[244] in DCNS Development
elibdev meeting 9/25 background
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim McGovern)
Mon Sep 14 12:55:22 1992
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 92 12:58:47 EST
From: tjm@EAGLE.MIT.EDU (Tim McGovern)
To: elibdev@MIT.EDU, developers@MIT.EDU
elibdev will meeting on 9/25 at 11 in E40-382. The topic will be electronic
journals (ejourals), and the workshop will be led by Carter Snowden of the
Libraries. Below is a brief abstract of the project ...
The Libraries have been exploring the problems inherent in the processing and
delivery of electronic journals (for now we're talking about text-based
journals that may or may not have subsidiary graphics files) in an
institutional setting. These problems shake out into three general areas:
1. Internal procedures for subscription to and processing of ejournals.
2. The packaging / indexing mechanism for ejournals.
3. The user interface.
The first problem is largely independent of the other two. The bottom line is
that libraries need to be able to process ejournals from subscription through
receipt and indexing in an efficient manner. The basic packaging unit of the
ejournal is the article rather than the issue. Any human labor expended on
processing an ejournal article represents processing at a level one level
deeper than libraries have traditionally gone. We think we've solved this
problem about as well as it's going to be solved until ejournal publishers
come up with some standards. I'd just as soon skip discussion of this part
unless people are especially interested.
I'd like to concentrate on the second and third areas for the discussion. We've
been experimenting with WAIS as our indexing and delivery mechanism.
We have questions on various topics, including, among others, and in no
particular order:
resources (e.g a server for non-athena access, a locker to store files),
general WAIS support,
compile options for xwais,
pre-login possibilities.
I'd also like to have people take a look at some of my ideas for bringing up
the Libraries' set of ejournals on an Xstation.
Carter
