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THE LIBRARY IN THE CARD: RESULTS FROM DECOMATE PROJECT AND CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS AT UAB
No full textThe Library in the card is the slogan which would summarize the aims of the Univeritat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) Library Service in its involvement in several EC Libraries Programme projects. It refers to the possibility of a member of the UAB community to accessing whatever
document he/she needs from his/her desktop on time. The identity card should be the key which opens his/her library without hours and place
constraints.
This paper explains the results from the DECOMATE project one year after its completion, looks into UAB usage studies and further conclusions and makes the audience aware of planned work in the follow up project DECOMATE II.
In a summary UAB Library Service is currently offering the UAB community (35,000 students, 2,500 academic staff and 1,500 administrative staff) access to 267 scientific journals at their wish.
Articles are provided by three publishers (Elsevier Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers and our own UAB Publications Service) directly in
electronic form, including bibliographic data.
DECOMATE is the modular and generic system which allows the management of authorization/identification of users, encryption of transactions, searches in the bibliographical database using the Z39.50 standard, retrieval of articles? PDF files, and extraction of statistical usage data for postprocessing purposes.
This service became operational on October 1996 with a small set of titles and, after the pilot phase and optimal results, it was enlarged with many more titles in order to cover far more scientific areas.
The partners in DECOMATE project, namely Tilburg University, London School of Economics and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, with the
additional collaboration of the European University Institute and the SilverPlatter company, submitted a proposal for a follow up project to the 1997 Call of Proposals of the EC Libraries Programme which has been approuved. The project?s work started in February 1998.
DECOMATE II is a short name for Developing the European Digital Library for Economics, which builds on the former experience of DECOMATE project and aims to enhance its features with the addition of:
. distributed searching of heterogeneous information resources within a specific scientific area, economics,
. access to services provided by different libraries in Europe through a single uniform interface,
. integration of current awareness services,
. development of an information broker module with advanced capabilities for deduplication, ranking, tracing of documents, implementation of
thesauri and subject matching algorithms,
. integration of an accounting module which allows the library to extend its services to external users while complying with commercial providers? conditions
Information Management in the "Information Age"
No full textWe 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.\u27 All this is done from the convenience of a personal computer (PC) on a desktop
Electronic Publishing : the evolution and economics of a hybrid journal
No full textThe 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 \u27hybrid\u27 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\u27s 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 \u27per paper\u27 sales as micro-payment technologies become available
The MeDoc Distributed Electronic Library: Accounting and Security Aspects
No full textThe 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 \u27pay per view\u27 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
Design by Example - A User-Centred Approach for the Specification of Document Layout
No full textDESIGNER 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\u27S graphical user interface using some simple examples to explain the main ideas of our system
The VENetIan Virtual Archive Project: Cultural Heritage and On-line Publishing
No full textThe 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 \u27cultural product\u27. 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 \u27cultural products\u27 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 Role of Electronic Distribution and Publishing in the Development of International Standards
No full textThe 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\u27s 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\u27s 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
Using Multimedia Document Communication services on top of T.120 protocols\u27
No full textOne 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)
Information Spoon-Feeding in an Electronic Environment
No full textThis 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\u27 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 \u27spoon-feeding\u27 whilst identi1\u27ing material to be submitted to the collection. The concept of \u27spoon-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 \u27spoon-feed\u27 them information. Academics and librarians held \u27spoon-feeding\u27 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 \u27education for life\u27 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, \u27spoon-feeding\u27 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
Modelling a Medieval Manuscript Database with HyTime
No full textOur 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