ELPUB Digital Repository
Not a member yet
774 research outputs found
Sort by
INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION IN THE MEDIA INDUSTRY: SITUATION AND GUIDELINES IN THE AGE OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
No full textElectronic publishing, digitisation and improved data transmission allow media compa-nies other forms of co-operation. In addition, different models occur to integrate clients and users in the production process (Fraunhofer IAO 1999A). These trends also offer vast chances to start or extend international activities in the publishing industry.
Besides a few global players, most publisher and media service companies are still ori-ented towards their regional markets. Nowadays many clients act more internationally, information is globally offered via internet, and new telecommunication providers enlarge possibilities to develop and distribute media services. Altogether, this is a challenge to most media companies which have to define their international orientation (Fraunhofer IAO 1999B).
In classical media production, internationalisation primarily manifests itself as an in-crease in activities within Europe, especially in border regions. Such activities are facili-tated by European harmonisation and by a better technical infrastructure, and some customers expect the media industry to internationalise. In electronic publishing, how-ever, regions and closeness are becoming less important in some segments of clients and uses and co-operators, because more of all these activities happen via internet (European Commission 1998).
Nevertheless, the regional orientation is still one chance to serve their specific markets. This specialisation can be a fundament for internationalisation by co-operation, because the transfer of media products into another country does not only demand translation, but needs to be aware of culture, values and habits. Depending on the subject and media channel, users abroad have a different common history, prefer other topics, and are used to specific forms of distribution (Fraunhofer IAO 1999C).
In the German state of Baden-W?rttemberg, a two-years project focused on international co-operation in the media industry. On one hand, it looked at success factors and meth-ods to establish such interactions, on the other hand, it analysed work flows and im-proved interfaces with internationally cooperating partners.
This paper presents the following results:
1. Empirical evidence of international co-operation in German media compa-nies
2. Case studies of medium-sized German publishers which practise international co-operations, especially in Eastern Europe
3. Analysis and design of organisational interfaces between internationally co-operating partners in electronic publishing
4. Conclusions and recommendations towards companies and politic
ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING AND THE EVOLVING INTERNATIONAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGIME
No full textAs we leave the Industrial Age behind us and move into the Information Age, the transition from ?bricks and mortar? commerce to electronic commerce and from paper to electronic publishing pose major challenges for international intellectual property regimes.
Electronic commerce has taken off. Whatever concerns about consumer acceptance there were five years ago have given way to ?click and mortar? business models where e-commerce has an established role complementing traditional commerce. The digital publishing market segment, approximately 70 billion by 2004.1 A significant portion of the GDPs of the industrialized countries is now based on the production and distribution of knowledge. While there are still issues that need to be dealt with, primarily the infrastructure of consistent standards for transactions, digital commerce in digital property will certainly continue to grow.2
Copyright and patent law worldwide, of vital importance to the production and distribution of knowledge, are struggling to keep pace with advances in technology. Intellectual property experts speak of the ?growing incoherence? and ?incipient breakdown? of the international intellectual property system.?3 There is the possibility that much of traditional copyright law may be marginalized.
Patents, too, are troubled. Two years ago the United States Patent and Trademarks Office began awarding patents for Internet business methods, such ?one-clicking shopping? and ?name your own price? reverse auctions.4 The awarding of these ?junk? patents, which seem to fly in the face of the Patent Office?s requirement that an invention be original and not obvious, may pose a threat to innovation in e-commerce, since entrepreneurs would potentially be forced to license these patents before starting up their competing Web sites.
The ability of an ordinary individual to make perfect digital copies and send them anywhere around the world undermines traditional copyright markets. Because of that fact, publishers have moved into electronic publishing with some hesitation. However, technical means are on the horizon that can restrict access to and uses of digitized works, which raises the specter of ?all-consuming copyright owner control.?5
My perspective in all of this is that of a librarian who attempts to deal with practical issues relating to copyright on my campus. An appreciation of the evolving and complex interrelationship between library services and copyright law should be a part of every librarian?s expertise. At this conference I hope to gain a clearer understanding of developments in intellectual property outside the United States and of the technology that will drive those developments
ELECTRONIC MEDIA IN A GLOBAL EDUCATION CONTEXT: PRACTICES AND ISSUES FROM A TORONTO, CANADA PERSPECTIVE
No full textThis paper will outline the means by which electronic media is organized and utilized in educational practice in the context of the secondary school system within the greater Toronto area in Ontario, Canada. Current models include computer mediated learning as an extension, resource and support for traditional classroom teaching and learning, the delivery of credit courses on-line which includes distance education, and co-operative education programs whereby students learn by working in areas outside their home region while being supervised and monitored by their home-based teacher. In addition to disclosing how these practices work, I will analyze some advantages as well as challenges arising from their deployment that derive from my research and discussion with teachers directly involved in such program
UNIVERSAL SYSTEM FOR CREATING AND APPLYING: ELECTRONIC ENCYCLOPAEDIAS FOR THE INTERNET
No full textElectronic encyclopedias are intended both for mass, and for the professional consultation using knowledge in them. The special place of encyclopedias among text-through electronic libraries is connected with an opportunity of construction the searching systems that provides answers reception on intellectual inquiries of the information consumers.
The special approach to the organization of documents storage as knowledge bases, makes possible application of electronic encyclopedias for the automatic users problems decision, with the help of knowledge processing procedures.
Works on creation the universal system VEDA for construction the electronic document storehouses and mechanisms of their processing are conducted in the Internet center of the Kuban University
DEVELOPMENTS TOWARDS A NEW DIGITAL PUBLISHING MODEL
No full textThe McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center (http://mcgovern.library.tmc.edu), a unit within the Houston Academy of Medicine - Texas Medical Center Library (HAM-TMC Library), is building a web-based digital library of medical history concentrating on the State of Texas and the Texas Medical Center. Our goals are to increase the awareness and utilization of the large, rare, and culturally rich holdings of the Library and its partners.
Founded in 1949 and located in Houston, Texas, the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library was created to serve the information needs of the health sciences students, faculty, researchers, and community. This not only includes the community of the Texas Medical Center but also the greater community around it. HAM-TMC is a private library funded by a consortium of twenty medical institutions
DIGITAL INCUNABULA: VERSIONALITY AND VERSATILITY IN DIGITAL SCHOLARLY EDITIONS
No full textThe physical medium signifies. Any document type within any medium offers a semiotic setting of its own, a particular document architecture [1]. Every transmission of a literary work affects its text [2] due to the particular media used and the choices made by the individual transmitter. Certain features of the textual work that can be expressed within the new architecture and its web of signs are preserved, while others are treated as noise, obscuring the essential text signals. This certainly holds true for the current transition of text: with each digitisation certain particulars of both the work and the tool are emphasised at the expense of others, and there is always some collision between different document architectures [3].
Furthermore, as any McLuhan student knows, a new media form poses as the old medium by imitating its very form. Any bibliological study will tell how the first printed books, known as the incunables, well into the 16th century tried to fit a previous medial expression into the economy of the new, and thereby did their best to pose as handwritten, illuminated manuscripts [4].
Such collisions and transitions have, to some extent, been studied within disciplines such as book history, editorial theory, textual criticism, and analytical and historical bibliography. One would therefore welcome more intense cooperative efforts between the currently "sexy" market of electronic publishing and the perhaps not-so-sexy competence of the latter disciplines
XML: MORE THAN AN E-PUBLISHING LANGUAGE
No full textXML is an SGML-based language designed for the interchange of documents with more flexible and powerful features than those provided by HTML. It can be considered as an intermediate step between HTML and SGML. On one hand, it is a fully conformant SGML application, but without most of the features of SGML that make it complex to handle or that are rarely used. On the other hand, XML is not restricted to a fixed DTD as HTML is: users can choose from the set of available DTDs the one that is best suited for their applications, or develop new ones for fully satisfying their requirements.
Although XML is initially a meta-language intended for publishing on the Web, there are many other applications of XML. Some of them are being widely used, some others are under investigation and some others still need be to be conceived.
In the paper, we describe some general uses of XML, such as metadata description or XML/EDI, and some experiences with XML, that include statistics handling, forms interchange, and XML/EDI payment
OPEN ARCHIVING FOR OPEN RESEARCH
No full textIt is a foregone conclusion that all refereed journals will soon be
available online; most of them already are. This means that one can
access them from any networked desk-top. The literature will all be
interconnected by citation, author, and keyword/subject links, allowing
for unheard-of power and ease of access and navigability. Successive
drafts of pre-refereeing preprints will be linked to the official
refereed draft, as well as to any subsequent corrections, revisions,
updates, comments, responses, and underlying empirical databases, all
enhancing the self-correctiveness and interactiveness of scholarly and
scientific research and communication in remarkable new ways.
But there is still one last frontier to cross before science reaches
the optimal and the inevitable: Just as there is no longer any need to
be constrained by the access-blocking restrictions of paper
distribution, there is no longer any need to be constrained by the
access-blocking financial fire-walls of
Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View (S/L/P) tolls for this give-away
literature that its authors have always donated for free (and its
referees have refereed for free), with the sole goal of maximizing
their impact on research (by accessing the eyes and minds of
fellow-research) and hence on society
IMPROVING INDIVIDUAL BOOK PUBLISHING CONCEPTS WITH XML SCHEMA
No full textThe traditional way of publishing books is a one-dimensional procedure. An author creates content, believing that somebody may be interested in it. A publisher in-vests money in his book project, financing the production, the marketing and the distribution to the bookstores. The readers select the books in the bookstore under a wide range of decision criteria?s. At the end of the chain, the public libraries save the book, storing the information as cultural heritage. With the growth of digital printing technology, the Internet and data based publishing, a new type of book production is also in the discussions: Book-on-Demand (BoD). Especially suppliers of the new enabling technologies promote this new type of book.
The argumentation for this book publishing strategy is guided very strong by the traditional way of book production and of traditional book concepts itself. Core feature of this BoD concept is the masterless print process of digital presses. Be-cause of this, the make ready times for printing decline to zero, the print production costs of one copy are the same as multi copy production. Since more then ten years this technical capability is used as Print-on-Demand PoD in invoice printing and other applications. Now also the bindery becomes ?on-Demand?, the inline production of a single brochure is possible on a low but acceptable quality stage. But the extension from PoD to BoD did not change the book market in a larger way. Only some specific branches occurred where BoD could take some significant parts of the market share. But today?s BoD does not cast any doubt on the tradi-tional book itself.
The main error of these first BoD concepts is that they ignore the real cost struc-ture of the books. Typically for a book for 20 must be paid for the printing, and all technical costs including materials are below 2,50$ [1]. Because of this reason, real cost savings in production and logistics are not so high and only in some special applications BoD is attractive.
We have to take another important fact into account: There are only a few authors writing books without any commercial interest and with the goal to sell only two or three copies. The success story of a book is, either in non-material or in commer-cial categories, to spread it. From this point of view, BoD is a disaster for the author and the publisher, who can not think about individual books economically. BoD solved only their second problem, the production. But the first problem, how to reach the reader who needs the book, remains.
Consistently, today?s BoD is not really successful. We call this concepts ?1st stage BoD (1?BoD)?, whereby the books are characterized by new production concepts and new output technologies (PoD, but also E-Books and CD-ROMs), but tradi-tional business models and content handling
XML: USING AN EVOLVING STANDARD IN ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
No full textXML is the proposed electronic publishing and data interchange format of the future. Currently XML is immature with little tool support, particularly for end-user World Wide Web browser display. At present many journal publishers typeset their articles, or at least their article metadata, in SGML which is converted to HTML for end-user display. The SGML article metadata is used for electronic data interchange for supply to external aggregating and abstracting agencies. This paper discusses the change to the electronic journal publishing production process implied by an adoption of the World Wide Web standard format of XML, the problems associated with using and displaying XML now, and the future benefits of adopting a standard interchange format. Real work experience gained by working with journal publishers in actual electronic publishing scenarios is used as illustration.
Keywords. XML, electronic journals, metadata, DTD, electronic data interchange