Electronic Publishing, Document Server for Universities and Printing on Demand

Tutorial

„Electronic Publishing, Document Server for Universities and Printing on Demand“

Welcoming:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure for me to welcoming you here at Humboldt University on the occasion of 7. EUNIS-conference.

EUNIS-Academy

· It is the first time that in connection to an EUNIS conference some tutorials are offered. The EUNIS board is speaking in this connection from the creation of EUNIS-academy. So sorry, but I am not informed about the whole programme of this academy. In preparation of the EUNIS-conference here in Berlin we thought about interesting topics for EUNIS participants.

· So we asked some colleagues if they can offered a special programme. I am very glad that we were able to organise five very interesting tutorials and we hope that all participants will get new information, can collect experiences from their colleagues and go home with new ideas for their own universities. If we will reach this so we fulfil our aims.

Tutorial 4 “Electronic Publishing and Document Server”

· You, here in this room, decided for the topic “Electronic Publishing and Document Server”. Thank you very much for this decision. We hope that we can offer you an interesting afternoon and give an impression of the work here at Humboldt-University in the last four or five years. Of course it is our aim to inform you about details of our experiences so that you will get some ideas for your work at home.

Let us start with our special topic.

The tutorial about four hours will be realised by Susanne Dobratz,

· she is very specialised in electronic publishing and is back only for hours from Pasadena in California from the 3. “Conference for electronic thesis and dissertations” where she realised a workshop about “Document type definitions” and presented a special lecture about our experiences in this field.

· She acted instead of me, I had to prepare the EUNIS conference, in the meeting of steering committee of the “Networked digital library for theses and dissertations” (NDLTD). We will speak about this organisation a little bit later.

· She is the manager of the project “Digital Dissertation” at Humboldt University and is involved in some national and international projects in this field for instance in a Test installation of Open Archives rules in Germany.

The second person in our team is Matthias Schulz.

· He has worked in the same project about three years and was the so-called chief developer of our special document type definition of dissertations.

· He developed a style sheet for WinWord for dissertations and is involved in a lot of lectures for authors.

· He was responsible for preparing the Conference proceedings in SGML.

My name is Peter Schirmbacher.

· I am the director of the computing centre of this university and in this function the leader of some projects in the field of electronic publishing.

· At least in Germany it is unusual that such a project is located in a computing centre. But it was and is my personal opinion that the creation of the basic of electronic publishing is the special form of computer applications.

· Which is the institution in a university that is able to realise a long term archive.

· Which is the institution in a university that is able the give lectures in modern electronic presentation forms like XML and so.

The best way to realise these things is a common work of Library and computing centre. So all our projects in this field are common projects of Humboldt-University-Library and computing centre.

What are our aims for today.

We want to work following this agenda.

· Motivation and Future Vision
Peter Schirmbacher

We have started our activities in the field of electronic publishing four years before. I will inform you about our motivation, our deliberations (Überlegungen) and first steps. I will speak about some principles we mean to see and give a short view to our future at Humboldt-University.

· Overview electronic Publishing projects
Susanne Dobratz

There are a lot of projects in this field all over the world. I believe that we have quite good overview about it. We are direct involved in some international projects and discuss regular some interesting points with colleagues.
I already mentioned that Susanne came back from an international Conference for Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Pasadena California.

· How to set up a document server
Susanne Dobratz, Matthias Schulz

Last but not least, the main part of our presentation

· will be to explain how to set up a university document server.

· We will detailed explain what it is like, from our point of view,

· how we organise the process in our university.

· How we try to support the prospective authors

· We will speak about the workflow in the Humboldt-Library and

· will give some demonstrations about the possibilities for a technical support.

· We will explain technical issues, standards, retrieval possibilities

It would be the best, to disturb if you have a question or if we should explain some things more detailed. During the conference we will give a presentation about the "UNESCO-Guide for electronic Thesis and dissertations" and we are involved in a poster-session. Of course all of us will be available the next days so you can ask any time.

· I want to start with a short introduction of Humboldt-university in order to give a background for our developing projects.

· I will speak about my opinion of a so-called digital library and show some difficulties and conditions in this field.

· I will explain the major aims of our projects and

· I will incur of our next objectives and give a small perspective of publishing at universities in this way.

The Humboldt-University at Berlin

· was founded in 1810

· is one of three universities in the capital of Germany.

· There are ten additional colleges for art, technique or economics and administration.

· All in all there are 130.000 students in Berlin

· Humboldt-university is the oldest university of Berlin

· The foundation concept of Wilhelm von Humboldt gave it the title “Mother of all modern universities”. The main constitutional elements were unity of research and teaching, self autonomy and self-government.

· Today the university has 11 Departments and with the Charité the largest medical faculty in Europe.

· More than 32.000 young people are students of our university,

· 10 % of them are foreign students.

· The Humboldt-University is a so-called classical university, that means, that it has faculties of Law, Theology, Economics, Agriculture, different fields of natural sciences and humanities and medicine but no faculties of engineering.

· We have an university-library, also with very large tradition and especially with very large collection of scientific literature with more than five million exemplar's

· The computing center has existed for nearly 37 years.
Almost all 6000 Computer-working-places are connected with more than 100 local area networks and a bandwidth of 155 Megabit per second to the internet. So we have relative good conditions for electronic communications and electronic archives.

· If we are looking in the field of electronic publishing or digital library so we started all activities about five years before.

· At the same time the government of Berlin decided that the Humboldt-University will get a new campus for the departments of natural sciences a little bit outside the centre of Berlin in Berlin-Adlershof. So it was the decision of the university that also the computing centre and the part of the library for natural sciences will change to Adlershof.

· We started our deliberations with a colloquium under the topic "The future of Libraries".

· As a result of the colloquium, the following points were the
major tasks for the future:

o First steps forward a digital library
What is that a digital library?
How is the relation to the traditional library?

o Investigation of the publishing process
What are the specific things of electronic publishing?
When is it really a electronic publishing -
if you use a computer to create a text
if you put the text on a www-server
Who are the major player in this field?
What about the authors - are they prepared to publish electronically.

o Specify the university objectives
What are the aims and which possibilities exist for a realisation?
How many people and how much money is necessary?
Are there any chances to get money.
Where are the risks?

o Example for electronic publishing
It was relatively easy to find out that in the surrounding of electronic publishing of theses and dissertations is a very good field to collect experiences.

§ The copyright is clear.

§ There is a duty to disseminate the theses by a library

§ There are some rules for layout of theses or the university can influence the rules

§ And very important: The prospective authors are very willing to learn, to accept new rules and so on.

o Development of a university workflow
It was and is important to speak about the efforts.
There is a wrong assumption to believe that electronic publishing of university papers is easier and cheaper at least at the very beginning.

o Development of a university policy
It is a very long way to get an university publishing concept but it is important.
We will speak about it a little bit later.

Digital Library

· It is not my aim to define the term "Digital Library" but to give a framework of it

· Some years ago we discussed this term together with Prof. Ed Fox from Virginia Tech, who is one of the leading person in the field of electronic Publishing of theses and dissertations, and he gave this different definitions or explanations.

· Important for me is, that is not only a software-product like the so-called 'digital Library' from IBM, which is nearly a development toll kit.

· At first it is a service with special possibilities

Objectives

More important than the definition are the characteristics.

· Availability
In most cases a normal library has an opening time, a digital library should realise the access at every time

· Independent from location
In Germany we have a relativly good developed system of inter-library-loan but you have to wait one up to three days for an article.
In a digital library you should have access from every point of the earth via internet.

· Free access
In most cases scientific libraries are free of charge in Germany. But in the last time German politicians began to discuss this points.
Free access is also one of the requirements of the Open Archives Initiatives. We will speak about it and explain it in details.

· Unlimited repository
Yes of course, every traditional library is limited. A digital library has the possibilities to be the connection between a big number of electronic libraries. I know that it is only a wish.

· One of the main points, to form my personal view, is the chance of new and higher quality in retrieval.
That is not the present situation in internet where it will be more and more difficult to find something. The searching machines will be better but the speed in which the number of documents will increase is quicker.
Important is, that the document which are to store will be structured and so new possibilities are able to search in such documents. That’s means and we will speak about this fact in details, not only to use HTML-based texts but SGML or XML documents. The arguments of it Susanne will discuss.

· Lower cost
I do not know if it is a realistic objective. If we will reach that the quality will be higher and the costs are not to high so we should be sufficient.

· Effective workflow
Important for an university is that the exploitation (Erschließung) of electronic documents is a part of the library process. We developed a database in our project to support this process.

· At first we spoke about the 'Digital Library' from a general view or a view of a whole university. If you want to explain the development process of a 'Digital Library' it is necessary to find out the different interests of the different groups that are involved in this process.
I believe that is important in order to know the requirements setting up such a library.

· What are the interests of an Author
How easy is it to create and edit my text?
Is the system available and free of charge or at least cheap enough.
How is the dissemination organised?
Which rules exist for ensuring the Authentication and Integrity?

· View of users
The most important point is the availability.
The possibilities of retrieval and so on.

· View of library
How is it possible to integrate electronic documents in the normal library workflow?

· View of computing centre
In difference to a traditional library in the surrounding of 'Digital Library' there are some tasks for the computing centre.
The assembly of enough bandwidth of network.
How can we realise the long term archiving?
How is the storage capacity to organise?

· View of publisher
The most important thing is the technological process.
How can we realise a co-operation between libraries and publishers?
In Germany there are a lot of discussions about that.

There are a lot of points to pay attention to. The main objectives in our first project were:

· Long term preservation of electronic documents using the SGML/XML-(Standard Generalized Markup Language / Extensible Markup Language) standards. This involves the investigation of typical document structures within dissertations, the development of specific document type definitions (DTDs) and the implementation of converter tools.

· High quality support of potential authors for preparing their theses and dissertations for storage in our digital library is given by special courses and author guidelines as well as special services for scanning and preparing graphical or audio information.

· Development of workflow for handling digital publications within university and library. Automated cataloging involves the Dublin-Core-Standard. The conversion of all documents into SGML/XML-forms is planned. Furthermore, concepts for storing and organizing documents within the digital library are to be developed.

· Development and Implementation of a robust concept for archiving digital documents and the usage of digital signatures and electronic time stamping services in cooperation with German certification authorities.

· Implementation of a high quality retrieval system . Search should be integrated to deal with: metadata, full-text, and document structure (sup-porting headings, tables, figures and descriptions). Browsing within the collection should be managed by an intelligent navigation system with the help of thesauri and classification schemes.

If I want summarise our experiences so I would think that the most important things are the following:

· Build up a common group of permanent staff from Library and computing centre.
We started our initiatives only by project staff that means time limited people. The process to set up a 'digital library' is however a permanent process. So you will get some difficulties or you are obliged (verpflichtet) to get one project after another.

· Improve workflow
In our experiences it is not the rule to store electronic documents. So you have to show that the process is very easy in order to get acceptance.

· Improve the knowledge of authors
To write a book in traditional form the authors had the experience of more than three hundred years. They write it as a sequential text and have to accept the layout of the different publisher.
If you want to publish electronically it should be possible to accept also some rules. For instance that it will be easier to search in a structured text than in a full-text and so on. Susanne will explain it in more details.

· Set up a university publishing server
In most cases you will find more than one hundred WWW-server from the different departments, institutes and so on in a university. Important could be that you create an official publishing server of the university. That means that only those documents will put on this server that are worth to be collected.
It is our philosophy that a document which is on the server is not changeable. If the author is interested in, it to change, he have to create a next version. That procedure should be comparable with the collection of a normal library.

· University policy
That is that what I mean if I speak from a document or publishing server.

Thank you very much for your attention. Susanne will continue.