The State University Libraries have negotiated two contracts for electronic access to two of our most important suppliers of information: Kluwer Academic Publishing and John Wiley & Sons. Each contract sets a cap on average price increases that is very reasonable (and below the general price increase for scholarly journals). Additionally, the group of eleven state institutions will share access to a 'dim' archive of each paper journal for a modest cost.

Over the past nine months the state libraries' electronic collections committee and the collection management committee have pursued discussions with these two publishers (and others). The end result is the decision (agreed to by our respective library directors) to switch from a paperbased journal subscription model to an electronic database of journals. Such a model improves access to materials at research centers. In addition to the costs savings derived from no longer having to pay an electronic fee that was supplemental to the journal's paper prices, there are also the savings from the processing of the physical paper journals, including binding and repair. More importantly, both contracts enable us to have access to a much larger shared collection of titles, and indeed the access extends to more than a third of each publisher's titles, for which no subscription existed in prior years within the group.

These decisions did not come to completion easily or quickly, but followed much discussion, both within our state institutions, as well as in discussions with consortia of libraries throughout the United States. It is becoming much more evident that within the fields of STM (science, technology, and medicine) the preferred, - and in some ways the only viable - path to intellectual access to information is through immediately available electronic access; moreover, it also appears that scholarly communication within the STM disciplines relies almost exclusively on periodicals and journals rather than monographs.

Both Kluwer and Wiley are major players in the STM market, and hence their publications lend themselves to this electronic approach to use. The library directors agreed to this approach for a one-year trial with the University of Florida agreeing to hold the 'dim' archive for Kluwer, and Florida State University for Wiley. The purpose of these 'dim' archives is to insure that the State University Libraries will be able to provide access to information that may not be available in, or that may be removed by the publisher from the electronic copy. In effect, we are hedging our bets for permanent access by maintaining a paper copy for the eleven state universities. Past performance by Kluwer (and to a greater degree, by Elsevier Science) points to the advisability of this arrangement, since both publishers have retrospectively deleted content from their electronic journals. This one-year trial period will enable us to determine both negative and positive aspects of the switch to electronic as well as the real expense for maintaining a shared 'dim' archive.