upping access to online periodicals.

Today’s New York Times online has a piece on a strategy they themselves recently adopted, and one that in tandem with the open publishing movement portends significant change for library e-subscription policy (and hopefully expenditures). Publications such as Sports Illustrated and Newsweek are making their back and historic issues available online, thus increasing their findability in search results, offering value in unique content, and apparently increasing site traffic by huge margins – “for magazines and newspapers with long histories, especially, old material can be reborn on the Web as an inexpensive way to attract readers, advertisers and money.” I’m betting this trend continues to spread, hopefully to the extent that it helps simplify the tangled web of print v. microform v. online access that we all currently contend with. I hope also that the digitization efforts of these publications go beyond simple web transcription to include scanned page images, which in my mind greatly increases the information value of such a move.