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PRINT ON DEMAND IN SWEDEN: FOUR PROJECTS AND THEIR PRODUCTS, PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS
No full textPrint on demand in Sweden is nothing brand new. The technique has been used by publishers and printers for several years, but until two years ago almost never for the open book market. This use of print on demand is still only in the beginning of its development.
When starting my investigation of Swedish printing on demand last year in March,1 I could find one (1) Swedish project marketing and selling print on demand produced books on the Internet. Today there are four similar projects and one more is taking shape as I speak. Even though these four projects in motion have not got more than a year to produce and make progress, I think it is possible to discover some trends. In this paper I intend to present some background material about Swedish print on demand, some facts about the four projects and their production and finally some of my thoughts about the future of print on demand in Sweden.
Note that a updated version of this paper is available at:
http://www.kur.se/aktuella-skrifter.html#Peurellpo
SEMANTIC AND THEMATIC NAVIGATION IN ELECTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIAS
No full textIn the field of electronic publishing, encyclopedias represent a unique sort of text for investigating advanced methods of navigation. The user of an electronic encyclopedia normally expects special methods for accessing the entries in an encyclopedia database. Navigation through printed encyclopedias in the traditional sense focuses on the alphabetic order of the entries. In electronic encyclopedias, however, thematic structuring of lemmas and, of course, extensive (hyper-)linking mechanisms have been added. This paper will focus on showing developments, which go beyond these navigational structures. We will concentrate on the semantic space formed by lemmas to build a network of semantic distances and thematic trails through the encyclopedia
CITING AND LINKING IN ELECTRONIC SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING: A PRAGMATIC APPROACH
No full textThe transition from traditional, paper-based publishing to electronic publishing presents many challenges for publishers and their constituents. Among the most significant are those that concern linking to articles that are available online and citing of articles that are now published online prior to (or even in lieu of) the final pagination and binding of paper issues. The solutions to these problems will have a great impact on the usability of the scholarly electronic corpus for the research community. In particular, the solutions must be easy to use, persistent, and scalable. Here we examine some pragmatic solutions (in use now) that satisfy these criteria and contrast them with other proposed solutions. The examples are drawn mainly from the experiences of the American Physical Society, but the lessons gleaned will have wide applicability
THE S-LINK-S FRAMEWORK FOR REFERENCE LINKING:
No full textThe Scholarly Link Specification (S-Link-S?) Framework has been proposed as a possible approach towards a solution to the reference linking problem. S-Link-S provides a language for specifying URL generation formulae, and a metadata vocabulary for describing linkable scholarly internet resources. In this paper, I describe the origin of this approach, outline the architecture of the prospective system, and describe the implementation environment.
Keywords: linking, RDF, XML
Electronic brokers as intermediariesfor electronic publishing
No full textPublishing is one of the sectors where with the advance of information technologies there are new possibilities of carrying out traditional processes in a more efficient way. The features provided by the new possibilities are exploited in Electronic Publishing. However, electronic handling does not replace totally the traditional processes (there is still a lot of non-electronic publishing and this will continue existing), but it offers new and interesting possibilities that produce diversification (more than replacement). There are some opinions that, with the increasing connectivity, the intermediaries will disappear and every process (in the electronic world) will be carried out directly from the originator (creator or producer) to the consumer (user or buyer). But there is still a need for intermediary systems to facilitate access to the right information and services. This need increases as the information available and accessible also increases. This paper presents the design and implementation of a specific intermediary system, an electronic broker, that facilitates electronic commerce in the electronic publishing market. An electronic broker for electronic commerce can provide users with products and services that are produced by several suppliers. When the goods being handled consist of electronic information, the broker can also be used to deliver the results. This paper presents the concepts of electronic brokerage in general, but emphasises those aspects more related to electronic publishing, such as the selection of products (images, magazines, videos, etc.) and services (document translation, professional layout, multimedia courses, off-line video production, etc.)
The Connected World - Opening Electronic Doors at the National Library of Canada
No full textFor hundreds of years, libraries have been the custodians of the accumulated knowledge of human civilization - collecting it, preserving it, and making it available and accessible to those who need it or want to use it. This tradition, supported by a variety of legislation, is continuing. With the advent of technology, libraries have changed how they do their work but not why they do it. As we move into the 21st century, the National Library of Canada\u27s basic mandate to collect, preserve and provide access to Canada\u27s published heritage remains unchanged. What has changed over the years is the nature of the published heritage. It now includes electronic publications. Technological progress has expanded (and made more ambitious) our information needs, having placed at our disposal a greater access to national and international information resources. Consequently, the National Library of Canada has broadened its mandate. It not only provides access to the country\u27s published heritage. It also endeavours to facilitate access for all Canadians to world-wide networks of information resources. There are many complex challenges related to providing or facilitating an equitable and universal access to these networks. Creating and managing an electronic collection, preservation or archiving of this electronic collection, and investing in a technical infrastructure required to support a large national heritage collection are the three challenges that will be highlighted. The world becomes connected at an economic expense. Some of the costs are related to the lack of standards, others to the continued inoperability of systems. With digitization costs ranging from 6 per page and given the ever decreasing support for cultural agencies, other financial solutions have been sought. The National Library has become engaged in various (government and private industry) partnerships for its multiple digitization activities that include digitizing unique manuscript collections, creating electronic versions of its current and past exhibits, and making available in electronic format some unique bibliographic tools. These activities will be briefly reviewed. World Wide Web, the final destination for the National Library\u27s digital information, is gradually becoming the backbone of the National Library\u27s services and operations and many resources are dedicated to making this happen. The Library\u27s publishing program is now driven by technology and more than one format may be used when publishing electronically. Based on user requirements, some publications are retained in print or at least are available on a print-on-demand basis. Some of the web-related issues that will be reviewed are: equitable access, including accessibility for persons with disabilities and bilingualism (English and French)
JSTOR: Providing New Access to Old Research
No full textMuch has transpired in a short period of time. The JSTOR database now includes well over two million pages from 47 core journals in 11 academic disciplines. Additional journal content is being digitized at a rate of approximately 100,000 pages per month. More than 250 libraries in the United States and Canada have become participating institutions, providing support for the creation, maintenance and growth of this database. Outside of North America, we have recently announced the establishment of a mirror site in the United Kingdom. Through a novel collaborative relationship with the Joint Information Systems Committee, the JSTOR database will be made available to higher education institutions in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland from a mirror site at the University of Manchester. As each day passes, new opportunities are presented to us to extend the reach of this enterprise. It is an exciting and challenging time. Since many of the participants at this conference are from outside of the United States and will not be familiar with JSTOR, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the project as well as an update on where things stand today
Distributed Multimedia WorkstationFor Medieval Manuscripts
No full textThis paper presents the Web version of the philological workstation BAMBI (Better Access to Manuscript and Browsing of Images) and its design. The BAMBI Web workstation allows historians, and more particularly philologists, to work on manuscripts (transcription, annotations, indexing, etc.) alongside the Internet network. Our approach for the Web implementation of the philological workstation is based on the reuse of the local BAMBI software. We have used the formalism of UML (Unified Modelling Language) for the distributed software design, and especially the concepts based on the diagrams of collaboration. The implementation is based on the ActiveX approach
TOWARDS AN INFORMATION-RICH SOCIETY? OR AN INFORMATION-OVERLOADED ONE? (IS THE MEDIA BECOMING MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE MESSAGE?)
No full textThe rapid growth in all forms of electronic publishing is creating many new problems – both technical and socio-economic. This paper examines some of these from three different perspectives, representing the author’s personal involvement in this field in three different capacities. As the Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Educational Media there is a need to address the issue of what role, if any, electronic publishing can and should play in the future of the journal. The particular subject of this journal, moreover, means that there is a need for the journal readers to have access to samples, at least, of the television and multimedia material which frequently forms the basis of the papers in the journal. This poses difficult issues, both technical and procedural, relating to both the paper version of the Journal and any future electronic versions. A particularly important question is the status of any electronic supplements to the printed journal, since it is extremely unlikely that they will be usable in 50 years’ time, even though the paper copies will still exist in libraries around the world. As Convenor of an ISO Working Group, the author is required to distribute, solely by electronic means, a wide range of documents throughout the world. The paper will discuss the technical issues that this raises, particularly when documents may be created using many different software packages, and yet must be delivered in a form that often requires very strict adherence to the original author’s formatting. As a user of electronic documents in many different fields, the author is faced with still more problems. In particular, the amount of email received by the author makes it quite impossible to read it all; yet how does one decide what to delete before reading? Equally, the number of web pages found as a result of a search on almost any topic is so vast that it is inconceivable that anyone could look at them all. Finally, very few people are able or willing to read documents of more than a page or two from a screen, and resort to printing before reading. Is electronic publishing increasing the rate of deforestation of the planet? Electronic publishing, in the broadest sense of the word, thus raises a great many problems at every stage of the process. These can best be captured by the growing sense of information overload that many (most?) people are suffering from, and the undoubted fact that, in many cases, the medium is becoming more important than the message that it conveys. Based on more than ten years’ experience of using electronic document distribution in several, quite disparate, fields, the paper concludes by suggesting some key principles which must be observed if the brave new world of electronic publishing is not to collapse under the weight of its own success
ByLine: A Global Online Journalism Bank on trial within the IMPRIMATUR project
No full textIndividual journalists have historically had little control over the republishing and syndication of their work. Open networks like the Internet, however, with their potential for many-to-many transmission, have offered technological opportunities for creators to band together and offer in collaboration what they could not offer alone. Taking up this baton on behalf of its writer members, the UK Authors\u27 Licensing and Collecting Society has applied its twenty years\u27 experience in tandem with technology from the European Commission-sponsored IMPRIMATUR project for the development of electronic copyright management systems, and launched the ByLine project: a global syndication and licensing service for journalists on the Internet. ALCS and IMPRIMATUR are partners in the first six-month trial, which was launched in January 1998 at http://www.universalbyline.co