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Information Spoon-Feeding in An Electronic Environment
No full textMost academic libraries are exploring the possibilities of introducing electronic formats to improve their overall service to users. It is important to remember, however, that though these may offer indisputable benefits, they may also bring problems and disadvantages.This paper seeks to examine the potential educational benefits and disadvantages of providingeasily accessible and carefully selected key course texts and other course-related materials in an electronic format
Breaking the barriers of resistance to electronic journal entry: Experiences of BIToday
No full textThere are a number of socio-economic issues that are generally understood in the area of electronic publishing. Primary among these is an apparent reluctance within the academic community to accept a replacement for paper-based journals. This sits incongruously with the fact that the WWW was born at CERN primarily as a vehicle for the effective dissemination of scientific research papers. The present paper focuses on research, problems and issues encountered at South Bank University in attempting to establish a Business Information Technology (BIT) Journal on the Internet (BiToday). It is hoped that this undertaking, which requires challenging the current academic culture on research and publication, would meet the requirements of academic staff and publicise the current and innovative academic area of BIT outside of the University. However, there are different levels of acceptance and understanding about communicating by electronic publication. This paper will thus review and highlight the main - problems and issues that have been encountered in this effort to establish an electronic journal in a relatively new academic discipline. The culture of electronic publishing is opposed by a number of \u27forces of resistance\u27 (as they may be termed in the electronic publishing environment). These forces of resistance act like bathers into the electronic journal field. This paper will suggest from experience the nature and origin of these resistant forces. Two obvious resistant forces are the establishment of standardisation of publication and the difficulties of enforcing copyright upon electronic journals. However, these issues are only policy constraints and pale in significance next to the issues of the initial cultural establishment of an electronic journal, which manifests itself in the form of an academic culture gap. The socio-economic forces of change in the academic world, such as diminishing budget allocation for paper-based journals held in academic libraries, strongly suggests that electronic journals will become the standard and not the exception in the future. Those institutions that, early in this evolution, break the barriers of entry to the electronic journal field, stand to benefit in terms of establishing standards and an academic presence. Academic institutions are still in a period of experimentation. Most people are still trying to get to grips with the basics of the WWW and theevolutionary nature of electronic publishing media which offer the prospect of hyperlinks, to point to additional reference material within other academic domains, or even other electronic journals (at no additional cost). This paper, firstly, addresses the issues that surround \u27barriers to entry\u27 in the electronic journals field. Secondly, it outlines the forces of resistance to an acceptance of electronic journal media and the nature and reason of such resistance. Thirdly, the paper will suggest possible solutions, and areas of further work, needed to overcome the primary forces of resistance
Issues for libraries, publishers and subscription agents posed by the development of an electronic \u27short loan\u27 collection of high demand journal articles in a university library
No full textDigitising high-demand materials in order to increase their access to students is currently very much a library-initiated activity, and one which needs careful presentation and explanation to publishers. There are a number of Electronic Libraries (eLib) projects working in this area, and some university libraries have independently undertaken to develop electronic collections, for example the universities of Leeds, Derby,Wolverhampton and York. To ensure access to large numbers of students, librarians normally place a photocopy of high-demand articles in their short loan collections. If the article is in a journal held by the library, this is very straightforward. If the library does not subscribe to the journal, then a cleared copy can be obtained from the British Library. This service now charges the cost of the inter-library loan (about ?5.00) together with a fee to be paid to the publisher. These fees currently range from ?4.20 for pre 1990 material and up to ?10.00 for most other articles. There are about 600 journal titles for which publishers have asked for a fee in excess of ?10.00. It must be noted that, apart from the cleared copy fee paid tothe British Library, short loan services currently generate no income for publishers
Issues for libraries, publishers and subscription agents posed by the development of an electronic \u27short loan\u27 collection of high demand journal articles in a university library
No full textTopics addressed by this paper are: changing role of publishers andsubscription agents; changing role of libraries and others involved in the information dissemination process; economic/financial questions;Project ACORN (Access to Course Readings via Networks) began in August 1996 as one of a new strand of electronic short loan projects funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) via the eLib (electronic Libraries) Programme. Project ACORN\u27s distinguishing features are firstly the involvement of Swets & Zeitlinger (the international periodicals subscription agency) in the project consortium, and secondly the project\u27s sole focus on journal articles. The overall aim otthe project is to develop a transferable model of the whole process of making high-demand short loan journal articles available electronically, and in particular to focus on the role of a third party agent in gaining copyright clearance and providing digital copies to libraries
The Librarian\u27s Role in Building the Virtual Library
No full textWe are entering a virtual age. The signs have been visible for over a decade. When my children were growing up I watched with concern as they preferred to interact with soccer balls on the computer screen rather than with neighborhood kids in our backyard. I imagined that a reduction in interaction with human playmates would create adult misfits in the real world. Only now, when they are adults, do I understand that the time they spent with joystick in hand was preparing them for their virtual future. My children and the wave of people behind them are ready for virtuality before it is ready for them
The Image Directory, Electronic Publishing, and the Changing Socio-Economic Position of Art Museums
No full textThe opportunities afforded by the Internet and online commerce are molding a traditional union catalog project into a publication that, before they became widely available, could not have been conceived. The project, the Image Directory, is creating new alliances between the editorial, production, and marketing departments of Academic Press. It is encouraging image owners, who are providing data for the catalog, to enter into the electronic publishing medium either for the first time or beyond theft own Web pages or CD-ROM productions. Finally, it is also holding out the potential for scholarly benefits, not only to the image owners, but also to students, researchers, and professionals interested in arts images. Whilst the concept of creating a union catalog of information about arts images is not new, without the capabilities offered by electronic publishing the project could not come into existence. Electronic publishing has introduced two significant ingredients to the art museum community that are making this project work. The first is the potential that it offers for the management of image collections. In the era when information about images and art objects was recorded on cards, museums created idiosyncratic vocabularies and formats that were incompatible with those of other museums. Because collections differ and because museums are by nature competitive, vying with each other for unique objects, there were few incentives to combine data. Collections management software and the introduction of standardized vocabularies and controls, such as the Getty\u27 s Art and Architecture Thesaurus, have provided the tools for significant inventory projects.The second is the fear of losing control of data that electronic publishing creates among curators and trustees. With the diminishment of grants and federal funding, museums are coming under increasing pressure to generate revenue. Looking for ways to generate revenue from their assets, they host block-buster exhibitions, sell coffee cups with paintings printed on them, and market themselves in ways that are succeeding in increasing attendance numbers. But electronic publishing and, in particular, the World Wide Web, offer pirates the opportunity to steal high resolution images, violating copyright rules and depriving museums of revenue that would naturally come through the sales of reproduction rights. Along with developments in image watermarking and the new envelope-locking technologies, museums need other ways to mark their assets as their own. The Image Directory directly addresses both of these aspects. The project is based on the information that image owners have already created for their collection management databases. Academic Press will add no new data to those records, but will standardize them so that idiosyncrasies among records are bridged but not erased. Scholars will be able to search the world for the location of and information about images and museums will have a central, definitive source in which to publicise their holdings and to list rights and reproductions information. The Image Directory will offer a leveling factor into the hierarchical world of museums, making records from the largest, best endowed museums equally accessible to those of small ones. And it will offer image owners the ability to sell images through the database architecture, potentially opening a new revenue stream for them. The Image Directory is an excellent example of an electronic publishing project crystallizing social and financial trends. There is every possibility that it will not only facilitate new scholarly discoveries, but it will increase the presence of different types of art in mainstream culture
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 re-thinking of the tasks of all the subjects involved in the process of creating and using a "cultural product". Publishers and all those institutions involved in the dissemination and preservation of cultural heritage can not ignore the risk of being left behind and gradually replaced by different subjects who, since they own the new information technology, can become the new and only 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 bring it into the new information technology world. The change of roles has to be compounded by the act of singling out new kinds of "cultural products" and value-added services that properly exploit all the potentialities of the newtechnology. 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 relate about its close collaboration with European libraries and historical archives on the one hand, and software houses and technical universities on the other, in order to develop innovative editorial services to be available on the World-Wide Web
Breaking the barriers of resistance to electronic journal entry: Experiences of BlToday
No full textThere are a number of socio-econoniicissues that are generally understood in the area of electronic publishing. Primary among these is an apparent reluctance within the academic community to accept a replacement to paper-based journals. This sits incongruously with the fact that the WWW was born at CERN primarily as a vehicle for the effective dissemination of scientific research papers. This paper focuses on research, problems and issues encountered at South Bank University in attempting to establish aBusiness Information Technology (BIT) Journal on the Internet (BlToday). It is hoped that this undertaking, which requires challenging the current academic culture on research and publication, would meet the requirements of academic staff and publicise the current and innovative academic area of BIT outside of the University. However, there are different levels of acceptance and understanding about communicating by electronic publication. This paper will thus review and highlight the main problems andissues that have been encountered in this effort to establish an electronic journal in a relatively new academic discipline. The culture of electronic publishing is opposed by a number of \u27forces of resistance\u27 (asthey may be termed in the electronic publishing environment). These forces of resistance act like barriers to entry in the electronic journal field. This paper will suggest from experience the nature and origin of these resistant forces. Two obvious resistant forces being the establishment of standardisation on publication and the difficulties on enforcing copyright upon electronic journals. However, these issues are only policy constraints and pale in significance next to the issues of initial cultural establishment of an electronic journal, which manifests itself in the form of an academic culture gap. The socio- economic forces of change in the academic world, such as diminishing budget allocation for paper based journals held in academic libraries, strongly suggests that electronic journals will become the standard and not the exception in the future. Those institutionsthat, early in this evolution, break the barriers of entry to the electronic journal field, stand to benefit in terms of establishing standards and an academic presence. Academic Institutions are still in a period of experimentation. Most people are still trying to get to grips with the basics of the \VWW and the evolutionary nature of electronic publishing mediums which offer the prospect of hyperlinks, to point to additional reference material within other academic domains, or even other electronicjournals (at no additional cost). This paper, firstly, addresses the issues that surround "barriers to entry" in the electronic journals field. Secondly, the paper outlines the forces of resistance to an acceptance of electronic journal mediums and the nature and reason of such resistance. Thirdly, the paper will suggest possible solutions, and areas of further work, needed to overcome the primary forces of resistance
Linking Everything to Everything: Publishing Myth or Reality?
No full textThe hypertext link as popularised by the World Wide Web is a simple utility. As users demand greater quality in the information they find online, as authors seek simpler tools, and as publishers seek original ways of adding value and maintaining control over their online products, a more sophisticated notion of links needs to prevail. New approaches to links are being tackled in two ways. Some research initiatives are building link services based on established hypertext principles, while some onlinepublishers are acting on an immediate need to produce large numbers of links. How these two approaches are converging within research and commercial frameworks will be the feature of this paper, which will describe the publishing application of links in the Open Journal project, in which thepublisher Electronic Press (EP) is a partner, and also a separate trial of a link service being developed at Southampton University applied to the journals services on EP\u27s commercial BioMedNet online club for those working in biology and medicine. A link service is one way of supporting greater link productivity. The potential of the link service is to link everything to everything, automatically generating links on a massive scale. But in a publishing context, what is the practical value of doingthis? As the link service in development at Southampton University is itself being commercialised, the emphasis of the Open Journal project and the BioMedNet trial is to refine this capability and to optimise its value as a development tool for users and publishers. In this environment the principalgoals of the applications are to demonstrate: controlled editorial linking; complete citation linking; the integration of diverse resources such as journals, books and databases; link management; and a framework for publishing online products. In this sense links are more than simple \u27go to\u27 jumps between documents, but become highly flexible information filters. Essentially, the link service, by separating links from the underlying documents, provides a means of managing and applying link data across distributed resources. By looking closely at how link data can be created and collected in databases, or Iinkbases, we aim to show that this data translates effectively to support the publishing goals. From a publishing viewpoint what is also new is the emergence of the Web as a service which unifies communication between these resources and at the same time presents a medium for online publishing with a sufficiently large user base to support commercial products. In turn the online published \u27package\u27 is transformed: it is now a linkbase pointing to selected resources. Referring to the implications of this framework rather than simply the technical detail, the paper will identify the latent power of the novel link types used in the link service. While a full publishing application based on the link service has still to be realised, the approach will be compared with EP\u27s current practice of linking which also stores link information in databases and within BioMedNet is used to link all citations to the cited articles via the Evaluated Medline abstracts service. All of this will be supported by results and experiences from both the Open Journal project and BioMedNet implementations in the most extensive demonstration of these link publishing features to date
An intelligent arbitrator associate for electronic commerce
No full textGrowing businesses and the large number of transactions involved in conducting a business tend to give rise to conflicts among the parties involved in a transaction. Human society has evolved in a way to cope with these disputes by creating law and order bodies. An Intelligent Arbitrator Associate (IAA) that works with and helps the law enforcement and law adjudication authorities to resolve disputes that arise due to commerce conducted over the Internet is presented in this paper. The infrastructure over which the IAA operates, the architecture, and the protocols involved are described. Some of the architectural pieces include monitoring systems for copyright infringement and currency fraud, information extraction systems to predict and map crime, and access revocation systems to punish principals involved in illegitimate transactions. The IAA sends out intelligent agents with warrants to gather information from the various entities involved in the transaction. The social and legal issues and difficulties involved in deploying such systems into the real world are described in the paper