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INDRENI - THE NEPALI INTRANET. A PLATFORM FOR ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING AND INFORMATION SHARING IN NEPAL
No full textThe paper commences with a briefing on the state of telecommunications in developing countries, Nepal being the prime example. The paper goes on to examine the procedures followed to establish Nepal Internet Users\u27 group(NIUG); a non-profit NGO established to facilitate access to internet technologies through intranet in a cost-effective manner.
In establishing this network, the group was assisted by the Electronic Networking Project of the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD)?a project funded by International Development Research Center (IDRC), Canada and responsible for establishing NepalNet , a group of development organisations through which a joint home page was registered on the worldwide web. The backward and forward linkages are explored?and this includes the difficulties of establishing IT networks in countries in which governments maintain a monopoly on telecommunication facilities. How these were overcome, the equipment acquired, and the partnerships formed are all given a place in this paper. The paper concludes with a brief on costs and the plans for the future, especially the role of IT in development research
PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE E-PUBLISHING MODEL
No full textConsiders why, after nearly twenty years of development, the electronic publishing model has not replaced the paper based model for academic journals. Gives three insights that attempt to explain this: the first is the \u27means-end\u27 confusion of commercial publishers, the second is the failure to realise it is the purpose not the form that is important about the current journal model, and third is the failure to recognise that a net-based replacement for the journal does not necessarily need a publisher. Finally some \u27ground rules\u27 to be used when thinking about, or designing, any future electronic publishing model are proposed
ONLINE PUBLISHING AS A SUPPORT FOR SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION IN DYNAMIC KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITIES
No full textInternet based services, particularly asynchronous communication services, offer an environment suited to the rise of knowledge communities. Knowledge communities, or invisible colleges, have existing for a long time, but have not always had efficient ways of communication.
Knowledge communities are heavily dynamic and are always changing in their composition and also in each member interests. The intersection of the interests of a given number of elements creates the environment for the rising of a community. Nevertheless, this community will benefit not by the intersection but by the union of knowledge of these elements. On the other hand, multiple overlapping communities are generated and one persons set of interests includes some intersection with the interests of several knowledge communities.
These communities are rather fluid and dynamic and the old processes for scholarly com-munication don\u27t seem to fairly represent these properties. Digital Libraries projects keep appearing throughout the world. Paper printed journals and proceedings are beginning to be also distributed electronically. Online scientific journals are starting to be taken seriously by scientists and by some of the major scientific publishers.
Nevertheless, online documentation per se doesn\u27t address the dynamic behavior of knowledge communities. Also, the problem of the undiscovered public knowledge (as called by Don Swanson) still tends to remain unattended. Most of the times we have been using old processes to solve new problems.
In our opinion, to address these issues, an online scholarly publication should have the following goals:
1. Promote the generation of knowledge communities composed of elements coming from different scientific communities - promote interdisciplinarity assuming it is a key factor on discovering public knowledge,
2. Promote, develop and maintain the communication between elements of a knowledge community,
3. Narrow the gaps between, and integrate as much as possible, formal and informal communication.
In this paper we present our research project on online publishing of a scientific journal, we discuss some issues related with knowledge communities and scholarly communication, and we propose a set of characteristics an online scientific publication should have in order to accomplish the aforementioned goals
A STRUCTURED LINK DOCUMENT AS A NEW MEANS FOR COMPOSING AND PUBLISHING TECHNICAL CUSTOMER DOCUMENTATION IN EXTRANETS AND INTRANETS
No full textInternet technology together with the SGML based XML language family provide means to develop technical customer document management in inter-organisational industrial projects. The purpose of this exploratory study is to describe the characteristics of an inter-organisational industrial project, the problems related to the management of technical customer documentation and the possibilities of the new information technology to solve some of the problems. The model for technical customer document management in an inter-organisational network is presented. The model indicates that more precise investigation is needed and that future research should concentrate on developing systematic extranet and intranet design methodology which focuses on link management
LEARNING CURVES: MANAGING SMOOTH PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CYCLES IN NON-PRINT ENVIRONMENTS
No full textWith the demand for electronic products and desktop access in the past 5-8 years, information providers have had to reorganize their operations to manage and produce digital versions of their publications. They have had to develop new formats and new interfaces while also refocusing business plans to establish new pricing models and collaborative partnerships. Managing these types of fundamental changes to their business has entailed use of project management as well as new product development processes.
Unlike the mature medium of print on paper, publishing in a non-print environment requires established processes of product development and requires expertise in the appropriate management of those cycles. But publishing organizations, at the beginning of this decade, had little familiarity with such cycles as applied to the electronic environment. For print, there was a standard production process for taking an item from manuscript to bound volume or in the instance of secondary bibliographic resources, from published source to full bibliographic citation and abstract entry. But since the burgeoning of the scholarly literature since World War II, these processes had become well-known and expertly done by most organizations in the publishing community.
Conversant with the information requirements of the professional and scholarly research communities, the Institute for Scientific Information? (ISI?) produces highly-acclaimed Web environments for tools which facilitate serious research at the desktop. In building those environments, like so many other content providers, ISI had to establish new or modify existing processes for conceiving, planning, developing and testing a product prior to commercial release. The context in which this process was developed mirrors the changes at large in the publishing and information industries between the period between 1993 and today
ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS OF CULTURAL HERITAGE: GLOBAL CHALLENGES AND LOCAL PRACTICES
No full textThe paper reviews information and communication technologies as new tools in cultural representation and knowledge management, addresses issues of persuasion and engagement with the new media, explores ways on how to construct three-dimensional interfaces that are easy to use and navigate. These main issues are addressed in discussing the design of cultural interface \u27Virtual exhibition of Lithuanian Cultural Heritage\u27 (a Millennium project). Also, the paper reviews new and multi-media as tools in communication and knowledge management and focuses on new media\u27s potentials and challenges, such as virtual realities and cyberculture
A NEW CONTINENT INTO LITERATURE: THE AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE DATABASE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY LIBRARY
No full textIn 1973, the Australian novelist Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for his novel "The Eye of the Storm." At the ceremony in Stockholm the novelist was honoured for his "epic and psychological narrative art, which has introduced a new continent into literature." This was undoubtedly true and White\u27s achievements have been followed by a new generation of novelists, poets and dramatists: Peter Carey, David Malouf, Les Murray, to name only a few. Patrick White\u27s award has always seemed to Australians to have tremendous significance, perhaps because it put to rest internationally the old colonial worries about whether Australians were capable of producing truly great art. However, there has always been a problem for contemporary Australian literary studies in its lack of any sense of a tradition predating our modern writers. It is as if we Australians did not begin to write about our experiences until the middle of this century. There were, of course, important writers before and contemporary with Patrick White, and he himself named a number as worthy of the acclaim surrounding his own work. But leaving aside the debates and concerns about what constitutes "great art" and "great literature", there is a more "archaeological" approach to a nation\u27s literary output, and one that is peculiarly amenable to electronic forms of publication and dissemination. This approach is evident in the creation of a database at the University of Sydney Library - The Australian Literature Database: A Collection of 18th 19th and 20th Century Australian Texts
ISSUES IN ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION OF IMAGE DATABASES: REPORT FROM A STUDY OF THE MUSEUM EDUCATIONAL SITE LICENSING PROJECT
No full textThis paper summarizes the findings of a two-year study of digital image distribution and publication, focusing on the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL). This study (Besser & Yamashita 1998) evaluated the costs, infrastructure, and efforts involved in implementing the MESL project, as well as user reaction to functionality. The study also examined costs of running analog slide libraries and compared these to costs and functionality associated with digital image distribution.
The MESL Project was the first US attempt to take a collection of images and accompanying metadata from a variety of museums and publish these in digital form on campus networks. It was a two-year experimental collaboration among seven museums and seven universities that distributed over 9,000 digital images and associated text for classroom use.
The study discusses cost-center models for looking at the distribution of digital and analog images, including creating digital images and metadata, mounting and distributing digital images, maintaining a distribution house, running a slide library, and an analysis of hybrid image libraries. It presents a comparison of user interfaces and search engines from the MESL universities. It also reports on the results of focus groups discussing faculty adoption of digital images for classroom use
DEMOCRATIC APPROACH TO ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING IN A NON-DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM
No full text"As we prepare to enter the twenty-first century, the world faces two important challenges to both its political stability and its potential for sustainable growth. The first is the growing gap between the science-rich countries of the North and the science-poor countries of the South in the production and use of scientific and technological knowledge. The second is the increasing complexity of the problems whose solution, drawing on such knowledge, is needed to achieve equitable, environmentally sustainable, development".2
This sentence, written recently by M. Hassan, Executive Director of the Third World Academy of Sciences, contains a series of statements that are not any more surprising to us; they have virtually become commonplace and thus run the well known risk of losing their effect despite the fact that they describe a terrible reality. It is particularly remarkable to read that the disparities are becoming larger, the gap is growing, the complexity is increasing, and that such sentences are found not only in the present context, but whenever a realistic description is made of almost any aspect of the contemporary world and the dynamics of globalization, be it nutrition, income, education, ...
PRODUCTS AND PROCESSES: HOW INNOVATION AND PRODUCT LIFE-CYCLES CAN HELP PREDICT THE FUTURE OF THE ELECTRONIC SCHOLARLY JOURNAL
No full textWe live in a time of change in the scholarly journal industry. This change predates the arrival of electronic publishing, but the increase in new technologies has accelerated many of its aspects. Indeed, many of the latest advances in e-journals have only been made possible by the development and adoption of new technologies such as multimedia personal computers, the Internet and World Wide Web, Adobe\u27s Portable Document Format (PDF) and so on. Such new technologies follow broadly predictable life-cycles which influence their adoption rates. What does the literature of technology life-cycles have to say about e-journals and how can it help us plot their future? This paper starts by considering technology life-cycles and adoption rates in general. Next it considers product and process innovation. It then looks at these life-cycles in the personal computer industry, before concluding by considering the implications of these concepts for e-journals in the near to mid-term