Preservation
Library Cataloging

Preservation


Bob Kelly, Director Journal Information Systems, the American Physical Society and Tom Von Foerster, Publisher, Journals and Technical Publications, the American Institute of Physics, have been pondering the on-line submission, storage and delivery of any non-text parts of scientific articles, that is anything that cannot be represented using an ASCII character set (or its extensions). We propose the creation of a small task force, workshop, or ad-hoc committee to discuss the issues raised and are posting this message in the belief that the group should also include a technologically knowledgeable librarian or someone like that who is involved with archival access to data. We are soliciting a volunteer to join us.

Although B&W line art poses no problems, halftones and color illustrations already raise some issues, especially when color images are published online while B&W images appear in print; complex mathematical expressions raise other issue -- at least until a proper language is worked out; and of course video and audio files, interactive graphics, and all those other neat things modern technology makes possible have raised all sorts of questions.

The group would discuss, and ultimately recommend, how such material ("essential non-text components" or "essential non-text stuff" -- which has the more euphonious acronym ENTS) affects all aspects of publication including submission, editorial and peer review, production, storage, on-line access and retrieval, subsequent use publishing and long-term archiving.

Some of the issues that we propose for consideration by this group include:

  1. How can ENTS best be accommodated during the review and production of articles?
  2. What formats should be supported?
  3. Since the on-line journals are intended to be archival, can we guarantee that all files will be useable in 5 years? In 50 years?
  4. Can appropriate links be provided in the posted article text? What is the best way to include such links?
  5. What accommodations need to be made in the printed version of an article to ensure that it represents as complete and useful a record of the contents as possible? Or, at what stage to we start publicly proclaiming to the user community, libraries and members, that the print copy is no longer a complete and faithful version of the journal?
  6. How does one need to restrict the file sizes for ENTS? Since not all of the users of electronic journal content have high-speed access to the Internet, do we need to provide several versions of the same material at different resolutions and file sizes?
  7. What new facilities and skills do publishers need to acquire to process ENTS into archival formats?
  8. What is the impact on subsequent users of the published material (abstracting and indexing services, secondary publishers, and the like)?
  9. What guidelines should one give authors for preparing the materials?
  10. What other problems may arise if journal articles contain ENTS?
  11. what are the costs? Are they recoverable?
We think that the group should include scientists working in areas (such as fluid dynamics or plasma physics, geophysics, bio-molecular chemistry, nonlinear dynamics, optics, acoustics, or high-energy experimental physics) who have experience working with ENTS. The group should, as stated above, also include a technologically knowledgeable librarian or someone like that who is involved with archival access to data.

The group would meet several times over the course of the next year, but would (after the initial meeting) mostly conduct its discussions by e-mail. We expect it to disband after making its recommendations.

While we expect the recommendations of the group to affect the publication of ENTS in AIP and APS journals directly, we also suspect that the establishment of a set of standards for the AIP and APS journals will have an impact in a far larger arena and the results of this effort will be shared with those involved in the flow of scholarly information, from author to current and future readers and subsequent users of the content.

Please contact either Tom or Bob if interested or with recommendations.

Bob Kelly
Director Journal Information Systems
The American Physical Society
rakelly@aps.org

Thomas von Foerster
Publisher, Journals and Technical Publications
American Institute of Physics

Posted with permission.





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