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ScienceDirect turns 10 in 2009
Lindi Belfield
It's hard to believe 10 years have passed since ScienceDirect, then the new baby on the block, was launched. Access to the world's literature via the World Wide Web has revolutionized the work of researchers.
For those of us who worked on ScienceDirect way back in the mid '90s and the commercial launch in 1999, it was a very exciting time. There were no blueprints on how to build such a database, and no benchmarks to tell us what to expect from users, so the adrenaline ran high as we watched the usage go through the roof, breaking our expectations every few months.
Today we celebrate the 2 billionth downloaded article, which translates to a staggering 925 articles every minute, somewhere in the world! Ten years ago we calculated that the average CPA (cost per article used) was approximately US $16. Today, because ScienceDirect is accessible anytime, anyplace, anywhere, the average CPA is down to $2.40. That's good news for librarians, as it represents increased use of scholarly resources they make available to users.
Facing backfile challenges
During ScienceDirect's history, one of the most daunting projects undertaken has been the backfile program which has digitized the majority of Elsevier-owned journal content prior to 1995. Just to give you an idea of the content involved, the Lancet goes back to 1823 and has published nearly half a million articles.
The project has taken 6 years so far, and now ScienceDirect offers more than 4 million backfile articles. Just trying to find the source material has proven a Herculean task: Basements have been raided, editorial offices plundered and chief editors sent begging letters for that elusive missing volume 1, issue 1. The first shipment to the digitizing agency filled four sea containers and two air cargo containers, and that was just the start. Six years on and we are still looking for some missing issues (0.2% or about 500 issues); we are working with international libraries and universities, and we won't give up! Of course, once we find missing back issues, sometimes they have to be treated before they can be digitized. See the above images of pages from the Lancet.
Sizing up ScienceDirect today
Numbers play a big role in ScienceDirect, but can lose their meaning with all those increasing zeros. So what might today's 9 million articles in ScienceDirect actually look like? Well, if you were to build a tower of all the article pages, it would be 45 times as tall as Elsevier's Radarweg building in Amsterdam.
If stacked up, the 9 million articles in ScienceDirect today would be
more
than 4 kilometers tall, or 45 times the height of Elsevier's
Radarweg building
in Amsterdam.
Ten years ago we launched a website that resembled something very similar to a library with a catalog system, and a lot of our effort was educated guesswork. Since then much has changed. Today we work closely with users and have built up a development partner programspanningmore than 30 institutes and corporations around the world who regularly help us develop new concepts and test our solutions so that they reflect the needs of our users.
ScienceDirect itself has changed and evolved tremendously over the last 10 years, not just with new features, but also with functionalities that match the changing behavior of our users. For example, 10 years ago we had to indicate that if you clicked on a particular button something would change — the type of online action we take for granted today. Most important over recent years has been adding more value to articles than is possible in the print world, e.g., presenting additional files related to an article such as video, audio or background data.
Looking into the future
Currently we are looking to partner with companies specializing
in semantic search technologies and visualization techniques to
enhance the intrinsic value of our content. So what will
ScienceDirect look like 10 years from now? According to Elsevier
Vice President, Product Management, ScienceDirect Rafael Sidi:
"One thing is for sure: It will be different. Technological change
is opening up new opportunities and innovative ways of working
with researchers and research workflows. It's an incredibly
exciting time to be working in this industry, helping to shape
and build the solutions of the future." 
l.belfield@elsevier.com
http://info.sciencedirect.com
