT Libraries recently acquired numerous significant journal back files in fields of interest across the campus. Among the most widely recognized titles acquired were Cell (1974 - ), Nature (1960- ), Tetrahedron and Tetrahedron Letters (1957- ), Angewandte Chemie (1962- ), Physics Letters B (1967- ) and Journal of Fluid Mechanics (1956- ).

To learn more and see a listing of recently purchased collections and titles, including important collections in the life sciences, neuroscience, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, economics, physics, art and architecture, as well as major national newspapers back to the nineteenth century, see: libraries.mit.edu/backfiles.

MIT Libraries provides electronic access to over 34,000 current and historical journals. Many are available to on-campus users by going directly to a journal’s Website - on-campus users are automatically recognized as being from MIT and granted access. Off-campus users with certificates can gain access through Vera (Virtual Electronic Resource Access) at libraries.mit.edu/vera, or by adding the Libraries proxy string to the publisher’s URL. (See: libraries.mit.edu/about/faqs/remote-proxystring.html for instructions.) The Libraries plan to purchase more electronic back files as demand for these resources grows and as funds become available.

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