TULIP at the University Of California, Part I: The Berkeley experience and a view beyond

Abstract

The TULIP (The University Licensing Program) project was the first attempt on the University of California, Berkeley campus to provide journal page images directly to faculty and graduate student desktops. An electronic journal project can be viewed as the confluence of three factors: the technical implementation, the user group and the environment in which that user group functions, and the material itself. In the preceeding article, Mark Needleman addressed the technical specifics of the University of California (UC) implementation, which is common to all nine UC campuses. At Berkeley, we provided accessible workstations in the Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics Libraries for the use of faculty, students, or staff who might not have the required equipment or software in their laboratories or offices, as well as for demonstration and instruction purposes. However, all along we knew that the fate of any electronic journal project in the sciences would rest upon our ability to deliver the material successfully in the user's environment; in an academic setting, this necessarily means in a multitude of user environment types.