TYDS@TUKS: a step towards JOUR@ZA?

Abstract

In 1998 the University of Pretoria subscribed to Science Direct after a year of experimenting with online journals and becoming aware of its potential impact on scholarly communication. It led to an ambitious project for grand scale migration to e-journals and creating a gateway for access to all available e-journals, rights management and user support with all the accompanying financial, IT, HR and marketing aspects. It operated under the brand TYDS@TUKS which can be translated as “Journals@University of Pretoria”. The Library Service (then known as the Academic Information Service) played a pioneering role by being one of the first institutions outside of the Netherlands and the US to take this plunge, definitely the first in Africa. Another first was the unbundling of journals from the general full text databases for inclusion in title lists. The presentation reported on the first year’s success. The original presentation was not done with Powerpoint but was in the form of a self-contained web site. More about this in the History of the TYDS@TUKS project.