A major on-line file of chemical journal literature complete with
graphics is being developed to test the usability of fully electronic
access to documents, as a joint project of Cornell University, the
American Chemical Society, the Chemical Abstracts Service, OCLC, and
Bellcore (with additional support from Sun Microsystems, Springer-Verlag,
DigitaI Equipment Corporation, Sony Corporation of America, and Apple
Computers). Our file contains the American Chemical Society's on-line
journals, supplemented with the graphics from the paper publication. The
indexing of the articles from Chemical Abstracts Documents is available
in both image and text format, and several different interfaces can be
used. Our goals are (1) to assess the effectiveness and acceptability of
electronic access to primary journals as compared with paper, and (2) to
identify the most desirable functions of the user interface to an
electronic system of journals, including in particular a comparison of
page-image display with ASCII display interfaces. Early experiments with
chemistry students on a variety of tasks suggest that searching tasks are
completed much faster with any electronic system than with paper, but
that for reading all versions of the articles are roughly equivalent.