D-Lib Magazine, December 1995

Project Briefings and Updates

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Project Muse

43 humanities and social sciences journals to come on the network

Project Muse is a collaborative project at Johns Hopkins University among the JHU Press, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, and Homewood Academic Computing with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://muse.jhu.edu/index.html). Beginning in 1995 and for the next three years, Project Muse is digitizing and making available by electronic subscription to participating institutions current issues of all 43 scholarly journals of the JHU Press at the rate of 11-15 journals each year. Nine of them are already on-line, and a sample of a tenth is also available.

These highly-regarded journals are primarily in the humanities and social sciences. Print versions of the journals will continue to be made available, however, the project emphasizes functionalities of the electronic environment (e.g., hypertext links between tables of contents, endnotes, and illustrations; Boolean searches of full text or tables of contents, expanded illustrations that may in color and/or larger than the print version, and the user-defined option to create "hot lists" of frequently used files).

The project has implications for at least three major areas of research interest: digitization and formatting of material for display and downloading to users; site licensing and cost recovery, and intellectual property. Demonstrations of digitized journals are available for browsers but full use of the system is presently restricted to the participating libraries and institutions.