In the membership-renewal information you recently received, you will find an announcement of the new “Lasers and Electro-Optics Society Digital Library” on page three and again under the LEOS entry. Whereas members have had free access to JQE, PTL, JSTQE, and JLT volumes from 1988 forward via IEEE Xplore™, the “backfiles” from the LEOS Digital Archives for earlier issues of JQE (1965 - ) and JLT (1983 - ) are being added to Xplore. Over 40 conference proceedings will also be included in this new Digital Library, which remains free to members.

How does the new Digital Library differ from the existing Digital Archives? The two most-noticeable differences are the user interface and the new conference content.

First, the Digital Archives reside on the LEOS server at www.i-LEOS.org and use a highly intuitive GUI. The Digital Library is available at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/, although there are several quick links to Xplore on the LEOS portal.

Second, although the conference proceedings were already part of the IEL (IEEE/IEE Electronic Library), they were not available to individual users unless your company or university subscribed to the IEL and delivered it over their LAN. We have changed those access arrangements for members to get LEOS-only (vs. LEOS-cosponsored) conferences, and we are examining possibly adding proceedings from LEOS-cosponsored conferences in the future. None of this content is in the Digital Archives.

There are less-obvious differences you will notice as you use each service. For instance, there are no Rapid Postings of accepted papers in the Digital Archives, and the Digital Archives may run an issue or two behind Xplore. Also, reference links, bibliographic links, and searches in Xplore are more extensive because they span all the IEL content, including journals, magazines, and IEEE and IEE conferences. Equivalent features in the Digital Archives span only LEOS journal publications. These and other comparisons are summarized in the table above.

The other important change is “unbundling” of the annual LEOS CD-ROM Journal Collection. From 1995 until 2000, it was offered to members for $25.00. In 2000 it was provided free to members. Now IEEE is closely examining the cost components of membership, and encouraging the Societies to structure their dues to cover the variable costs. In June, the Societies endorsed this concept. The choices are either to raise dues or unbundle “free extras.” Therefore, a decision was made to keep our dues at their current values and allow members to continue receiving the CD-ROM as an optional $5.00 add-on. When priced at $25.00, fewer than 5% of LEOS members selected the option. This suggests that many of the free CD-ROMs are not used, which effectively raises the expense for providing them to those who do. By unbundling the CD-ROM, we expect the production run, and associated expense, to fall, allowing the funds to be applied for other benefits more ubiquitously valued such as the Digital Library. We will examine the financial results of this decision.