By James Speed Hensinger

BCR and OCLC have created a special offer to get libraries started on Electronic Collections Online, OCLC's web-based electronic journals service. The offer runs through January 15, 1999, and introduces OCLC's new practice of allowing libraries to subscribe to the journals through BCR, rather than having to go though the publisher or distributor.

Subscribe to available online journals during this period and your library will receive at least a 15 percent discount off your OCLC Access Account fee through Electronic Collections Online. This means you pay a maximum of $30 per journal for 12 months' access through the FirstSearch web interface. The fee may be even lower, depending on the total number of ECO journals subscribed to by BCR libraries by the January 15 deadline.

Through this special offer, your library can:

• Obtain full access to article citations for all online journals through Electronic Collections Online.

• Select from among 500 journals now available at no additional cost to libraries already subscribing to the print version. More than a dozen publishers are offering the online version of their respective journals to print subscribers in 1999 for no additional fee. Most include a 1998 backfile.

• Subscribe to and/or access collections from Johns Hopkins University Press Project Muse and/or Jossey-Bass Inc. Publishers. Subscribe to any of these collections in 1999, and you can purchase access through Electronic Collections Online. BCR hopes to include Academic Press IDEAL in this offer as well. Watch BCR's web page to keep informed.

• Receive up to two months' additional free access. Participating libraries will receive free access to the complete ECO collection (currently 1,000 journals) from December 1, 1998, to January 31, 1999.