Proceed to Establishing
a Regional Electronic Library System on the North Coast of New
South Wales By:
Dr Jenny Cameron - CSIRO Publishing
Mr Tom Denison - Whiteroom Publishing (tdenison@vicnet.net.au)
Dr Bob Jansen - CSIRO DIT (bob.jansen@dit.csiro.au) http://mac145.syd.dit.csiro.au/
Mr Paul Mercieca - INFORMIT (paulm@informit.com.au)
Mr Paul Reekie - CSIRO Publishing (paul.reekie@publish.csiro.au)
Dr Don Schauder - RMIT/Monash University (dschauder@vicnet.net.au)
Mr Andrew Treloar - Deakin University (andrew.treloar@deakin.edu.au)
http://www.deakin.edu.au/~aet
Mr Patrick Wilken - Monash University (pwilken@peg.apc.org)
http://www.cs.monash.edu.au/~patrickw/
The authors have been listed alphabetically, in accordance with the EPICentre team policy on general articles discussing the work of EPICentre.
Please direct any specific enquiries arising from this article to Dr Bob Jansen,the EPICentre team leader. This article is only a summary of the work undertaken by EPICentre. More detailed reports and pointers to many of the organisations and journals mentioned in this article can be found at the EPICentre Web site.
The Electronic Publishing Innovations Centre (EPICentre) was
formed in late 1994 as the result of a successful bid for project
funding from the Australian Vice-Chancellor's Committee through
the Standing Committee on Information Resources, Library
infrastructure projects, Program 3 - Electronic Publishing of
Full Text Materials. This program is managed by the Standing
Committee on Information Resources, Working Group on Electronic
Publishing. A number of projects were funded in the first round
of funding, but EPICentre received the largest grant, A$100,000.
EPICentre was designed to draw on the expertise and strengths of a number of organisations. The Division of Information Technology (DIT) within the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial and Research Organisation (CSIRO) provided expertise on electronic publishing technologies, document models, and project management. CSIRO Publishing were publishers of a number of print journals in the Science and Technology Materials (STM) area and were actively investigating electronic publishing. Monash University were publishing electronically and wished to enhance this. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University (RMIT) had significant expertise in CD-ROM based publishing and information organisation.
The original proposal was to undertake a number of sub-projects to develop an understanding of various aspects of electronic publishing.
These were:
The two journals selected were Psyche and The Australian Journal of Chemistry. These journals were selected with great care to provide the greatest possible contrast. The Australian Journal of Chemistry is a physical science traditional print journal moving into parallel electronic delivery. In terms of formatting it is a near worst case scenario. It contains in its articles formatted text, diagrams, photographs, mathematical equations and tables. Psyche is a science publication that started life in electronic form and is moving into parallel print delivery through MIT Press. Its formatting requirements are much less demanding, and until recently were handled using plain text only.
Articles from both of these journals were converted into a range of electronic forms. These forms ended up including Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML), and Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) (sometimes referred to as Acrobat.
Psyche now has a fully functional Web site which is used to deliver the journal articles. ASCII versions of the articles are also available from an FTP site. The Psyche web site also provides links to related:
The Australian Journal of Chemistry is continuing to appear primarily in print only, but is using its Web site to provide:
The survey was structured to determine:
The survey instrument was distributed to Psyche readers via email. The instrument was also posted on a Web site so that people could download the text, complete it and send it in. Use of the Web forms facility to gather responses was not used due to lack of time to set up the form and data-handling. The survey instrument was distributed to AJC as an inclusion in the print journal.
For Psyche, 336 responses were received from a mailing list of 2800 readers (332 received by email, three printed out and mailed in, one faxed in). AJC has a subscription list of around 800. From this readership, a total of three responses were received. As this is slightly too small to have statistical significance, the following discussion is based on the Psyche responses only.
Respondents were asked to indicate which pieces of technology they had access to, either at home or at work. The intention was to determine what facilities an ejournal could assume from its readership. Over two-thirds of the respondents have access to multimedia facilities on their computers. This is a large enough pool to consider adding features to Psyche that take advantage of this technology such as supplementary material on CD-ROM, access to interviews (perhaps using a streaming format like Real-Audio), and video simulations to support article text.
More than two thirds of the respondents used various electronic publishing fora or the World Wide Web either frequently or regularly. Slightly under half viewed ejournals either frequently or regularly. Last in frequency of use was publishing itself with a combined score of less than 9%. Clearly, for the Psyche respondents the ratio between authors and readers is about 10:1.
More than half of the respondents either 'strongly agreed' or 'agreed' that speed of publication, 24 hour access, convenience, reduced paper use, ease of searching and affordability were advantages of electronic scholarly journals. No proposed disadvantage received more than 10% of 'strongly agree' responses. Those disadvantages that received more than 25% of 'agree' responses were lack of refereeing, the need for special equipment and the unfriendliness of the format. There was a noticeable bias among respondents towards a positive view of electronic scholarly journals. With the advantages questions the responses were clustered around 'strongly agree' and 'agree'. With the disadvantages questions the concentration of answers shifted towards 'neutral' and 'disagree'.
The general conclusions from the survey sub-phase can be summarised as:
The CSIRO Division of Information Technology was charged with investigating document models and/or document type definitions, in relation to the Australian Journal of Chemistry and PSYCHE. The investigations concentrated on the Australian Journal of Chemistry, as it was the most challenging of the two journals used in the study. Early on in the research, it became obvious that any activity in defining models/DTDs must take into account end-user requirements as well as the publisher's intent. Without an understanding of these two constraints, any DTD or document model is unrealistic and will necessarily be incomplete. Further research is needed to finalise these requirements. The lessons learnt from the document model sub-phase can be summarised under a number of headings.
Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, many of the conclusions reached now seem obvious and in line with other research. It is important to remember that this research commenced in 1994 and predates the arrival of technologies like PDF, and the ready availability of good tools for working with HTML and SGML. The EPICentre team is now actively cooperating on developing tools and methodologies to facilitate network-based scholarly publishing. The data from the Psyche survey has been further processed and analysed statistically . Readers are encouraged to visit the EPICentre Web site to view work in progress.
Proceed to Establishing
a Regional Electronic Library System on the North Coast of New
South Wales
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