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The Scholarly Societies Project on the World Wide Web, maintained by the
University of Waterloo Library, provides a gateway to more than 700
scholarly societies worldwide including the Royal Society of London, the
American Philological Association, the Society of Women Engineers, and
the International Astronomical Union. Society links are organized
alphabetically by society name and by broad subject area. In addition to
linking to individual society pages, the site also includes links to
other sites which organize access to scholarly societies such as the
World Wide Web meta-list of Medieval Studies Organizations, Societies,
and Centers maintained by Georgetown University. The society pages
themselves offer a wealth of information, ranging from society news and
publications to calendars of upcoming conferences and job listings. Providing access to scholarly societies on the Internet is only one of the goals of the project. Another goal is to encourage scholarly societies to not only set up Internet sites, but to experiment with using them as a means of publishing their newsletters and journals. The site maintains an archive of scholarly serial publications available online. For each society publication, an annotation indicates whether the full text, table of contents, and/or abstract are available and whether access to the publication is free or for a fee. The site also includes a series of essays on the history of the scholarly society and the evolution of the scholarly journal. The essay notes that "in spite of the proliferation of non-societal journals in the last two centuries, scholarly societies continue to play an important role in encouraging research and publishing the results of it." The escalating subscription costs of many research journals, particularly those published by certain commercial publishers, is documented in another essay, "The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing." A concluding editorial discusses the impact this has had on journal collections in academic libraries and calls on scholarly societies to help influence the future of scholarly publishing. The Scholarly Societies Project is located at http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/s ociety/ on the World Wide Web. For assistance with connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the Computing Center's Help Desk at 645-3542. -Loss Pequeno Glazier and Nancy Schiller, University Libraries
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