Web Journals

In 1945, Vannevar Bush published his famous article "As We May Think", where he discussed the vast amounts of publications researchers face. Bush suggested a mechanic microfilm machine, the memex, where the user could could copy documents, link the together with what we now know as hyperlinks, and annotate directly onto the documents with a special pen.

In the 1960ies, Bush's article appears to have been an inspiration both for Ted Nelson's hypertext experiments and for the development of bibliographic databases and information retrieval as a field (Hyperland; Tenopir and King, 61-62). Experiments with electronic databases and journals have continued through different generations of computer systems. Around the last turn of the century, the World Wide Web emerged as the most common online system for research publication.

Carol Tenopir and Donald King provide a detailed overview of these experiments. For the sake of overview, we may group them into five kinds.

• online distribution
• databases of articles
• multimedia
• hyperlinked artikles
• online discussion

Most of these are inventions to allow faster access, and modern versions of all of them are found on the Web today. We will look into these in more detail in the two next chapters.