highly customizable. They must also be aware of the out- put hardware’s capabilities and limitations, automati- cally adjusting to deliver the best possible presentation quality at all times.

Administrative. Traditional libraries store a final copy of a book or other documents. Digital libraries store several versions of a document in a way that makes mul- tiple revisions by multiple authors possible. In addition, the content for a digital library may have multiple owners in terms of the sources of the content and annotations made to the content of the library. An administrative sys- tem ensures that materials intended for public viewing can indeed be viewed by anyone, while private collections and personal annotations may only be viewed by a select group or single individual. And data-versioning techniques track the history of such revisions.

There may also be times when a small group of indi- viduals want access to a portion of digital library content, such as when authors are preparing initial drafts of a doc- ument. In these cases, security mechanisms must be put into place to ensure that only authorized users gain access. Current digital libraries employ the basic security mea- sures offered by the supporting operating systems. For example, any digital library running Unix can restrict access using username and password authentication and protect files using group membership and file-access rights. This basic security will not meet the demands of large-scale digital libraries.

Finally, digital libraries must protect the identity of their users, who may wish to browse content that may be embarrassing.

Task Force on Digital Libraries In 1995, the IEEE Computer Society established the Task

Force on Digital Libraries as a first step leading to a full- fledged Technical Committee. The task force is to promote research in the theoryand practice of all aspects of digital libraries.

The task force sponsors activities that benefit its mem- bers and profession. Such activities include sponsoring and cosponsoring symposia, sessions in large conferences, tuto- rials, and a newsletter, edited by Erich Neuhold, GMD-IPSI. Send newsletter contributions (news, brief articles, con- ference announcements) to neuhold@darmstadt. gmd.de. The task force cosponsored the Forum on Research and Technology Advances in Digital Libraries, held last May at the Library of Congress and is cosponsoring the International Journal of Digital Libraries, which Springer- Verlag will begin publishing this year.

The executive committee of the task force includes Nabil R. Adam (chair), Rutgers University; David Choy, IBM Almaden Research Center; Milton Halem, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Nahum Gershon, Mitre; Erich Neuhold, GMD-IPSI; and Yelena Yesha, UMBCKESDIS.

Membership in the Task Force on Digital Libraries is free. We invite you to join and contribute ideas, sugges- tions, comments, and time. For more information, see our home page at http://cimic3 .rutgers.edu/ieee-dltf.htm1 or through the IEEE Computer Society’s home page at http://www.computer.org, or send e-mail to adam@ adam.rutgers.edu.

Editor: Ron Vetter, North Dakota State University, IACC 8ldg.. Rm. 258, Fargo,

ND 581 05-5164; voice (701) 231-7084; rvetter9plains.nodak.edu

Web publishing: Speed changes everything Steve Hitchcock Southampton University

he most pervasive medium of our age is not tele- vision, radio, or even print-it is the clock. T Individuals and entire societies set their daily

routines by it. A quartz clock beats faster than its mechan- ical predecessor, and the urge to go faster is nowhere more evident than in our use of computers. Information on the Internet travels at the speed of light. Although we’ve seen the effects of speeding up the rhythm of the clock, we’ve not yet felt the full impact of instantaneously transmit- ted information.

To understand this impact, the per- spective of media is important. Many research journals are gradually migrating on-line, in effect participating in a new medium. Because information is the lifeblood of professionals, any change will significantly affect readers as well as pub- lishers. By understanding a new medium’s effects, we can anticipate and exploit the -__ -- -- change; however, we must also recognize that our ability to control such change is not straightfor- ward. As Marshall McLuhan said, “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.”

Understanding the new medium When we talk about on-line Internet delivery of jour-

nals, we’re talking mainly about the Web. This tool is pretty much shaped already, so by McLuhan’s reasoning, it must now be shaping us.

Indeed it is, but how many of us realize it? McLuhan’s observations remain relevant because he emphasized psy- chic and social consequences: “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs”[italics added].

Herein lies the Web’s crucial feature: speed. From speed emerges interactivity which, among other things, leads to hypertext. Except for specialists, few seem to have noticed the significance of this fact.

August 1996

Those who criticize the Web’s content quality, such as T. Matthew Ciolek (Computer, January 1996, pp. 106-108), miss the point, as do publishers of electronicjournals who recognize the need for speed but see the solution as reduc- ing publication delays from many weeks to just a few weeks (see “Speed of publication” in sidebar). First we must anticipate how people will react and respond to infor- mation presented on the Web. Readers will demand qual- ity and will also expect materials to be delivered at near-instantaneous speed, but that quality will be judged in the context of the new information medium that is the Web itself.

Contrary to some views, we are still at the stage where the medium rather than the content demands our atten- tion.

Asking the right questions Microsoft is said to exist in its present form because, a

decade ago, Bill Gates asked himself, “What would my business look like if the hardware were free?” Computer scientists make this sort of quantum leap of imagination all the time. They needn’t expect a proposition to be com- pletely fulfilled to explore its possibilities.

Let’s pose a similar question for the Web: What would research publishing look like if it were free and available instantaneously? This particular leap is harder to grasp, judging by the tentative steps recognized computer sci- ence journals are taking toward on-line delivery (see “Survey of on-line journals” in sidebar).

There may be good reason to hesitate. Speed, in the context of information, is a double-edged sword. Infor- mation presented as entertainment is an end in itself. Information as fact, if it is to be useful, is a means to a pos- sibly distant end; thus, it demands a response. The on-line medium tends to integrate this response as part of the information exchange. Given the medium’s inherent speed, this response may well be instantaneous. Even

journals, with their well-thought-out editorial routines, cannot buck this trend if they venture on-line, which most feel obliged to do.

An early casualty of instant information is peer review, at least in its present form. Why burden the transfer of information, which requires only a few seconds, with a review process that takes weeks or months? Perhaps the immediate response, when properly targeted, will become the most effective peer review, because it takes the work to a new level which itself becomes the benchmark for fur- ther comment. Such a model entails obvious problems for research works, but there are new mechanisms for sur- mounting them-for example, “scholarly skywriting” or hypertext link services (discussed below).

Adapting to a new model Early on-line newspapers discovered that interactivity,

or the facility for participation, becomes essential, not just an option. According to Wired (Jon Katz, “Online or Not, Newspapers Suck,” Sept. 1994), when the New York Times went on line in June 1994, “hundreds of users tried to mes- sage ‘@times’ and many asked for e-mail addresses for reporters, (but) there was no one for them to talk to.” In contrast, Time magazine on-line actively encourages contact from readers, causing some observers to say that the on-line culture is changing the magazine. Echoing the point, the president of one on-line newspaper said: “Our communication historically has been: ‘We print it. You read it.’ This changes everything.”

While newspapers are quite different from journals, an equally potent vision is “scholarly skywriting,” so called because with the speed, global scope, and unprecedented interactiveness of the on-line medium, it is as if messages were being written in the sky for peers everywhere to see. This model is implemented for the journalPsycoloquy, one of the earliest and most successful on-line journals, which can referee papers and post peer feedback all within hours of receiving the originals (see sidebar for Web URL).

Nor is the author immune to the new demands of on- line publishing. Clear and unambiguous expression, good grammar and phraseology, and logical structuring of argu- ment take time, but are all sequential. On-line with hyper- text, we have nonsequential possibilities for discovering new perspectives, if only we knew how to handle them. We will have to learn, because greater speed means less time to construct a sequential argument. The research report will no longer be an isolated entity: In active fields, ideas and results become part of a continuum. Responsive writing will be integrated within hypertext link structures.

Linkbases offer some help Creating links can be cumbersome, which is why on-

line journals contain so few. But links are the currency of the Web, so we’re going to see more of them (“Ending the Tyranny of the Button,” IEEEMultiMedia, Spring 1994, pp. 60-68). With “open” hypermedia systems that simplify and automate link-making and the management of large link databases, or linkbases, everyword, phrase, or object within a document becomes a potential link anchor (see “Linkbases” in sidebar). Unlike “closed” hypertext systems, linkbase approaches do not embed link data within docu- ments-they store this data separately; moreover, they

Computer

scale more effectively in large information environments. At least two HyTime-compliant systems that create linkbases, Microcosm and HyperWave, are now commer- cialized, with Web applications under development (see sidebar for URLs) .

Linkbases let you define the information environment you wish to work in. You needn’t become lost in the Web’s information space, or be artificially constrained by the physical limits of a paper journal. While links establish rel- evant connections between different pieces of informa- tion, managed linkbases impose in-text signifiers and act as navigation tools. Linkbases can also be the glue for cus- tomizable on-line “journals” and offer a way to establish boundaries around selected, or “quality,” information. In other words, linkbases can work as an analog to print pub- lishing but in a form that is naturally suited to the dynam- ics of the on-line medium.

Researchers must now find ways to adapt new, more transient information structures to meet quality expecta- tions while recognizing valuable contributions and focus- ing debate. How this is achieved will differ from discipline to discipline, perhaps even from group to group.

Prospects for change Will instant technical information, with all its ramifica-

tions, become a reality? The research community as a whole is moving slowly, although physicists have enthu- siastically embraced portions of the on-line publishing vision. The Los Alamos National Laboratory’s physics e- print archive makes conventional research papers avail- able instantly on submission without peer review, bypassing the established paper journals to stunning effect. The five-year-old archive has served over 20,000 papers, on some days adding 50 or so new papers, and users make over 40,000 connectionsper day.

It has been argued that physicists are anomalous in their readiness to adopt this new form of publication, and some of the arguments explain why in the short term other dis- ciplines have been slow to follow. Medical professionals, for example, are concerned that the process might com- promise the integrity of their work. The Web is not restricted to specialists, however, and there is nothing fun- damental in these arguments to keep other disciplines from evolving Web-publishing strategies over time.

Warp speed, Mr. Data To resist change effectively means to change nothing,

but journals are migrating to the Web at an accelerating rate. They generally mimic their paper journal forerun- ners, and though this model is unsustainable on-line, it nevertheless adds to the Web’s momentum. An alterna- tive is to ignore the Web and preserve paper journals, but the economics of paper and declining library funding have been diverging disastrously for years, so this is not along- term option (see “University Libraries and Scholarly Communication-Synopsis” in sidebar). Prestigious jour- nals that retain a distinctive purpose-and make the eco- nomics work for them-might survive in paper form. For those of you who prefer paper, there is some good news: Computer could be one such journal.

Other pressures prevail, however. Research-even uni- versity research-succumbed long ago to market forces.

While intrinsically cooperative at one level, research must nevertheless be competitive: Marketplace and funding dependencies demand it. One of the foremost ways to gain a competitive advantage is speed.

ADMITTEDLY, THIS VISION OF FUTURE RESEARCH publishing may seem like an extreme scenario. Even to approach it will entail huge change, as the Web already portends. This “extension of man”-the on-line medium-will hold us helplessly in its grip unless we find the will and the capa- bility to understand and use it.

The irony of digital technology, with its capacity for automation-which was supposed to give us more leisure time-is that most people now work faster and for longer hours than before. With that brand new 200-MHz com- puter on your desk, you have unwittingly turned the heat up another notch. Now hook up a modem and see what happens.

Steve Hitchcock is a researcher in the Multimedia Research Group at Southampton University, UK. After 14 years in academic publishing, he now works on the Open Journal Project, funded by the UK Electronic Libraries Pro- gramme, which provides hypermedia link services to estab- lished research journals that are being made available on the Web.

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