SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) continues to expand its activities in accordance with its mission to promote greater competition in the scholarly publishing arena. Recently, SPARC announced a new public-private initiative with the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium, the University of Kansas and the Allen Press to develop an electronic source named BioOne.
BioOne will begin as an electronic aggregation of the full texts of dozens of research journals in the biological, ecological and environmental sciences. It will provide an Internet access and delivery system, based on an archival SGML database, to a broad selection of the journals and bulletins of the 55 member societies which constitute the AIBS. Back issues will be included and additional publishers/journals may be added over time. Should the effort succeed, BioOne may ultimately include over 200 bioscience titles from both AIBS and other publishers. In essence, the coalition approach enables smaller, underfunded bioscience societies to move strongly into electronic dissemination of research, thereby reaching a broader audience and expanding service to their constituencies. BioOne is scheduled for beta release in early 2001 and full availability soon thereafter. Financing will come from the societies, the 166 member libraries of the SPARC coalition, and other sources.
In other SPARC news, the American Chemical Society has launched its new title Organic Letters, covering peer-reviewed research in organic chemistry. The ACS is the first major publisher to agree to work with research libraries to offer new journals at lower prices to compete with costly competitors. A major innovation is that this journal offers a completely online system of manuscript submission, peer-review, editing and publishing. Articles in the Web edition of Organic Letters will be published sequentially within 48 hours of peer-review under the ACS's innovative ASAP (As Soon As Publishable) system. This system should make the publication the fastest of the "letters" journals.

In May of this year Jim Cusick, Florida History curator, and Bruce Chappell, archivist, both with the Department of Special Collections, spent a week in Havana, Cuba, representing the George A. Smathers Libraries. Their primary objective was to reestablish relations with the Archivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC) and open negotiations for a joint microfilming/digitization project for four centuries of Havana notary records held by the ANC and collectively known as the Protocolos Habaneros. This little-known collection of over six million pages is of hemispheric significance and in danger of loss due to deterioration.
Secondary objectives included reestablishing collegial and professional relations between the Smathers Libraries and the University of Florida and the Cuban Academy of Sciences, the Museo de la Ciudad de la Habana and individual scholars.
Within the framework of these objectives the mission was an unqualified success. Chappell and Cusick left Cuba with a sense that the Libraries and the University of Florida now enjoy a favored position in Havana and that prospects for future cooperation, particularly for the proposed joint project, bode well.