| Keywords | Abstract | |
|---|---|---|
| "A Critical and Skeptical Overview of Electronic Publishing and Librarianship: Notes from the United States." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Electronic publishing presents the most fundamental challenges to the practice and the values of librarianship. If there is to be a meaningful partnership between electronic publishers and libraries in future, then librarians as professionals need to critically review our previous experiences with electronic resources. Such assessments however, have been in short supply because of the enormous hype of the 'Information Age' and pressure to bring libraries into this new era.The United States is perhaps the best case study to highlight and review the issues raised by electronic publishing and libraries. It is the country which has invested both broadly and deeply in electronic resources in libraries. Research libraries in the United States are advancing the research on and projects of electronic publishing and document delivery, and smaller libraries are counting on these systems to expand access after years of constrained budgets. The United States is also the country which has promoted - through both the public and private sectors - the idea and image of an information revolution. In short, libraries and electronic publishing in the United States are seen to have the same future. In this environment, problematic issues concerning electronic resources on libraries are generally not raised or actively discussed by library professionals. Only in the last few years have a small minority of scholars and librarians begun to actively raise practical and theoretical questions concerning electronic resources in libraries. A critical review of those issues concerning the nascent electronically-published products (e.g. e-journals, CD-ROMs, remote databases) currently in United States libraries includes:1. Preservation. Libraries traditionally collect and preserve the scholarly and documentary record of publishing. Electronically-published materials required a new approach to document security since digitally-edited records are much more difficult to trace in their changes (unlike print). Further, individual libraries which purchase 'copies' of electronically published works will be required to convert those documents to new systems, or maintain old hardware to provide access to them.2. Economic issues. Budgets are not swelling, yet information outlets (and the demand for those products) are. Price and fee structures of electronically-published works are different for libraries. The end result of different collecting patterns and the imposition of fees have broad consequences for equity of access and the skewing of content in libraries.3. Print resources. Electronically-published texts are intellectually different than printed sources, and those differences will critically affect how patrons approach information, how libraries organize it, and how it is packaged and promoted. The paper concludes with recommendations for librarianship in approaching forthcoming initiatives in electronic publishing. | |
| A Critical and Skeptical Overview of Electronic Publishing and Librarianship:Notes from the United States In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | A strong case can be made that electronically published products pose a strong challenge to the practices and values of librarianship, and the United States is perhaps the best place to review and establish this. As I have written elsewhere, the pattern of shifting toward electronically published resources "is the one touted by the vast majority of our library leadership as the essential model if our institutions are to survive" and librarians are under considerable pressure to develop skills to accomodate them.' The challenges posed by these new resources are not "the traditionalbarriers with which we have grappled, such as single usage of a single printed copy or the preservation problems of the codex. Rather, the essence of the shift in our profession is in redefining [it.]"2 This process of redefinition - driven in large part by electronically published resources - is not without serious problems, especially considered in light of the basic mission of libraries. In order to demonstrate this, this paper will proceed from a brief overview of the current technological status of the United States to an assessment of the environment and level of technological development in U.S. libraries. This will establish the basis of the argument that the United States and its libraries are a good case study. The paper will then move on to review three important areas where electronically published resources in American libraries pose a direct challenge to some of the basic ideas and values upon which modern librarianship is based. Thoseareas are preservation, the new economics of information purchasing, and intellectual differences between print and electronic resources. The paper will conclude with a summary analysis of these trends in American libraries. | |
| "A Resource that Contains a Journal: The First Two Years of the Journal of Humanitarian Assistance." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Even as the number of electronic journals continues to grow, the Journal of Humanitarian Assistance remains an unusual venture and the experience of its editors is instructive for those wishing to combine academic, practitioner and electronic publishing resources for purposes which extend beyond the traditional reach of any on their own. The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance was created from an awareness that although a good deal of work of every sort is produced on the subject, little of it travels beyond national, organisational and professional boundaries. Work that is truly international and multi-disciplinary is hampered, and important lessons not conveyed because there is no single source - timely, and open to the full range of subjects and issues - for the many disparate actors. The journal is an entirely free, open-access resource that contains an academic journal, but which also carries a range of materials which, by dint of timeliness or length would not be suitable for the print medium.This paper describes the inception and growth of the journal and discusses the range of issues encountered; continuous versus periodic publishing; copyright issues; ensuring coherence and timeliness without any full-time staff and no budget; retaining format flexibility and attracting a readership and contributors. The technical issues faced by the authors will also be discussed; seeking out professional expertise; HTML formatting; adapting document size to suit the downloading capacities of readers; and making the transition from an adapted to a dedicated server. The authors will argue that far from being a niche enterprise, electronic publishing which brings together policy makers, analysts, activists, academics and others holds much promise as a model for combining strengths, broadening communities and communicating more quickly and effectively across common divides. | |
| A Semantic Model for Information Retrieval in Documents: an experiment with patient medical records. In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Patient medical records contain a great number of information distributed in different kinds of documents: diagnosis, prescription, symptoms observations or radiology analysis, etc. Documents heterogeneity makes specific information retrieval difficult to the medical staff members. This paper shows how a semantic model of documents enables handling information stored in these documents. It enables the definition of a generic semantic structure of a medical record: this structure expresses the implicit content of the each document's element by specifyingwhat kind of information is required. Moreover, it enables to display relevant information depending on the reader. | |
| "An Electronic course in macroeconomic: a prototype text and course." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | This paper explores the problems and potentials of teaching a college-level economics course by computer using an electronic text supplemented with an electronic lab. The course is currently under development at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. The current prototype course uses a paper text with a computer simulation model of the U.S. and world economies and a self-correcting laboratory with individually developed lessons. Each lesson has an infinite number of self-generated quizzes each with ten questions. Eventually, the course will have an electronic text coupled with a video lecture series. The paper will explore briefly the potential cost savings to the institution of this mechanism for learning and teaching. | |
| "An intelligent arbitrator associate for electronic commerce." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Growing businesses and the large number of transactions involved in conducting a business tend to give rise to conflicts among the parties involved in a transaction. Human society has evolved in a way to cope with these disputes by creating law and order bodies. An Intelligent Arbitrator Associate (IAA) that works with and helps the law enforcement and law adjudication authorities to resolve disputes that arise due to commerce conducted over the Internet is presented in this paper. The infrastructure over which the IAA operates, the architecture, and the protocols involved are described. Some of the architectural pieces include monitoring systems for copyright infringement and currency fraud, information extraction systems to predict and map crime, and access revocation systems to punish principals involved in illegitimate transactions. The IAA sends out intelligent agents with warrants to gather information from the various entities involved in the transaction. The social and legal issues and difficulties involved in deploying such systems into the real world are described in the paper. | |
| "Breaking the barriers of resistance to electronic journal entry: Experiences of BIToday." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | There are a number of socio-economic issues that are generally understood in the area of electronic publishing. Primary among these is an apparent reluctance within the academic community to accept a replacement for paper-based journals. This sits incongruously with the fact that the WWW was born at CERN primarily as a vehicle for the effective dissemination of scientific research papers. The present paper focuses on research, problems and issues encountered at South Bank University in attempting to establish a Business Information Technology (BIT) Journal on the Internet (BiToday). It is hoped that this undertaking, which requires challenging the current academic culture on research and publication, would meet the requirements of academic staff and publicise the current and innovative academic area of BIT outside of the University. However, there are different levels of acceptance and understanding about communicating by electronic publication. This paper will thus review and highlight the main - problems and issues that have been encountered in this effort to establish an electronic journal in a relatively new academic discipline. The culture of electronic publishing is opposed by a number of 'forces of resistance' (as they may be termed in the electronic publishing environment). These forces of resistance act like bathers into the electronic journal field. This paper will suggest from experience the nature and origin of these resistant forces. Two obvious resistant forces are the establishment of standardisation of publication and the difficulties of enforcing copyright upon electronic journals. However, these issues are only policy constraints and pale in significance next to the issues of the initial cultural establishment of an electronic journal, which manifests itself in the form of an academic culture gap. The socio-economic forces of change in the academic world, such as diminishing budget allocation for paper-based journals held in academic libraries, strongly suggests that electronic journals will become the standard and not the exception in the future. Those institutions that, early in this evolution, break the barriers of entry to the electronic journal field, stand to benefit in terms of establishing standards and an academic presence. Academic institutions are still in a period of experimentation. Most people are still trying to get to grips with the basics of the WWW and theevolutionary nature of electronic publishing media which offer the prospect of hyperlinks, to point to additional reference material within other academic domains, or even other electronic journals (at no additional cost). This paper, firstly, addresses the issues that surround 'barriers to entry' in the electronic journals field. Secondly, it outlines the forces of resistance to an acceptance of electronic journal media and the nature and reason of such resistance. Thirdly, the paper will suggest possible solutions, and areas of further work, needed to overcome the primary forces of resistance. | |
| Breaking the barriers of resistance to electronic journal entry: Experiences of BlToday In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | There are a number of socio-econoniicissues that are generally understood in the area of electronic publishing. Primary among these is an apparent reluctance within the academic community to accept a replacement to paper-based journals. This sits incongruously with the fact that the WWW was born at CERN primarily as a vehicle for the effective dissemination of scientific research papers. This paper focuses on research, problems and issues encountered at South Bank University in attempting to establish aBusiness Information Technology (BIT) Journal on the Internet (BlToday). It is hoped that this undertaking, which requires challenging the current academic culture on research and publication, would meet the requirements of academic staff and publicise the current and innovative academic area of BIT outside of the University. However, there are different levels of acceptance and understanding about communicating by electronic publication. This paper will thus review and highlight the main problems andissues that have been encountered in this effort to establish an electronic journal in a relatively new academic discipline. The culture of electronic publishing is opposed by a number of 'forces of resistance' (asthey may be termed in the electronic publishing environment). These forces of resistance act like barriers to entry in the electronic journal field. This paper will suggest from experience the nature and origin of these resistant forces. Two obvious resistant forces being the establishment of standardisation on publication and the difficulties on enforcing copyright upon electronic journals. However, these issues are only policy constraints and pale in significance next to the issues of initial cultural establishment of an electronic journal, which manifests itself in the form of an academic culture gap. The socio- economic forces of change in the academic world, such as diminishing budget allocation for paper based journals held in academic libraries, strongly suggests that electronic journals will become the standard and not the exception in the future. Those institutionsthat, early in this evolution, break the barriers of entry to the electronic journal field, stand to benefit in terms of establishing standards and an academic presence. Academic Institutions are still in a period of experimentation. Most people are still trying to get to grips with the basics of the \VWW and the evolutionary nature of electronic publishing mediums which offer the prospect of hyperlinks, to point to additional reference material within other academic domains, or even other electronicjournals (at no additional cost). This paper, firstly, addresses the issues that surround "barriers to entry" in the electronic journals field. Secondly, the paper outlines the forces of resistance to an acceptance of electronic journal mediums and the nature and reason of such resistance. Thirdly, the paper will suggest possible solutions, and areas of further work, needed to overcome the primary forces of resistance. | |
| "Copysmart: a trusted monitoring system for electronic works and document." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The rapid development of digital technology and information networks now permits a broad and easy dissemination of digital works and other electronic information. However, once published, it is difficult to control access, usage, manipulation and distribution of digital materials. The ease of reproduction of electronic information raises the problem of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). But beyond the necessity to ensure the protection of digital information and the associated rights owned by the work's originators and the various rights-holders, the need to have a full management of IPR is getting crucial. More and more, authors, publishers, fee-collecting companies, producers, distributors, etc., are looking for tools which are able to determine the utilisation conditions of their works and to provide them with information on the usage, in order to get the reward corresponding to the exploitation of their works and to better market them. Several projects have been initiated in order to meet the needs related to IPR management. In 1992, the European Commission launched under the ESPRIT Programme, the CITED project (Copyright In Transmitted Electronic Documents) with the objective of defining a global model for IPR management. CopySMART represents the industrialisation of the CITED model. | |
| Copysmart: A Trusted Monitoring System for Electronic Works andDocuments In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The rapid development of digital technology and information networks enables a broad and easy dissemination of digital works and other electronic information. However, once published, it is difficult to control the access,usage, manipulation and distribution of digital materials. The easiness of reproduction of electronic information raises the problem of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). But beyond the necessity to ensure the protection ofdigital information and the associated rights owned by works originators and the various rightsholders, the need to have a full management of IPR is getting crucial. More and more, authors, publishers, fee collectingcompanies, producers, distributors ... are looking for tools which are able settle the utilisation conditions of their works and to provide them with information on the usage made of the works they offer in digital form onnetworks or on CD-ROM for example in order to get the reward corresponding to the exploitation of their works and to better market them. Several projects have been initiated in order to meet the needs related to IPR management. In 1992, the European Commission launched under the ESPRIT Programme, the CITED project (Copyright In TransmittedElectronic Documents) with the objective of defining a global model for IPR management. Based upon the CITED model, C0pySMART represents the industrialisation of CITED. | |
| Design by Example - A User-Centred Approach for the Specification of Document Layout In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | DESIGNER is a layout specification system for generically coded documents. It is based on the paradigm design by example and the methodology of using layout objects to provide graphic artists with an ergonomically sound user interface for their trade. In this paper we introduce layout objects and present DESIGNER'S graphical user interface using some simple examples to explain the main ideas of our system. | |
| "Design by Example: A User-Centered Approach to the Specification of Document Layout." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | DESIGNER is a layout specification system for generically coded documents. It is based on the paradigm design by example and the methodology of using layout objects to provide graphics artists with an ergonomically sound user interface for their trade. In this paper we introduce layout objects and present DESIGNER'S graphical user interface using some simple examples to explain the main ideas of our system. | |
| "Developing a flexible structure for a pure e-journal." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. |
Despite the recognition of electronic journals as an important means of publication, there is, as yet, little migration to this medium. In this paper we review progress in the establishment of a peer-reviewed 'pure' electronic journal, and place it in the setting of the nature of the scientific research paper. In particular, we review the background to the journal, outlining its main features and the way it has been designed to fulfil several roles in extending the scope of e-journals for academic research as a whole. We also suggest developments in which the e-journal may help create a research framework centred around digital data transfer. |
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| "Developing a flexible structure for a pure e-journal." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Despite the recognition of electronic journals as important means of publication, there is, as yet, little rapid movement to this medium. In this paper we shall review progress in the establishment of a new,peer-reviewed electronic journal and place it in the setting of the nature of the scientific research paper. Glacial geology and geomorphology (GGG) was conceived from the first as a pure e- journal (i.e. no paper-product counterpart). It has faced problems of establishment as a new journal in its own right as well as those concerned with publishing in a new medium. There have also been technological challenges in establishing itself in an area which, despite conjectures from many areas, there might well be no set or ideal form of an e-journal. Indeed, it would seem that the adaptive nature of the technology is very important. The main controlling factors about development so far have been related to the human preconceptions of what an e-journal should or might be. In some form these may often beconsidered to be 'conservative' or even retrogressive. In the paper we shall touch upon the technology used in the establishment of GGG but place emphasis on the limitations or restrictions which 'vested interests' impose. We believe that these are as important as any constraints imposed by hardware or software n the establishment of this journal. | |
| "Document Semantic Model: an experiment with patient medical records." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Patient medical records contain a large amount of information distributed in different kinds of documents: diagnosis, prescription, symptom observations or radiology analysis, etc. Document heterogeneity makes specific information retrieval difficult for medical staff. This paper shows how a semantic model of documents assists in handling information stored in these documents. It allows the definition of a generic semantic structure of a medical record: this structure expresses the implicit content of each document element by specifying what kind of information is required. Moreover, it permits a display of relevant information for a specific reader. | |
| "Electrifying Wordsworth: Using SGML and HTML for dynamic collation." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | It has become commonplace to draw parallels between the rapid growth of digital communications systems and the introduction of the printing press over five hundred years ago. George Landow' s claim (or is it a warning?) that "electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book" takes its cue from Marshall McLuhan' s provocative comments a generation ago. As that Canadian communications theorist observed, media are not transparent windows-- by their very function of mediation, they have power to reshape reality. The view of the world that the print medium conveys is likely to be quite distinct from the view made possible by electronic media, not just in content but also in structure. | |
| "Electronic intermediation - new challenges for the subscription agent." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Subscription agents have a long tradition of serving libraries in the acquisitions of printed journals. The move towards electronic publishing has major implications for agents. What are these changes? How is the agent facing new challenges which electronic information presents? What intermediary roles are needed in the new scholarly communications process? | |
| "Electronic intermediation - new challenges for the subscription agent." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Subscription agents have a long tradition of serving libraries in the acquisitions of printed journals. The move towards electronic publishing has major implications for agents. What are these changes? How is the agent facing new challenges which electronic information presents? What intermediary roles are needed in the new scholarly communications process? | |
| "Electronic Publishing : the evolution and economics of a hybrid journal." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The technical, social and economic issues of electronic publishing areexamined by using as a case study the evolution of the journal Electronic Publishing - Origination, Dissemination and Design (EP-odd) which is published by John Wiley Ltd. The journal is a 'hybrid' one, in the sense that it appears in both electronic and paper form, and is now in its ninth year of publication. The author of this paper is the journal's Editor-in-Chief. The first eight volumes of EP-odd have been distributed via the conventional subscription method but a new method, from volume 9 onwards, is now under discussion whereby accepted papers will first be published on the EP-odd web site, with the printed version appearing later as a once-per-volume operation.Later sections of the paper lead on from the particular experiences with EP-odd into a more general discussion of peer review and the acceptability of e-journals in universities, the changing role of libraries, the sustainability of traditional subscription pricing and the prospects for 'per paper' sales as micro-payment technologies become available. | |
| "Electronic Publishing: Avatar or Metamorphosis for Information Access by Academics." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Paper-based publishing is an intellectual and commercial activity of long tradition: it is now undergoing an important mutation by using media other than paper. Will research use of information be deeply affected? Is this a metamorphosis implying deep changes, or will it be just an additional avatar, with new uses added to the previous long list of modifications to our traditional culture? Will there be disruption or adaptation in terms of scientific and technical information communication? We shall try to examine these questions below. | |
| Electronic Publishing: Avatar or Metamorphosis for Information Access of University Publics In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | As an intellectual and commercial activity of long tradition, publishing started an important mutation when using other supports than paper. Will research practices of information be then deeply affected ? Shall we assist to a metamorphosis implying deep changes, or will it be just an additional avatar, new uses added to the previous long list of modifications known by our old occidental culture ? Will there be a disruption or an adaptationin matter of scientific and technical information communication ? We shall try to bring to all these questions, if not full answers, at least some elements of thought. | |
| "Generic Hypermedia Structure and Presentation Specification." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | We consider the generic hypermedia structure of a document to be a means of representing the document that allows it to be processed into a wide variety of presentations. Representing a document in this manner requires additional specification and resources to render it into any presentation. In this paper we discuss the relationship between the generic hypermedia structure of documents and the processing of this structure into presentation. Our discussion is expressed in terms of existing models for hypertext and hypermedia systems and also in terms of ISO standards for text and hypermedia document formatting and processing. The discussion and the resulting formalisms and the resulting formalisms are illustrated with extension designs for the hypermedia authoring and presentation environment developed at our laboratory. | |
| "Generic Hypermedia Structure and Presentation Specification." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | We consider the generic hypermedia structure of a document to be a means of representing the document that allows it to be processed into a wide variety of presentations. Representing a document in this manner requires additional specification and resources to render it into any presentation. In this paper, we discuss the relationship between the generic hypermedia structure of documents and the processing of this structure into presentation. Our discussion is expressed in terms of existing models for hypertext and hypermedia systems and also in terms of ISO standards for text and hypermedia document formatting and processing. The discussion and the resulting formalisms are illustrated with extension designs for the hypermedia authoring and presentation environment developed at our laboratory. | |
| Information Management in the "Information Age" In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | We are in the middle of a revolution -- an information revolution. All one has to do to realise this is merely look around. The world is linked by a computer network that just 10 years ago was almost unimaginable. There is e-mail, and of course, World Wide Web access. The latest statistics show more than 108 million people worldwide have access to the Web. There are some 1.9 million homepages that enable shopping, reading of the daily news andthe ability to search for an almost endless amount of information.' All this is done from the convenience of a personal computer (PC) on a desktop. | |
| Information Spoon-Feeding in An Electronic Environment In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Most academic libraries are exploring the possibilities of introducing electronic formats to improve their overall service to users. It is important to remember, however, that though these may offer indisputable benefits, they may also bring problems and disadvantages.This paper seeks to examine the potential educational benefits and disadvantages of providingeasily accessible and carefully selected key course texts and other course-related materials in an electronic format. | |
| "Information Spoon-Feeding in an Electronic Environment." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | This paper examines the potential educational benefits and corresponding disadvantages of providing easily accessible and carefully selected key course texts and other course-related material in an electronic format.These findings emerged from a Library Services exercise to identify userneeds/expectations/potential use of an electronic reserve (short loan collection), before designing and installing the ResiDe system for the Faculty of the Built Environment at the University of the West of England. ResIDe is a project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (IISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as part of its Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib).Through a series of one-to-one loosely structured interviews and focus groups, students, and cross-faculty academic and library staff were encouraged to discuss such issues as the types of material they wished to be included, preferred methods of retrieval and how they wished to use the stored items.It quickly became apparent that all interviewees felt that the collection mightbecome exclusive; mirroring concerns of staff creating ResIDe that the moreclosely it fulfilled users' specifications the greater the possibility that it might not integrate with existing library services and might discourage an investigative approach to study.Whilst detailing the item types they wished to submit, almost all academics included both essential texts and a sufficiently wide range of other sources to ensure students using this material alone could obtain adequate or good assignment and examination passes. They welcomed the possible inclusion, within an electronic environment, of detailed lecturer-directed material to these sources and for links between different items required for each assignment or module. Most interviewees actually used the term 'spoon-feeding' whilst identi1'ing material to be submitted to the collection. The concept of 'spoon-feeding, however, was held to be of very positive educational advantage by some interviewees and of positive educational detriment by others. There was not, however, any homogeneous opinion within any one group, though unexpectedly, almost all students expressed grave concerns about using a system which might 'spoon-feed' them information. Academics and librarians held 'spoon-feeding' to be a positive teaching methodology for students preparing for professional examinations. All interviewees felt that these (part-time) students attended for the sole purpose of learning essential information to pass specific examinations and had neither the time nor inclination to explore additional sources or read information not strictly required.Some interviewees felt that, for other students, the electronic environment offered a dangerous level of direction and interaction between material pre-selected by lecturers or librarians which could easily lead to the non-reading of more peripheral material and damage the educational process. A system which unintentionally discourages the seeking of additional information from other sources may create excellent graduates in a particular discipline, but is a bather to students gaining a broader 'education for life' in that an inquisitive open mind is not fostered nor searching skills absorbed. Others, however, felt that concentrated direction to essential information supporting lectures and assignments fostered a more enquiring mind, broadening the educational base by removing tedious and, possibly, discouraging and fruitless searches for material. For these, 'spoon-feeding' core information did not discourage further browsing either within the electronic reserve collection or within wider library or external resources, but encouraged it. An electronic collection is quickly and easily accessible; thus leaving students with a whetted appetite and more time to explore material which might be important, but peripheral to their courses. | |
| Intelligent Arbitrator Associate for Electronic Commerce In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Growing businesses and the large number of transactions involved in conducting a business tend to give rise to conflicts among the parties involved in a transaction. Human society has evolved in a way to cope withthese disputes by creating law and order bodies. An Intelligent Arbitrator Associate (IAA) that works with and helps the law enforcement and law adjudication authorities to resolve disputes that arise due to commerce conducted over the Internet is presented in this paper. The infrastructure over which the IAA operates, the architecture, and the protocols involved are described in this paper. Some of the architectural pieces include monitoring systems for copyright infringement and currency fraud, information extraction systems to predict and map crime, and access revocation systems to punish principals involved in illegitimate transactions. The IAA sends out intelligent agents with warrants to gather information from the various entities involved in the transaction. The social and legal issues and difficulties involved in deploying such systems into the real world is described in the paper. | |
| "Issues for libraries, publishers and subscription agents posed by the development of an electronic 'short loan' collection of high demand journal articles in a university library." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Topics addressed by this paper are: changing role of publishers andsubscription agents; changing role of libraries and others involved in the information dissemination process; economic/financial questions;Project ACORN (Access to Course Readings via Networks) began in August 1996 as one of a new strand of electronic short loan projects funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) via the eLib (electronic Libraries) Programme. Project ACORN's distinguishing features are firstly the involvement of Swets & Zeitlinger (the international periodicals subscription agency) in the project consortium, and secondly the project's sole focus on journal articles. The overall aim otthe project is to develop a transferable model of the whole process of making high-demand short loan journal articles available electronically, and in particular to focus on the role of a third party agent in gaining copyright clearance and providing digital copies to libraries. | |
| Issues for libraries, publishers and subscription agents posed by the development of an electronic 'short loan' collection of high demand journal articles in a university library In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Digitising high-demand materials in order to increase their access to students is currently very much a library-initiated activity, and one which needs careful presentation and explanation to publishers. There are a number of Electronic Libraries (eLib) projects working in this area, and some university libraries have independently undertaken to develop electronic collections, for example the universities of Leeds, Derby,Wolverhampton and York. To ensure access to large numbers of students, librarians normally place a photocopy of high-demand articles in their short loan collections. If the article is in a journal held by the library, this is very straightforward. If the library does not subscribe to the journal, then a cleared copy can be obtained from the British Library. This service now charges the cost of the inter-library loan (about £5.00) together with a fee to be paid to the publisher. These fees currently range from £4.20 for pre 1990 material and up to £10.00 for most other articles. There are about 600 journal titles for which publishers have asked for a fee in excess of £10.00. It must be noted that, apart from the cleared copy fee paid tothe British Library, short loan services currently generate no income for publishers. | |
| Linking Everything to Everything: Publishing Myth or Reality? In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The hypertext link as popularised by the World Wide Web is a simple utility. As users demand greater quality in the information they find online, as authors seek simpler tools, and as publishers seek original ways of adding value and maintaining control over their online products, a more sophisticated notion of links needs to prevail. New approaches to links are being tackled in two ways. Some research initiatives are building link services based on established hypertext principles, while some onlinepublishers are acting on an immediate need to produce large numbers of links. How these two approaches are converging within research and commercial frameworks will be the feature of this paper, which will describe the publishing application of links in the Open Journal project, in which thepublisher Electronic Press (EP) is a partner, and also a separate trial of a link service being developed at Southampton University applied to the journals services on EP's commercial BioMedNet online club for those working in biology and medicine. A link service is one way of supporting greater link productivity. The potential of the link service is to link everything to everything, automatically generating links on a massive scale. But in a publishing context, what is the practical value of doingthis? As the link service in development at Southampton University is itself being commercialised, the emphasis of the Open Journal project and the BioMedNet trial is to refine this capability and to optimise its value as a development tool for users and publishers. In this environment the principalgoals of the applications are to demonstrate: controlled editorial linking; complete citation linking; the integration of diverse resources such as journals, books and databases; link management; and a framework for publishing online products. In this sense links are more than simple 'go to' jumps between documents, but become highly flexible information filters. Essentially, the link service, by separating links from the underlying documents, provides a means of managing and applying link data across distributed resources. By looking closely at how link data can be created and collected in databases, or Iinkbases, we aim to show that this data translates effectively to support the publishing goals. From a publishing viewpoint what is also new is the emergence of the Web as a service which unifies communication between these resources and at the same time presents a medium for online publishing with a sufficiently large user base to support commercial products. In turn the online published 'package' is transformed: it is now a linkbase pointing to selected resources. Referring to the implications of this framework rather than simply the technical detail, the paper will identify the latent power of the novel link types used in the link service. While a full publishing application based on the link service has still to be realised, the approach will be compared with EP's current practice of linking which also stores link information in databases and within BioMedNet is used to link all citations to the cited articles via the Evaluated Medline abstracts service. All of this will be supported by results and experiences from both the Open Journal project and BioMedNet implementations in the most extensive demonstration of these link publishing features to date. | |
| "Modelling a Medieval Manuscript Database with HyTime." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Our project enhances the accessibility of ancient manuscripts and provides new ways of working with them. More precisely, we air to produce a software tool allowing historians, and more particularly codicologists and philologists, to read manuscripts, write annotations, and navigate between the words of the transcription and the matching piece of the image in the digitised picture of the manuscript. In this paper, we present the design of such a Hypermedia Workstation.It is based on the standardized hypermedia language HyTime (Hypermedia/Time-based Structured Language). We describe how HyTime can be used as a modelling language to describe works on manuscripts. We present relevant parts of the HyTime model and prove that the model thus obtained can also serve as a basis for implementation. | |
| Modelling a Medieval Manuscript Database with HyTime In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Our project enhances the accessibility of ancient manuscripts and provide new ways of working with them. More precisely, we aim to produce a software tool allowing historians, and more particularly codicologists and philologists, to read manuscripts, write annotations, and navigate between the words of the transcription and the matching piece of image in the numerized picture of the manuscript. In this paper, we present the design of such a Hypermedia Workstation. It is based on the standardized hypermedia language HyTime. | |
| "New Directions for STM Publishers." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. |
A publishing editor with a leading scientific publisher describes the key directions and aims of scientific, i.e., technical & medical (STM) publishers in the electronic age, with particular reference to market research within the product area he manages, i.e., computer communications. |
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| Putting Renaissance Women Online In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Humanities computing is on a roll. Multi-media, hypertext, online discussion groups: what had once been seen by many scholars as the preserve of a few strange types who carried outn unspeakably mechanical practices upon sensitive texts has expanded to include all kinds of people and all manner of things. As usual, the avant garde vies most for attention, with sound clips, full-motion video, and astonishingly processed images. A little away from the dazzle of the apparent front line, a quieter revolution has been taking place of equal orgreater significance. As recently as five years ago, projects which only existed to make primary documents available in electronic form provoked a mixture of curiosity, suspicion, and disdain in academics, and anxiety in librarians. Since then, the advance of newtechnology into the temples of humanities academe has reached critical momentum and the priests have no choice but to embrace it. In college and public libraries rows of computers appear like shrines to the gods of the ethernet as old-style reference and reading rooms get retasked into "e-text centers"1. Recognized now as the prophets and messiahs of that holyof holies, the Digital Library, electronic text projects have gained credibility and respectability. Old ones are treated with reverence, new ones spring up daily ; they are feted, feasted, even funded. We can measure the potential of this revolution by noting that capitalism got its foot in the door early in the shape of Chadwyck Healey. | |
| "Putting Renaissance Women Online." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Since its inception in 1986 the aim of Brown University's Women Writers Project (WWP) has been to bring to much wider attention the extensive body of pre-Victorian women's writing in English. In an initiative funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the WWP is creating "Renaissance Women Online" (RWO), a collection of SGML-encoded transcriptions of works in English by women writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This full-text database or "textbase" will be integrated into a Web site designed to help teachers and students access and appreciate these long-neglected works. This undertaking has three main aspects: preparing the electronic texts, organizing access to them, and presenting them in a way appropriate to the target audience. Preparing the texts involves both transcribing them and encoding them in a manner conformant with Standard Generalized Markup Language. The WWP has a close association with the work of the Text Encoding Initiative and has adopted its Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange as the Project's encoding scheme. The advantages of the TEl scheme for the WV/P he in its breadth of application, its flexibility, and its widespread adoption among other humanities text-encoding projects. To offer wide access to the RWO materials, the WWP will publish them on a dedicated Web site. In preferring this option over CD-ROM, flexibility is again a prime consideration. A textbase like RWO gets revised and updated with a frequency which would make the timely distribution of update discs burdensome and impractical. Also, RWO has some material which is available to anyone, and some which can only be accessed with the payment of a licence fee. A Web server can easily offer different levels of access to different users of a single site. The RWO site will not be simply a passive resource. While it does have archival value, it aims to be pedagogically useful and proactive. The design of the site must help students read the works, literally and critically. For the first, RWO uses the DynaWeb interface. Its ability to exploit documents' SGML encoding while serving them to a Web browser offers readers easy navigation through, and searching of, the textbase. To help students and non-specialist readers understand and critically approach what they read, supplementary materials specially written by scholars in the field introduce the works and explain the ideas and issues of concern to the women writers represented in the textbase. Publishing the Renaissance Women Online electronic resource is a crucial step for the Women Writers Project progress in fulfilling its aim, and not just because a Web site offers the chance of truly widespread distribution. For the WWP to continue its work it must move from grant-dependency towards financial self-sufficiency. RWO represents the Projects first large-scale effort to market its most valuable product, its textbase | |
| "Review of Track 2." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | When the programme was first conceived, the intention was that track 2 would contain the technical papers, while track 1 would contain those on the socio-economic issues. In the event, more socio-economic than technical papers were submitted, so track 2 contained papers that were not so technical as well as the intended technical ones. This chapter comments on the Monday evening semi-formal session first, before moving on to the sessions in track 2. | |
| Roles in the new information age: the evolution of the super-agent and the library partnership In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Most of us have relied on familiar ways of handling the acquisition process. The process has included using a third party, or subscription agent, to act as the clearing house, or consolidator, for journals, books, and a variety of other materials. Agents have also handled electronic publication formats, such as microfiche and CD-RUMs. With the advent of electronic publishing and the shift from purchase to lease, the familiar models that we have relied upon no longer work as effectively as they once did. Libraries often turn to their subscription agents in the acquisition process for scholarly journals, CD-ROM titles, or newsletters. For libraries the acquisition of electronic journals should be no different. | |
| "Roles in the new information age: the evolution of the super-agent-library partnership." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Libraries traditionally have relied on their subscriptions agents to assist in the acquisition process for scholarly journals, multi-media titles, and recently even CD-ROMs. This relationship should be no different when the product desired is an electronic journal. Although some academic and research libraries have begun to incorporate the world of electronic publishing into their collections, many public and college libraries are just beginning to approach this challenge. As a result, the role of the subscription vendors is evolving to assist as needed. Vendor databases and services now provide the help needed to handle all aspects of electronic journals - from access to licensing issues. [1] This presentation win focus on: 1) the traditional agent-library relationship; 2) the new, integrated agent-library relationship; and address 3) possible models for the future. In the first part of the program, these issues will be presented through a live, scripted role-play between an academic librarian, Trisha Davis of The Ohio State University Libraries and an agent, Susan Wilson of the Faxon Company. The actual dialogue will help to 1) define new roles; 2)demonstrate use of appropriate communications for mutual benefit; 3)identify collaborative strategies; 4) show how the existing library-agent can gain new value in the electronic publishing world. The presentation will help both parties 5) understand new needs and expectations in the acquisition of electronic publications; 6) address the issues of negotiating and licensing issues; and will 7) discuss the use of new technology. The second half of the program, will formalize the discussion and make specific recommendations on the evolution of this relationship. As the publishing community offers more selectivity in the electronic world, agents and libraries must expand boundaries and establish new methods for working collaboratively. Access issues, licensing, and complicated pricing schemes add a level of sophistication to the process of acquiring these journals. As a result, the subscription agents must expand their role to work hand-in-hand with the library. | |
| "Subscription Agents, Libraries and Others Involved in the Information Dissemination." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | An information revolution is underway around the world. More than 108 million people world-wide have access to the Web and some 1.9 million homepages provide a wide variety of information. The move to electronic information formats is changing the processes and methods for conducting business. Timeliness is more important than ever and the focus is on easy access to information. Those of us who are in the business of providing access to information are changing with these demands and technologies. Journals, serials, newspapers and other periodicals are becoming 'electronic,' and we still have to find ways to provide access. The major players are the same in this 'electronic age' -- libraries, publishers and subscription agents --and the need to work together is far greater now than ever before. Changes in the roles and the functions of information professionals are apparent. The creation of the serial by the publisher remains the same, but now there are choices in formats. Whether electronic or paper, the serial is still published and circulated but how does an 'electronic' or 'online' serial get 'circulated?' For years, libraries have found it easy to work with subscription agencies to order numerous paper-based periodicals. With many serials available, both online and in paper formats, ordering and circulation become more complex, especially since electronic formats are expected to become more commonplace. Publishers, agents and libraries are turning to the World Wide Web to distribute information and are working together to provide users access to this information. Subscription agents can provide such online services as searching, ordering and claiming. Online services give librarians immediate access to databases at various subscription agencies, offering fast, accurate sources for locating online journals and other electronic serials. As more publishers begin to offer online serials, subscription agents will develop services to make access to those and traditional serials easier, while maintaining a traditional role as subscription management organisations. What we see as the future today-may change tomorrow, however. Thus the traditional role of the library is changing. Many libraries are forming or joining consortium groups, pooling their resources with others to provide their users with online materials efficiently. This is one solution that is beneficial for everyone involved. There are many concerns related to production of online journals, including cost, archiving and cataloguing. To find solutions, traditional boundaries will change -- formats, access methods and services. To keep up with changes, investments in technology, resources and strategies are required. The World Wide Web has provided the information industry with the best tool yet for fast access of information over the broad spectrum of users and library patrons. this valuable tool must be thoroughly utilised to manage information in the Information Age. | |
| "Summary of Track 1 Presentations." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | All speakers were necessarily concerned with some aspect of the transition from printed to electronic information. Some assumptions were explicit or implicit in most discussions. For example, the continued existence of a recognisable information chain was generally supposed. At least for the immediate future, this was seen - by most, but not all participants - as having a rather traditional structure. The chain starts with the author, who creates the information. It then passes via intermediaries (such as publishers, subscription agents and librarians) to the end-user. Another feature was the belief that electronic and printed material can be compared in a standard way. For example, a distinction can be drawn in both cases between content, presentation and handling. Moreover, these divisions apply not only to individual documents, but to the information system that provides them. | |
| "The Deconstructed Journal." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Many of the ideas expressed in this paper are not new. I described the original version of the model that forms the basis of the Deconstructed Journal (DJ)1 at a meeting held at the Royal Society in 19932. That simple model seemed so obviously a candidate for a new net-based academic publishing model that I expected it to be proposed any moment in the academic literature of library and information science. However, although a great deal has been written over the past four years about the electronic journal, both on the net and in paper form, and often it seemed the author must stumble into my proposed new model if only by accident, I have not seen a model proposed for academic publishing on the net that is quite like the Deconstructed Journal. | |
| "The economics of electronic journals." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | Can electronic publications be operated at much lower costs than printjournals, and still provide all the services that scholars require?That is the key question that is still in dispute. Available evidenceshows that free or at least much less expensive journals are possibleon the Net. It is probable that such journals will dominate in thearea of basic scholarly publishing. However, the transition is likelyto be complicated, since the publishing business is full of inertiaand perverse economic incentives. | |
| "The evolving use of SGML in electronic journals." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The application of SGML in e-journal production and presentation is steadily increasing. This paper discusses some current experiments in the use of SGML for the representation of both bibliographic information and hill article text. It describes the 'standard' journal DTDs currently available in the STM domain and discusses their use. | |
| "The evolving use of SGML in Electronic Journals." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The application of SGML in ejournal production and presentation is steadily increasing. This paper discusses some current experiments in the use of SGML for the representation of both bibliographic information and full article text. It describes the 'standard' journal DTDs currently available and discusses their use. | |
| The Image Directory, Electronic Publishing, and the Changing Socio-Economic Position of Art Museums In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | In late 1997, Academic Press will launch the Image Directory, an online union catalog of information about art images. Based on descriptions provided by museums and image owners all over the world, the Image Directory will be an ever-growing union catalog which will provide item-level and collection-level access to data and low-resolution images. The project isanalogous to Books in Print in that it collects data from many sources and places them in a uniform format, thus facilitating search strategies and promoting standardized descriptive vocabularies. There is nothing novel about the concept: Books in Print began shortly after World War II, building upon a book cataloging tradition that extends backward to hundreds ofyears. What distinguishes the Image Directory-the reasons a union catalog of art images has been impossible to create until now-is inextricably tied to the rise of electronic publishing and changes within the museum community. | |
| "The Image Directory, Electronic Publishing, and the Changing Socio-Economic Position of Art Museums." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The opportunities afforded by the Internet and online commerce are molding a traditional union catalog project into a publication that, before they became widely available, could not have been conceived. The project, the Image Directory, is creating new alliances between the editorial, production, and marketing departments of Academic Press. It is encouraging image owners, who are providing data for the catalog, to enter into the electronic publishing medium either for the first time or beyond theft own Web pages or CD-ROM productions. Finally, it is also holding out the potential for scholarly benefits, not only to the image owners, but also to students, researchers, and professionals interested in arts images. Whilst the concept of creating a union catalog of information about arts images is not new, without the capabilities offered by electronic publishing the project could not come into existence. Electronic publishing has introduced two significant ingredients to the art museum community that are making this project work. The first is the potential that it offers for the management of image collections. In the era when information about images and art objects was recorded on cards, museums created idiosyncratic vocabularies and formats that were incompatible with those of other museums. Because collections differ and because museums are by nature competitive, vying with each other for unique objects, there were few incentives to combine data. Collections management software and the introduction of standardized vocabularies and controls, such as the Getty' s Art and Architecture Thesaurus, have provided the tools for significant inventory projects.The second is the fear of losing control of data that electronic publishing creates among curators and trustees. With the diminishment of grants and federal funding, museums are coming under increasing pressure to generate revenue. Looking for ways to generate revenue from their assets, they host block-buster exhibitions, sell coffee cups with paintings printed on them, and market themselves in ways that are succeeding in increasing attendance numbers. But electronic publishing and, in particular, the World Wide Web, offer pirates the opportunity to steal high resolution images, violating copyright rules and depriving museums of revenue that would naturally come through the sales of reproduction rights. Along with developments in image watermarking and the new envelope-locking technologies, museums need other ways to mark their assets as their own. The Image Directory directly addresses both of these aspects. The project is based on the information that image owners have already created for their collection management databases. Academic Press will add no new data to those records, but will standardize them so that idiosyncrasies among records are bridged but not erased. Scholars will be able to search the world for the location of and information about images and museums will have a central, definitive source in which to publicise their holdings and to list rights and reproductions information. The Image Directory will offer a leveling factor into the hierarchical world of museums, making records from the largest, best endowed museums equally accessible to those of small ones. And it will offer image owners the ability to sell images through the database architecture, potentially opening a new revenue stream for them. The Image Directory is an excellent example of an electronic publishing project crystallizing social and financial trends. There is every possibility that it will not only facilitate new scholarly discoveries, but it will increase the presence of different types of art in mainstream culture. | |
| The Librarian's Role in Building the Virtual Library In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | We are entering a virtual age. The signs have been visible for over a decade. When my children were growing up I watched with concern as they preferred to interact with soccer balls on the computer screen rather than with neighborhood kids in our backyard. I imagined that a reduction in interaction with human playmates would create adult misfits in the real world. Only now, when they are adults, do I understand that the time they spent with joystick in hand was preparing them for their virtual future. My children and the wave of people behind them are ready for virtuality before it is ready for them. | |
| "The Librarian's Rote in Building the Virtual Library." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | We are entering a virtual age. The signs have been visible for over a decade. When my children were growing up I watched with concern as they preferred to interact with soccer balls on the computer screen rather than with neighborhood kids in our backyard. I imagined that a reduction in interaction with human playmates would create adult misfits in the real world. Only now, when they are adults, do I understand that the time they spent with joystick in hand was preparing them for their virtual future. My children and the wave of people behind them are ready for virtuality before it is ready for them. | |
| The MeDoc Distributed Electronic Library - Accounting and Security Aspects In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The MeDoc service provides access to a distributed full-text library for computer scientists over the Internet. Since the library provides commercial information products, accounting and security aspectsare of considerable importance in this electronic-publishing project.MeDoc has developed business, cost, and payment models suitable for electronic library services. The partners co-operating in the MeDoc service are users, providers and producers of information products.Their business interaction is based on trade as opposed to systems financed by advertising. The cost models offered to the users are various forms of subscription and "pay per view"-purchase. As paymentmodels both credit and debit models are considered suitable for the MeDoc service. Initially only registered users are admitted to the MeDoc library, so the users can be charged via accounts. Currently a clearing agency handles the actual invoice process for the MeDoc service. To secure the communication over the Internet within the MeDoc library, several existingimplementations of cryptographic algorithms have been evaluated against the MeDoc requirements analysis. Communication channels MeDoc are now secured by transparent encryption mechanisms based on SSL. | |
| "The MeDoc Distributed Electronic Library: Accounting and Security Aspects." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The MeDoc service provides access to a distributed full-text library for computer scientists over the Internet. Since the library provides commercial information products, accounting and security aspects are of considerable importance in this electronic-publishing project.MeDoc has developed business, cost, and payment models suitable for electronic library services. The partners cooperating in the MeDoc service are users, providers and producers of information products. Their business interaction is based on trade as opposed to systems financed by advertising. The cost models offered to the users are various forms of subscription and 'pay per view' purchase. As payment models, both credit and debit models are considered suitable for the MeDoc service. Initially only registered users are admitted to the MeDoc library, so the users can be charged via accounts. Currently a clearing agency handles the actual invoice process for the MeDoc service. To secure the communication over the Internet within the MeDoc library, several existing implementations of cryptographic algorithms have been evaluated against the MeDoc requirements analysis. Communication channels in MeDoc are now secured by transparent encryption mechanisms based on SSL. The mechanisms described are implemented in a prototype that has been evaluated in a first field test from the beginning of 1997. | |
| "The New Virtual Library and Serials - A Kaleidoscope of Options: Case Western Reserve University and the Kelvin Smith Library." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | In this paper I will focus on the virtual academic library as a place and as a structure or shell for serial information access and services. Specifically, I will relate some of our practical experience of planning, building and organizing library services in the new Kelvin Smith Library, just opened, on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The library was planned and designed from the start to be a "library of the future" or "virtual library" and relies heavily on supply of information through electronic resources as well as through traditional means. We will present what we see as the future from our experience and will present a model which is serial based, our "shared digital library" which is based on the proven success of cooperative bibliographic database efforts such as OCLC and RLIN. The future of serials, at least the next twenty years, will probably be a meshing of supply sources and access options. These will include traditional print on paper journals, current periodical areas, and bound journal stacks, both on-site and off-site with linked storage facilities. Becoming more important, however, is the supply of serial information through the new technologies, including networked, licensed CD-ROMs, networked e-journals with cataloging and integration in the database and linked through subject gateways, publisher e-journal projects, such as Johns Hopkins Project Muse, Elsevier ESS, etc. Regional consortia document delivery projects, such as OhioLink, are and will also play an important role in efficient and economical serial information supply, as will direct commercial document delivery services, such as Uncover, CISTI, Swets and EBSCO ventures. I will describe some of the OhioLink experience in negotiating and coordinating between publishers and member libraries. An important component of our 'virtual library' services is our project supported by Mellon, which focuses on organizing information supply in the chemical sciences. It is a collaborative approach to the Chemical Sciences Virtual Library, and models itself after the OCLC and RLIN database systems which were so successful in consolidating and sharing catalog information and records. It is a system which has already worked. The cornerstone of our concept of a 'shared digital library' involves the creation of bodies of digital documents in an area in which libraries can make a real contribution, that is undertaking a digital retrospective conversion full-text, whether images, searchable text, etc. The project makes use of library staff as a labor pool and works with publishers to build a low-cost retrospective database of digital resources for which the publisher could charge royalties. The shared digital library, or SDL, will consist of several components, including image servers, input devices, an indexing component (or linked to commercial indexes), rights management software and the Internet (or its successor) as the network for distribution. Of course, the difficult part of doing serials in the new virtual library is in being able to separate the good new options from the bad, choosing those which are appropriate for your library and its constituencies, and in balancing "keeping on top of the new" with supplying serials that students and faculty need now. The options are not only in the areas of format and supply vehicle, ie print, microfilm, electronic CD-ROM, networked, hypertext linked, and online archive sources. They also appear to include acquisitions methods, ie traditional subscription agents and vendors, and "new"software-based, bank-linked subscription services. We will cover options we have explored and our success and otherwise with them. This is the challenge we are facing in our new library, and one which everyone in North America and Great Britain is facing to one degree or another. It is a major transition period in which some supply sources will ebb and decline in proportion to others, some will and have already turned out to be "dead ends" - we hope to be fortunate enough not to invest heavily in any of these. (We feel the Shared Digital Library approach is one that could have applications elsewhere.) It will take more technical savvy, more serials experience, keeping abreast of what is available, what is working and what is not, just being lucky to make it all work smoothly, and to get to the next stage without sacrificing good service now. | |
| "The New Virtual Library and Serials: A Kaleidoscope of Options." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | In this paper I will focus on the virtual academic library as a place and as a structure or shell for serial information access and services. Specifically, I will relate some of our practical experience of planning, building and organizing library services in the new Kelvin Smith Library, just opened, on the campus of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The library was planned and designed from the start to be a "library of the future" or "virtual library" and relies heavily on supply of information through electronic resources as well as through traditional means. We will present what we see as the future from our experience and will present a model which is serial based, our "shared digital library" which is based on the proven success of cooperative bibliographic database efforts such as OCLC and RLIN. | |
| The Role of Electronic Distribution and Publishing in the Development of International Standards In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) is responsible for the production andmaintenance of tens of thousands of International Standards, covering almost every aspect of twentieth century life. 85 countries are currently full members of ISO, with a further 26correspondent and 9 subscriber member countries Although the detailed structure of the Organisation varies slightly in different areas, the production of an International Standard always involves three main stages. | |
| "The Role of Electronic Distribution and Publishing in the Development of International Standards." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The production of International Standards traditionally involves the distribution of substantial numbers of documents to individuals in many countries for use between and during meetings. The advent of easy electronic communication has opened up the possibility of dramatically reducing the cost of document distribution, while simultaneously enabling information to be distributed considerably more quickly. On the other hand the use of electronic distribution carries several dangers, notably those concerned with copyright and equality of treatment for participants in all countries. A further matter of concern is how the electronic version used for distribution is related to the printed versions distributed for international balloting and eventual publication as International standards. Although many of the initiatives have come from the Working Group level, the whole question of electronic distribution has become a major topic of interest and concern at the highest levels of ISO. This has led to considerable tension between those at the two extremes of the process, with regard both to policy and to the technical approaches to be used, as regards both the format of documents and the distribution media. This paper is based, primarily, on the author's experience as Convenor of ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC22/WGS - the Fortran programming language working group - as the group has moved over a two-year period from a paper-based document distribution system, with electronic mail as an informal communication medium, to its current system of all-electronic information distribution and publication utilising email, ftp and the World Wide Web in almost equal proportions. In common with all other programming standardisation committees, WG5 has rejected the use of diskettes for distribution, despite this being ISO's preferred medium! Initially, documents distributed via an official file server were stored in WordPerfect, Rich Text Format (rtf), and PostScript in accordance with ISO recommendations. However, it very quickly became apparent that this was unsatisfactory and that only the PostScript version stood any chance of being reproduced by recipients so as to provide them with a more-or-less identical copy of the original document. This was particularly true of documents containing graphical images, but was also the case with plain text documents. Further experiments resulted in the current pattern of PostScript, Acrobat (pdf) and, in most cases, ASCII - the latter primarily for the benefit of those whowish to produce their own documents incorporating extracts form other documents. Mother approach which is finding favour in some areas of International Standards community is the use of HTML for document distribution. This obviously has the advantage that documents can be published on the Web in the same way they are distributed by other means. On the other hand it does provide considerably less detailed control over the layout than is possible with PostScript or pdf, and is not so readily converted into the final document for publication. The paper discusses the relative advantages of (ASCII) text, PostScript, pdf and HTML for widespread document distribution/publication methods. The process of moving from a working (electronic) document to a final published (paper) standard is also discussed as part of this comparison. Finally consideration is given to the social, legal and economic effects of the move from paper to electronic distribution, with particular reference to copyright issues and the effect on the future involvement in standardisation of individuals from less electronically and/or financially well-endowed nations. | |
| "The slow evolution of electronic publishing." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | How will scholarly publishing evolve? The history of other technological innovations suggests the shift to electronic publications will be rapid, but fundamental changes in the nature of scholarly communications will be much slower. | |
| "The VENetIan Virtual Archive Project: Cultural Heritage and On-line Publishing." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The ever-changing and growing reality of on-line communications and of the World Wide Web has posed the need for a general rethinking of the tasks of all the participants involved in the process of creating and using a 'cultural product'. Publishers and all those institutions involved in the dissemination and preservation of cultural heritage cannot ignore the risk of being left behind and gradually replaced by different participants who, since they own the new information technology, can become the new, unique vehicles for its dissemination. But the challenge that publishing houses and primary source repositories such as libraries and historical archives have to face nowadays is not only that of safeguarding their experience and know-how, and bringing it into the new information technology world. The change of roles has to involve singling out new kinds of 'cultural products' and value-added services that properly exploit all the potentialities of the new technology. In this paper, we will describe the experience of a publishing house which has moved into the non-traditional sector of on-line publishing. Specifically, we will examine its close collaboration with European libraries and historical archives on the one hand, and with software houses and technical universities on the other, in order to develop innovative editorial services on the World Wide Web. | |
| The VENetIan Virtual Archive Project: Cultural Heritage and On-line Publishing In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The ever-changing and growing reality of on-line communications and of the World-Wide Web has posed the need for a general re-thinking of the tasks of all the subjects involved in the process of creating and using a "cultural product". Publishers and all those institutions involved in the dissemination and preservation of cultural heritage can not ignore the risk of being left behind and gradually replaced by different subjects who, since they own the new information technology, can become the new and only vehicles for its dissemination. But the challenge that publishing houses and primary source repositories such as libraries and historical archives have to face nowadays is not only that of safeguarding their experience and know-how and bring it into the new information technology world. The change of roles has to be compounded by the act of singling out new kinds of "cultural products" and value-added services that properly exploit all the potentialities of the newtechnology. In this paper, we will describe the experience of a publishing house which has moved into the non- traditional sector of on-line publishing. Specifically, we will relate about its close collaboration with European libraries and historical archives on the one hand, and software houses and technical universities on the other, in order to develop innovative editorial services to be available on the World-Wide Web. | |
| "User Studies of Commercial and Free Electronic Journals." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | The paper reports on initial findings from user studies of electronic journals in which users from six academic disciplines participated. Issues of access, content, layout and navigation are considered in addition to the perceived advantages and disadvantages of electronic journals. It is concluded that librarians should view electronic journals as an opportunity rather than a threat. | |
| "Using Multimedia Document Communication services on top of T.120 protocols." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | One of the most relevant problems in electronic publishing is the interoperability between different systems in order to interchange multimedia information. Part of these problems could be solved by providing standardized multimedia document communication services, such as storing, distribution, manipulation, and even more complex ones such as joint presentation/viewing or joint synchronous editing. This paper deals with the technical issues of designing such services based on standardized protocols, such as the ITU-T 1.120 Recommendations. Attention is focussed on adding multipoint facilities to the document communication services taking advantage of the 1.120 Recommendations. The paper discusses how to use the facilities provided by the 1.120 Recommendations to design multimedia document communication services such as Joint Presentation/Viewing (PV) or Joint Synchronous Editing (SE), that run in heterogeneous environments. The fast development and penetration of the T.120 Recommendations make them an adequate platform on which to base other applications. The facilities of 1.120 cover, amongst other features, multipoint communication, token management, conference control, etc. The 1.120 multipoint communication Recommendations are the base for this design, and are described briefly. These services could be based only on MCS, but the paper discusses how to map the service onto the complete 1.120 specifications, which also include GCC. This provides a wide variety of conferencing management functions that facilitate the development of document communication services. The paper presents PV and SE, as examples, describing the rules to be followed during a PV or SE session. It also analyses the most relevant issues for the services: start-up synchronization, late joining, early leaving, co-ordination, update, closing and final document copy. These aspects may cause problems in the design and implementation.The proposed design uses the conferencing capabilities specified in GCC tosupport PV and SE services. The paper discusses how to solve the relevant issues of PV and SE using the facilities of GCC (and T.120, in general). | |
| Using Multimedia Document Communication services on top of T.120 protocols' In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference (Preliminary Version). ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | One of the most relevant problems in electronic publishing is the interoperability between different systems in order to interchange multimedia information. Part of these problems could be solved by providing standardized multimedia document communication services such asstoring, distribution, manipulation, and even more complex ones such as joint presentation! viewing or joint synchronous editing. This paper deals with the technical issues of designing such services based on standardized protocols, such as the 1TU-T T.120 Recommendations. Focus ismade on adding multipoint facilities to the document communication services taking advantage of the T.120 Recommendations.The paper discusses how to use the facilities provided by the T. 120 Recommendations to design multimedia document communication services such as Joint Presentation/Viewing (PV) or Joint Synchronous Editing (SE) that run on heterogeneous environments. The fast development andpenetration of the T.120 Recommendations make them an adequate platform in which to base other applications. The facilities of T.120 cover, between other features, multipoint communication, token management, conference control, etc. The T.120 multipoint communication Recommendations are the base for that design, and aredescribed briefly. These services could be based only on MCS, but the paper discusses how to map the service onto the complete T. 120 specifications, which also include GCC, that provides a wide variety of conferencing management functions that facilitate the development of documentcommunication services. The paper presents PV and SE, as examples, describing the rules to be followed during a PV or SE session. The paper also analyzes the most relevant issues of the services: start-up synchronization, late joining, early leaving, co-ordination, update, closing and final document copy. These aspects may cause problems in the design and implementation. The proposed design uses the conferencing capabilities specified in 0CC to support PV and SE services. The paper discusses how to solve the relevant issues of PV and SE using the facilities of GCC (and T. 120, in general). | |
| "Versioning Wordsworth; Dynamic Collation in the New Medium." In Electronic Publishing '97 - New Models and Opprtunities: Proceedings of an ICCC/IFIP Conference. ELPUB. Canterbury, UK: University of Kent, 1997. | This paper presents work on a scholarly hypertext edition of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Initially, we plan to digitize the four lifetime editions (1798, 1800, 1802, 1805) by compiling transcripts based on original printed volumes, marking these up with SGML in conformity with the TEl guidelines, and collating them with special software to discover variants and generate an apparatus criticus. Each poem would then become the focus of its own hypertext web, showing all four versions together for the sake of immediate visual comparison. Every page of the digital transcription will be linked to digital images of the printed text, so that features like font, margins, and layout of stanzas on a page will be accessible. Our purpose is to show the development of the poems in the Lyrical Ballads collection, and in the case of the poems by Wordsworth to show how these evolved towards their 'final authorized' form. Cambridge University Press has undertaken to publish this electronic edition on CD-ROM in 1998, to commemorate the bicentenary of the first edition. Wordsworth was chosen for this project because his restless habit of revision produced so many versions of each poem that trying to represent them in print stretches that medium to its limits. New media functionalities of electronic text, digital images, and hypertext may offer the capacity to fully exhibit this poet's diversity. To know Wordsworth is to know not one but many selves, expressed in a succession of texts that mark the different stages of his personal development. Which to choose has always been the editor's dilemma; establishing a text has always meant that we must privilege one version over others, and settle for a static representation of what might be better understood as a dynamic process. By digitizing Wordsworth, we hope to show that the electronic medium is best adapted to capture this protean romantic self by displaying the multiple versions of each work. |