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Electronic Publishing at Humboldt University Berlin - Concepts, Tools and Services
No full textOriginally established to merely publish electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) as well as postdoctoral theses, the edoc server at Humboldt University Berlin (http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/) has become the service platform for scholarly publications of all types. It is an integral part of the university\u27s information infrastructure which also contains a teaching management system, a virtual library portal, and a media portal. During the past years the edoc server has become the central place for electronic publishing within the university. On the basis of a hosting concept, the Electronic Publishing Group which is in charge of the edoc server also provides its publishing services for external authors, editors and institutions likewise. And being a DINI certified document and publication server, the technological components and the organisational workflows developed for the edoc server exemplify other scholarly publishing servers. As a joint group formed by the Computer and Media Service and the University Library of Humboldt University the Electronic Publishing Group deals with all issues associated with scholarly electronic publishing, including technical, library, and legal aspects. Combining the development of publishing tools and services with its routine operation the group consists of permanent and project funded staff. This paper describes the edoc server at Humboldt University and details on both the technical and non-technical parts of the entire publishing service
Semiautomatic Extraction of Thesauri and Semantic Search in a Digital Image Archive
No full textThe topics addressed in this paper are threefold: First, techniques for the semiautomatic normalization of image descriptors in a digital image collection from free text titles and keywords. Second, the efficient construction of thesauri for specific image collections. And third, the optimisation of search mechanisms to deal with the special characteristics of the image collections and with the use made by users through web-based search interfaces. The solutions presented here have been developed in the framework of a commercial project intended to improve image search in a website for selling photographs through the web. The ultimate goal of this project is to improve the customer accessibility to a collection of more than two million photographs
Disseminating Service Registry Records
No full textThe JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) contains descriptions of collections of resources available to researchers, learners and teachers in the UK, along with technical service access details. This paper describes the data model and metadata description schema of IESR, and the services IESR provides to disseminate its records. There is a particular focus on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) interface, including a possible use scenario. IESR\u27s position within a wider information environment, its relationship to other initiatives, and future possible service registry directions are discussed
Independent Journals: Solutions for Low-cost, Open Access Journal Publishing
No full textThe growing momentum of the world wide open access movement has splurged a parallel trend of development of open source and low cost electronic publishing systems and digital repository services. These growth and development strongly reflect the desire of the scholarly communities to take back control of aspects of scholarly communication and to improve processes for the dissemination and impact of their research.
The development of journal publication systems makes it easier for university presses, libraries, societies, and individual researchers to launch and run open access journals. Researchers are now less dependant on the decisions of large publishers as to which journals should be published (decisions that are often made on financial, rather than academic, grounds), how the journals should be priced, access policies, etc. Digital publishing systems also allow scholarly communities to experiment with innovative formats, to contribute to sharing and re-using digital research data, and overcome the limits of traditional publishing
The users of e-publishing and their communication behaviour
No full textA major problem with discussing how users interact with electronic publications is that such publications are not only new, they are also evolving rapidly in terms of their characteristics. As a result, studies of users have also changed - from the 1980s and early 1990s, when e-publications were mainly experimental and few in number, to the present-day, when they are numerous and widely available [21]. It was expected in the 1990s that the first decade of the present century would be a crucial period in the transition from print publishing to e-publishing, and such is, indeed, proving to be the case. At the same time, the medium for e-publication is increasingly becoming online and interactive. Such forms as CD-ROM are still useful for specific purposes (for example, including electronic information with printed matter), but the main future for electronic publishing is clearly linked to online developments. One problem in discussing user interaction with electronic publications is the somewhat restricted scope of the most extensive user studies of e-publishing. These have tended to concentrate on academic or professional groups, frequently in North America, and on their use of e-journals. Fortunately, many of the factors affecting users are common across a range of e-publication types. Because of the rapidity with which change is occurring, most attention will be paid here to user studies that have appeared over the past five years. However, these studies have often confirmed the results of work carried out in the 1990s (especially since usage of the World Wide Web became common). Users\u27 attitudes to e-publishing, and the way they interact with it, are affected by a range of factors. At a general level, they depend on the value that is attached to electronic resources, with particular emphasis on the perceived advantages and disadvantages of e-publications. Next, they can be affected by the specific sort of user group being studied. Then they can vary according to individual preferences regarding methods of seeking information. These various factors are, in turn, affected by others. One such is the availability and reliability of the electronic facilities that users can access. Another is the extent to which habits and skills acquired in the use of print publications can be applied in an e-publishing environment. The discussion of users\u27 behaviour below will concentrate on the significance of these different, though often related, factors
Electronic Publications of Old Geographical Maps and Studying Names on Them
No full textSome aspects of digitizing old printed maps and suitable forms of storing are pointed to discussion. Questions arising about practical use of a resolution level, which is necessary for a proper identification of names on maps, and how to identify them, are considered. A case study is presented
Using SVG for an User-Interface to a Digital Library
No full textInterfaces for users on the web are usually created using standard HTML-technologies. Although dynamic text-based features are widely available on the web (e.g. by using DHTML) there are still some limitations in the user experience when using dynamic graphical elements. In this article we focus on a GUI-prototype using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as an interface to an existing Digital Library. First we describe the current situation of the running system and explain some of the limitations in the GUI. Thereafter we compare the document-format with other electronic formats. An overview of the prototype and a detailed description of the used framework will be given in the main section of this article. Finally we are going to show an improved version of a search task using an SVG-category viewer. Currently supported SVG-recommendation (SVG 1.1) by the SVG-plugins have some limitations. The upcomming release will solve some of the problems and introduce new features related to data-handling and database access. An outlook of these new features and lessons learned in implementing the prototype will close the article
Metadata and Rights Interoperability for Content Interchange between TV Programs Producers
No full textWhen content producers are forced to generate and manage content day after day (and, most of the time, in a hurry), as in the case of TV broadcasters, they have different priorities and requirements than other kinds of content providers. However, the requirement for content interchange through optimum content search is always there. The paper presents how the issue of interoperability of metadata and digital rights information is solved in a specific project, the XAC (Xarxa IP Audiovisual de Catalunya, Audiovisual IP Network of Catalonia), where producers of TV programmes are the main involved content owners. After an analysis of how these content providers manage metadata and rights information, a specific proposal fulfilling providers\u27 requirements and International Standards, the XAC Metadata Set (XAC-MS), is described. This is the basis for implementing a system for multimedia content interchange that could be extended to other kinds of multimedia publishing
CityInMyPocket: Digital Walking Guides
No full textBy the end of this year visitors to the Flemish town of Mechelen can discover the city with the help of the new CityInMyPocket walking guide. Instead of following a person or a book, people can pick up a CityInMyPocket digital walking guide and go sightseeing at their own speed. So, leave your heavy guide books and many flyers at home. CityInMyPocket will tell you just as much, and even more. CityInMyPocket is like having a friend who lives in the neighbourhood showing you around. The goals are formulated, but how did we manage? In order to succeed, we started investigating how people usually visit a city. Are people just strolling around the city or do they strictly follow the walk mentioned in their walking guide? What are the information needs during their stay? In parallel with the user analysis, we looked at similar projects and applications to see how they approached the problem. Based on the results of the user needs and the tests of existing applications, we defined the concepts of the CityInMyPocket walking guide. Here, we can distinguish three main building blocks: the map application, the search engine and the route planner. When the overall concept was ready and the information needs where specified, we started building the information model based on the Topic Map standard. For the map information we explored the power of the SVG standard. The moment the first data set was prepared, we implemented the map application. The remaining concepts were built around the central map application. This paper describes in more detail how we managed to build the CityInMyPocket walking guide
Making a Home for a Family of Online Journals
No full textIn this paper we present the e-publishing platform created by and for the Living Reviews project. In particular, we give an overview of the Living Reviews project, concept and publishing model, compare our project to related projects, and present the technical infrastructure used to run the "Living Reviews" family of online journals. We will give an overview of the publishing environment, point out the challenges inherent in distributed editorial offices, and describe the interaction between various user groups and the infrastructure. Based on this description of the environment, we will explain the constituents of the infrastructure and how they evolved. Following the history and detailed description of the constituents we give an overview of further plans within our project and applicability of our particular solutions to other publishing projects. Again on this level of detail, we will compare our solutions to related efforts. We will conclude the paper listing lessons learned from our project. In particular, we will describe the challenge of reconciling the technical and the non-technical divisions of the publishing project and how it was met for the Living Reviews family. While mainly providing a case study, we also hope to point out solutions to publishing problems which may be of general interest, and more importantly make a case for necessary standardization of e-publishing software components. We don\u27t see much scientific value in this venture, but value for the scientific community since we present another epublishing platform to use, provide another set of tools to choose from, give another best-practices description when rolling your own