If you follow the pattern of most subscribers, your subscription is for one year, expiring at the end of the calendar year. This means that by the time this issue arrives you should have received at least one renewal notice. There is happy news for individual subscribers-no increase in prices!

Some readers have asked for guidance with the options that are now available. Our recommendation is, "Get all 3: print, JCE Online+, and the annual CD." A one-year print subscription provides 12 issues of the traditional print Journal by mail. A JCE Online+ subscription gives you a year of access to everything that is in the print issue plus considerably more, via the WWW and as soon as the issue is released; the amount of material that is available only on the WWW is increasing. The annual CD comes at the end of the year. It is a CD-ROM for both Mac OS and Windows that gives you instant access to everything in the current and several previous volumes of the Journal. (JCE CD 1998 will contain issues from 1998, 1997, and September-December 1996.) While not everyone will choose to "get all 3", this is the way to get quick and convenient access to the whole Journal.

There are changes in subscription options, too. Notice that it is now possible for libraries to subscribe to JCE Online+. Individuals, if they choose, may now subscribe to the online version only, getting full access during the year of their subscription.

Save Your Carrier Sheet

The sheet containing your address label that comes with your Journal issue has valuable information-keep it! The first (5-digit) number on the second line of the address label is your subscriber number. It is important because:

• If you subscribe to JCE Online+, this 5-digit number is your password to complete online access via JCE Online+.
• If you subscribe to print only, this number is your password to limited online access (supplementary materials.
• All subscribers should use this number when corresponding with us about any subscription.

The date, also on the second line of the label, tells you when your subscription expires. Your name should be entered exactly as it appears on the third line (copy the punctuation used on the label) for JCE Online+ access.

Fast Access for non-U.S. Subscribers

If you are a subscriber from outside the U.S., you may be frustrated by the slowness of international mail delivery. To eliminate the waiting, we recommend adding to (or upgrading) your subscription to include JCE Online+. Since each Journal issue goes online at the same time it is mailed, non-U.S. subscribers can get access to the most recent issue in the middle of the month prior to the issue date (the December issue will go online in mid-November). This usually saves at least several weeks of waiting.

Coming in the January Issue

The schedule for publishing the Equipment Buyers Guide has been changed. It will appear with the January 1999 issue, not with this one, so that it can include as wide as possible a range of equipment and supplies. Expect it as part of the January issue, scheduled to be mailed in mid-December.

The Equipment Buyers Guide will be a comprehensive source of information about laboratory equipment and supplies, organized by item type and by the name of the supplier, with appropriate cross -referencing. We hope you find the Equipment Buyers Guide as useful as the Book Buyers Guide. And as is the case with the Book Buyers Guide, it will be online as well as in print.

Looking for Journal History?

It seems fitting to wind up this year of celebrations with information about our history. A collection of articles titled "Journal History: A Synopsis of Our Past" can be found on pages 1542 through 1550. On these pages you can read first-hand accounts written by three former editors-Bill Kieffer, Tom Lippincott, and Joe Lagowski. Jerry Bell gives some insights into the choices and challenges that the Board of Publication faces as a body. Emory Howell describes interactions of the Journal with the high school community and Tamar (Uni) Susskind describes interactions with two-year colleges.

If you want to dig deeper, there is a reading list at the end of this section (p 1550). The information in it has been accumulated by the staff in the course of carrying out the 75th year celebrations. Because many of you have expressed an interest in Journal history and there exists no single source of information, we have compiled it and included it here. To be sure, there exist valuable pieces of history-Neil Gordon wrote an admirable retrospect in 1943, Otto Reinmuth provided some valuable insights in 1933, several historical reflections were included in the special Journal issues marking Volume 50. But the history remains to be written. Until then, here are leads to some fascinating reading.

If there is a problem with this reading list, it is that some readers will not have access to articles written in the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps even the 1960s. If so, contact the Journal, preferably by sending an email message to jce@chem.wisc.edu with Journal History in the subject line. You can arrange to get copies of articles as inexpensively as we can provide them.