The history of scientific journals dates from 1665, when the French Journal des Sçavans and the English Transactions of the Royal Society, first began systematically published research results. The number of journals increased rapidly in the decades to follow and today millions of such journals in every thinkable subject field are being published.

Being the only veterinary science faculty in South Africa, our journal collection has always been unique and specialised. Most core journal resources to support the teaching, learning and research needs of the Faculty of Veterinary Science, are held by the library. Through interlibrary loans, we are also able to help the rest of the southern African region.

With the arrival of electronic journals in the late 1990’s, we were enthusiastic about adapting to this new environment. Our mission in 1999 was to convert 80% of our paper subscriptions to electronic journals in the following five years. Fortunately our users responded very positively to this movement from paper to electronic.

Tyds@Tuks, the electronic journal gateway of the University of Pretoria, was developed in 1998, under the leadership of Monica Hammes, to promote easy access to e-jounals. At that stage, we introduced the first e-journal platforms, namely ScienceDirect, Journals@Ovid, General Business File and Emerald as well as ABI and Infotract.

There were some irritations initially in using e-journals. A particular annoyance during the early years of Tyds@Tuks was passwords. Every title had its own password, and most titles were only accessible on campus. To some extent this barrier was solved by Internet Protocol (IP) control, however it was still limited to on-campus users only. Today users can access e-information through Innopac, by means of the rewrite proxy of Innopac and are only prompted once for a Username (surname), and Student/Personnel nr as well as a PIN. E-journals are now available at any time and place - much faster, simpler and more versatile. Users have now access to more than 32 900 electronic journal titles through Tyds@Tuks.

With new developments such as Web/Library 2.0 Tools, the use of journals has become more interactive. Features such as RSS and citation feeds, alerts, citation export, DOI-based document linking schemes, corresponding with authors, cited by options and federated searching are only some aspects of e-journals that facilitate research and learning in the new millennium.

When looking back at my ten years involvement with journals at the Veterinary Science Library, I can truly say that it was filled with excitement, new challenges and non-stop development. Even the way our subscriptions are managed has changed from little hand-written Cardex cards to sophisticated interactive systems.

Victor Hugo once said: An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. With all the movements towards an electronic environment for information sources, we were ready and no one was able to stop us - just think what the future is going to be…