The first phase of the project, completed in February 1994, is a freely accessible prototype consisting of current issues of Configurations, MLN (Modern Language Notes), and ELH (English Literary History). The fully formatted text of these journals is now available on the Internet via online access to the library's server (http://muse.mse.jhu.edu). Features include subject, title, and author indexes; instant hypertext links to tables of contents, endnotes and illustrations; Boolean searches of text and tables of contents; and voice and textual annotations. Several members of the scholarly community at Johns Hopkins have already used this resource, and one professor describes it as "an intelligent, incredibly easy system to use . . . an actual research tool."
The prototype is accessed through a networked hypermedia information retrieval system known as the World Wide Web (WWW). It can be viewed and searched using any of a number of freely available WWW readers, but runs optimally under the Mosaic reader developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Users of Mosaic can annotate text, record paths taken during online sessions, download text for printing, and create "hot lists" of frequently accessed documents. Mosaic readers are available for a variety of operating systems, including Unix, Mac, and Windows machines. Users of the prototype may send comments and suggestions with the online form provided in the prototype or via regular e-mail (ejournal@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu).
The short-range goals of Project Muse, which the prototype enables us to achieve, are the creation of an easy-to-use electronic-journal environment with searching and multimedia features that cannot be duplicated in print, and the collection of data on amounts and types of usage for an access and costing model. Long-range goals are to offer reasonably priced electronic journals to university libraries and to use online technology to make works of scholarship more widely available within individual university communities.
If funding for capital costs can be raised, the project team aims to mount about forty of the Press's journals in math, the humanities, and the social sciences. These issues will appear on a prepublication basis and will be available electronically a few weeks in advance of the printed version. Beyond developing a prototype, Project Muse has enabled the university press, the library, and the computing center to engage in a meaningful dialogue about the current state of the scholarly communication process. We believe that this dialogue will not only influence the final appearance, price, and distribution method of the Press's online journals, but the shape of scholarly publishing in the information age.