Executive Summary
Electronic publishing is no longer the wave of the future. It is already crashing on the shores of the academy, making its presence felt throughout the world of higher education with faculty websites, electronic journals, digital library initiatives, e-print (pre-print) archives, and an abundance of other creative activities. Faculty and researchers are exploring and exploiting the capability for innovation offered by rapidly changing information technologies. Distance learning will be highly dependent on the availability of electronic content for its success and electronic publishing will be a rich source for distance learning. At the same time, economic factors, notably the inexorable double-digit increase in the cost of scientific journal literature, have encouraged librarians and administrators to view electronic publishing as a cost-effective alternative to traditional paper publications. The shift to a world in which the primary mode of scholarly exchange and communication of research findings is digital will profoundly impact libraries, the university, and scholarly publishers. Although even experts find it impossible to predict the future, there is a strong belief that electronic publishing promises both intellectual and economic benefits for higher education. If publication patterns change from the present model, in which faculty publish the majority of their research in commercial journals that university libraries purchase for millions of dollars, to a model in which scholars and researchers disseminate their findings and analysis at low-cost over the Internet, substantial savings will accrue, first to the libraries, and then elsewhere in the university.
The Electronic Publishing Steering Committee unanimously urges University leadership in electronic publishing. Electronic publishing, defined broadly, encompasses the creation and access to digital publications, the ability to deliver print-on-demand service, the support of electronic commerce, and the guarantee of a well-maintained, permanent digital archive or some other form of document preservation. For Cornell's faculty and students to remain in the vanguard in higher education, to lead in their chosen professions, and to serve as productive members of society, they must develop a high proficiency in applying the new information technology to the various kinds of scholarly communication. The transformations occurring in the way scientists can communicate discoveries electronically (for example, in a more timely manner, to a broader audience, and in multiple versions reflecting input from colleagues) and the manner in which humanists can represent new ideas (for example, incorporating text, video, and audio into a single document readily linked with previous and subsequent scholarship) will affect future research and teaching. Increased availability of electronic publications will foster development of more robust curriculum resources for distance learning, and facilitate other aspects of the University's public service mission.
Current electronic publishing activity at Cornell is diverse, dispersed, and the work of a varied group of entrepreneurs. This continuing and ever-proliferating experimentation will help faculty and students develop more creative ways of sharing information and testing new ideas. We anticipate the transformation of scholarly communication -and of the university itself - as new information technology is applied to our work. Although we predict that universities may realize savings over the long term as a result of the transition to electronic publication, particularly if the model of low-cost Internet access prevails, the short-term reality is that we will face some additional costs for potentially a decade. As long as we inhabit a world in which traditional paper documents co-exist with electronic versions, digital publications will be a supplementary cost to the university. Additionally, there will be a necessary investment for start-up hardware and software, development of expertise, experimentation, and creation of an environment in which faculty and students produce and use electronic publications with ease. The University needs to monitor digital publishing endeavors inside and outside of Cornell, extracting and evaluating cost and savings data that will accrue to Cornell in order to develop a more precise understanding of the financial benefits.
To obtain the intellectual and economic advantages electronic publishing offers, the Electronic Publishing Steering Committee recommends that the University undertake three strategic initiatives.
The University should endorse and provide the appropriate funding to:
Our vision for the future is a distributed network of electronic publications, created by authors through a cost-effective process, which facilitates the mechanics of communication of both new knowledge and innovative interpretative work. Electronic publications should be immediately and democratically available to the world of knowledge-seekers, be they colleagues and students at Cornell, or in the global community. Electronic publications emanating from Cornell should adhere to the high standards of the University in intellectual creativity and editorial quality. To enable the rapid dissemination of ideas through electronic publications, Cornell University and other institutions of learning and research must possess a technological infrastructure that provides dependable, enduring, and user-friendly access to digital information, with the ability to discover, retrieve, manipulate, and print electronic publications. As we transcend the barriers of current publishing models, which impose strictures of physical location, format, time, and cost on the spread of thought, we will accelerate the pace the at which new knowledge can be generated and disseminated.
Principles
The Electronic Publishing Steering Committee has outlined several principles that underlie its recommendations:
1. Cornell University represents a diverse community with a broad spectrum of needs.
2. Electronic publishing exists, and will continue to exist, in a multitude of manifestations from the ephemeral to the enduring.
3. No single electronic publishing program will address all the needs of Cornell faculty, staff, and students.
4. It is in the best interest of the advancement of knowledge to make the research and scholarship conducted at Cornell widely available in as cost-effective a manner as feasible.
5. Successful scholarly publishing ventures will be collaborative. The Library, as a university-wide entity with a strong interest in digital content, is a prime player in electronic publishing, as is CIT, because of its responsibility for developing the technical infrastructure. Many other stakeholders exist within the university.
6. New initiatives may be started with seed money, but over time they should become self-sustaining.
7. Achieving an appropriately varied electronic publishing program will require a sound technological infrastructure, the development of relevant staff expertise, the endorsement of the faculty, and the firm support of the University administration.
Costs and Savings
In a period when electronic publishing grows and changes at a dizzying rate, we are still gathering data on costs and savings. The EPSC has not studied the costs of electronic publishing extensively, nor has it calculated savings in a systematic way. Nonetheless, the Committee has considered the economics of digital publishing in general terms, and has identified below some of the key elements of the financial equation.
Costs
If it is to engage successfully in electronic publishing, Cornell must develop and maintain the infrastructure necessary to support such activity. Included in this technological infrastructure is the software to support the creation of digital publications. In some cases, a simple word-processing software with the capability of SGML will suffice, but in the case of more complex documents incorporating mathematical figures, audio, moving images, or certain types of data, a more sophisticated software package will be required. To facilitate the authoring of electronic documents during the start-up phase, the University should earmark an initial $150,000 for hardware and software, with annually recurring costs of $200,000 - $250,000 for back up, licensing, and upgrades to hardware and software. Assuming a model in which Cornell serves as a host for disciplinary-based contributions from multiple sources, the University would need to dedicate a server and provide text management software for searching the files mounted on it.
In addition to hardware and software, there are significant costs associated with the staffing of a digital publishing operation that incorporates aspects of the traditional publisher (editing, marketing, dissemination) and of the library (addition of indexing or metadata, preservation archiving). Staff must be familiar with the technology and document mark-up. Since the organizations producing digital publications will continue, at least during a period of transition, to maintain their paper-based activities, funding will be required either to hire individuals with appropriate skill or to offset existing staff who take on new responsibilities. For a start-up period of four years, the University will need additional personnel such as software developers, production assistants, trainers, editors, and other technical staff estimated to cost $500,000 annually. One of the premises of online publications is that they reduce the cost to an individual university because libraries no longer need to retain physical copies, saving both building space and collection maintenance. However, to achieve the equivalent of the preservation functionality that libraries now offer, thereby securing the availability of past scholarship and research for use by future generations, we must develop and carefully coordinate digital archiving capabilities.
The costs incurred by peer institutions in their electronic publishing initiative are illuminating. Johns Hopkins received $400,000 from the Mellon Foundation to launch Project Muse, a program to develop electronic versions of 40 humanities titles published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Hopkins calculates the cost of producing parallel print and electronic titles to be 130% of the cost of print only. They estimate that the cost of electronic-only would roughly equal the cost of preparing paper versions.
The MIT Press found that the direct costs of publishing an electronic journal were significantly less than that of generating a paper version, but that the overhead cost of the electronic journal was much greater. However, MIT related that the most difficult aspect of electronic publishing lay in financial viability, since they found that the market for electronic publications lagged considerably behind that for print journals.
Experience with the Los Alamos e-Print operation, in which scientists post pre-publication papers in high energy physics, mathematics, and computational sciences to a server in Los Alamos, has demonstrated that a relatively modest investment of $100,000 can support the submission of 20,000 papers annually, an archive of approximately 70,000 articles, and searching traffic of 400,000 weekly.
The University of California Press and the University of California Library received $400,000 from the Mellon Foundation in 1997 toward the costs of electronic publication of 24 scholarly monographs in area studies. The Press anticipates a permanent addition of three to four staff to the overhead of the publishing operation. Additionally, "the Press and the Library have just begun to step up to the costs of long-term archiving." (citation-Emory conference paper)
These experiences reveal that there is a wide range of investment in electronic publishing. Comparatively little is known about the costs of producing and making available electronic materials. The University can make a contribution in this area by conducting a number of pilot projects and tracking and evaluating cost data.
Savings and Revenue
Electronic publications offer the promise of significant savings. In the long term, as digital content begins to predominate over other formats, especially paper, libraries will no longer need to warehouse vast quantities of books and journals. Digital storage costs are on a steady decline, with the net effect that libraries will be able to curtail new buildings to house collections in the next decade. Cornell has moved to offsite storage as the most effective means of shelving its collections, and the present facility and capacity of campus libraries should extend through 2007. Retrospective digitization of publications may open the way for elimination of some paper copies in some disciplines, freeing up additional space. Consequently, Cornell need not expect to invest heavily in new library construction for book storage in the future. This is not to say that libraries themselves will disappear, however! Experts see libraries as the physical spaces necessary for consultation with information navigators, group study, and community interaction, as well as for the integration of information from paper resources with that from online services.
Malcolm Getz, economist and former Dean of Libraries at Vanderbilt, posits that universities may derive some savings when departmental libraries, which now exist primarily to provide convenient access to current journals, can be consolidated because the preponderance of these materials will be available online. (Malcolm Getz, "Electronic Publishing in Academia: An Economic Perspective" in Scholarly Communication and Technology, p. 15. http://www.arl.org/scomm/scat/getz.html)
Another potential cost saving lies in the area of library subscriptions. Data supplied by the Association of Research Libraries show that expenditures for serials doubled in the past decade, but libraries purchased 6% fewer serial titles, and funds previously directed toward the purchase of monographs have been shifted toward journal subscriptions, resulting in a 14% decrease in the number of monographic titles added to collections. During the period 1986-1997, the average annual cost increase for a journal title has been 9.4%, whereas the increase for a monograph has been 4.5%. (ARL Statistics, 1996-1997: a Compilation of Statistics from the One Hundred and Twenty-One Members of the Association of Research Libraries. Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1998, p.9) Cornell (including the Medical College Library) currently spends almost $10,000,000 annually on Library materials, of which approximately 7% is devoted to online databases. By changing the paradigm of existing publication to a model where authors publish in low-cost alternatives to expensive commercial journals, the university will obviate the need for faculty to rely on certain Library resources. Ross Atkinson, Deputy University Librarian and national expert in collection development, estimates that the Library could save as much as 30% of its materials budget over a 15-year transition period to electronic publishing -- more, if the transition to electronic media proves truly global.
One effect of reducing the number of print subscriptions in the Library would be savings in the processing of physical pieces and in the cost of circulating physical volumes. Susan Whisler's and Susan Rosenblatt's paper, "The Library and the University Press: Two Views of the Costs and Problems of the Current System of Scholarly Publishing" (http://www.arl.org/scat/rosenblatt.html), estimates that for each journal title held at U. C. Berkeley, staff and binding costs are approximately $70 annually. Thus if the Library were to eliminate 1000 titles, one might expect a $70,000 annual savings in processing and handling.
In a world where electronic publications predominate, the need for faculty subscriptions will also decline sharply. Currently individuals and departments subscribe to journals for individual use. In the world in which digital documents are free, or in which institutional licenses to databases of electronic information are purchased, faculty will no longer need personal reference copies of journals.
University authors dedicate an uncounted amount of money annually to pay page charges levied by certain prestigious journals. The transition to economical forms of electronic publishing would eliminate the need for page charges.
Some models of electronic publication provide free access to documents, with the producing organization subsidizing their availability. Others charge for access to material, either "by the drink" or through a license for unlimited use. If Cornell were to implement a fee-based model, there would be a revenue opportunity for the University. A hybrid approach might be to share information freely within a designated community (such as the Ivies or Land Grants), but to charge for others who do not contribute to the common good. Cornell needs to evaluate the alternatives, collect accurate financial data in some prototypical electronic publishing ventures, and establish its policy after a careful review and analysis of data.
Other Financial Considerations
Savings in one area may be offset by expenses in another. For example, the University may save the expense of building new library storage facilities by moving from the more expensive processing and storage of physical volumes to the use of a vastly less-expensive digital repository, but some of these savings may need to be redirected to technological support for the end-user or the creator. Whisler and Rosenblatt note that the U. C. Berkeley Library system spends $750,000 annually on capital equipment with a five-year life cycle, and Getz states that the "data storage system involves not simply the storage medium itself, but a range of services to keep data on-line. A data center typically involves sophisticated personnel, back-up and archiving activities, the cost of upgrading software and hardware." Getz continues by observing that shared, aggregated repositories would be more economical (p.16).
Despite the uncertainty about costs, savings, and revenue, Cornell should forge ahead in electronic publishing. There is much to be gained by simply plunging into this fermenting mix. Sustained, direct experience in electronic publishing will help us more accurately to evaluate the results of others and enhance our grasp of the still elusive economics of electronic publishing. Greater involvement will increase our ability to influence the development of new models of scholarly communication in a manner that is advantageous to Cornell's faculty and the greater university community.
Recommendations
The time is ripe for action. The members of the Electronic Publishing Steering Committee are eager to see electronic publishing take root and develop at Cornell and in the wider world of higher education. To accomplish this goal, the Committee recommends three mutually reinforcing strategies:
1. Build and maintain the technological and staff infrastructure to provide the support faculty, staff and students need to create, disseminate, use and archive digital documents. Estimated cost: $800,000 over 4 years (see Appendix IV: Budget)
The Electronic Publishing Steering Committee recommends that Cornell put in place a technology infrastructure and technology support services to facilitate electronic publishing efforts across the campus, and particularly within the Electronic Publishing Center (see Recommendation #2). This infrastructure will entail a network and server environment with appropriate workstations and peripheral equipment that will enable various individuals and units within the Cornell community to develop, disseminate, and archive electronic documents. CIT, and specifically the Academic Technology Services organization (ATS) should be charged with developing and maintaining this infrastructure. The highly qualified staff devoted to the maintenance of this digital document infrastructure will support and contribute to the development of standard tools and protocols for handling and manipulating digital documents. They will work closely with the staff of the Electronic Publishing Center, essentially providing the platform upon which the work of the Center is conducted. The Provost should appoint an advisory body, to help determine priorities for the EPC. FABIT, the Faculty Advisory Board on Information Technology, would be an appropriate body to guide the development of the infrastructure.
2. Develop an Electronic Publishing Center (EpiCenter)
Estimated Cost: $2,000,000 (see Appendix IV: Budget)
The Committee strongly urges the University to provide start-up funding to create a cooperative team of qualified staff to make an Electronic Publishing Center a reality at Cornell. The Electronic Publishing Center would support electronic publication in a wide variety of areas.
As a first step in its establishment, we envision the development of a core group of individuals whose home base is located in several campus organizations. This group would consist of individuals already part of the University staff who can dedicate their time to acquiring the skills needed to assist in electronic publishing, as well as some additional staff hired specifically to enrich the pool of experience. The Electronic Publishing Center would function as a service bureau to assist faculty, students, and others in the creation of digital manuscripts and in the management of electronic publications. The Cornell University Library, as an organization that serves the entire campus and that has extensive digital publication experience, will coordinate the efforts of the Electronic Publishing Center with regard to content; as explained in Recommendation #1, CIT will take the lead role in developing the sustaining technological infrastructures. Selected staff from Cornell Information Technologies, the Cornell University Library, the Cornell University Press, Cornell Business Services, Media Services, and Extension will work with the Electronic Publishing Center to form an advisory council to the EpiCenter. Examples of the work that the EpiCenter should undertake include 1) publication of faculty works for which traditional publication is not feasible, such as highly specialized monographs with limited paper distribution potential; 2) electronic publication in areas where the University has academic distinction, drawing on authors throughout the world, and working collaboratively with professional societies and other universities; 3) the electronic publication of the proceedings of conferences or symposia held at Cornell, or organized by Cornell faculty or staff; 4) electronic dissertations; 5) republication in electronic form of out-of-print monographs from the Press, the Cornell East Asia Series, or other similar entities; 6) digital documents incorporating a variety of media that are incapable of being rendered in paper; 7) electronic publication of journals edited at Cornell or journals recommended by faculty as candidates for electronic publishing. The goal of the EpiCenter would be to reduce the University-wide overhead costs of making the transition to electronic publishing by drawing on expertise already present on campus but dispersed among various units. In other words, the EpiCenter seeks to facilitate synergy among players who have hitherto gone their very separate ways.
The Electronic Publishing Steering Committee endorsed two areas of academic excellence at Cornell for immediate implementation: mathematics and publications emanating from and of interest to the Land Grant community. Other disciplines that have been considered are Asian Studies and labor relations.
In the mathematics example, disciplinary-centered approach, Cornell would become the host site for research findings and information on the topic contributed by authors at Cornell and individuals and organizations outside the University. The site would publish traditional materials such as refereed titles in electronic form and serve as a repository for information on the mathematics that has not undergone a formal certification process. The Electronic Publishing Center would work with authors, editors, and representatives of scholarly societies to create a collaborative enterprise that would enhance scholarly communication and strive to reduce the costs associated with the present model. The Committee recommends that the Library work with professional societies such as the American Mathematical Society, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Computer Science and Mathematics departments, and other appropriate partners to achieve a critical mass of digital information in mathematics. This model should be developed, implemented, and evaluated by a panel of outside consultants with expertise in electronic publishing, the economics of information, and knowledge of the mathematics community.
The second proposal endorsed by the Committee is based on J. Robert Cooke's concept of the Land Grant Digital Press as open access, Internet-first publishing, supplemented by on-demand printing. Modeled on the Los Alamos e-Print archive, the Land Grant Digital Press would be a cooperative venture in which authors from other Land Grant partners would contribute their works for free or low-cost access. The Committee recommends that a small group of advisors with experience in electronic publishing develop this visionary model and a business plan to ensure its viability.
Since electronic publishing is still unfolding, the University will need to monitor environmental trends and make appropriate adjustments as faculty needs change and grow in this area.
* holding a symposium on the topic
* holding a speaker series to invite experts to campus to describe their endeavors and to foster a dialogue on campus about various issues, such as copyright, the place of electronic publications in the reward and tenure process, and the utilization of electronic publications in teaching and research
* making presentations to deans, directors, and departments
* journeying to other universities to see related work in digital publishing
It is vital that electronic publishing be a priority of the President, Provost, deans and other senior administrators. Equally critical is the widest possible exposure across campus to the pilot projects undertaken by the Electronic Publishing Center and its advisors.
Conclusion
The University should make a significant investment in electronic publishing because digital technology is a tool that will improve scholarly communication and University outreach, enhance the dissemination of quality scholarship, and kindle new ideas. Furthermore, electronic publishing offers the potential to alter the unhealthy economic dynamic that exists between publishers, particularly publishers of scientific and technical materials, and libraries, and to replace that relationship with an economic model that is more favorable to the university. By providing an alternative to more expensive forms of publication and by creating an outlet where less economical traditional publications can find expression, the University will be doing a service to its faculty and all who benefit from scholarly discourse.
The endorsement of electronic publishing by the leadership of the University, accompanied by appropriate financial commitment, will be an important step in ensuring that Cornell develops an environment that will support innovative scholarship in the twenty-first century. An Electronic Publishing Center, a robust infrastructure, and a receptive and enthusiastic faculty are critical elements for the transformation ahead.
Appendix I: Formation, Activities, Continuation, Charge and Membership of the EPSC
Formation:
In March 1997, recognizing the significance of the developments in electronic publishing for higher education, Provost Don Randel appointed an Electronic Publishing Steering Committee (EPSC) comprised of faculty and key administrative stakeholders, including Cornell Business Services, Cornell Information Technologies, Cornell University Library, Cornell University Press, and Media Services, to recommend a course of action for Cornell University. The Steering Committee has reviewed a variety of electronic publishing initiatives underway outside of Cornell, as well as fledgling and more established efforts within the University, and the members have evaluated numerous options over the past year. As a result of their review, they have identified several areas of strategic value for Cornell. Their discussions and the experience of others confirm that electronic publishing will become the dominant method of communicating many forms of scholarly activities and knowledge in many fields in the future, although paper will remain viable, and in some disciplines, preferred, for some time.
Provost Randel charged the Electronic Publishing Steering Committee, co-chaired by then Vice President for Information Technologies David Lambert and Carl A. Kroch University Librarian Sarah E Thomas with the following:
1. explore a vision and strategy that would position Cornell as a recognized center of excellence in electronic publishing
2. establish a small prototype "digital press" on an experimental basis, reviewing and accepting project proposals, establishing criteria for measuring success in projects, monitoring projects through ongoing reports, and establishing priorities.
Activities:
The Committee first met in August 1997. Over the academic year it considered a proposal for a Land-Grant Digital Press, and a number of different presentations, including one on the need for authoring software, and others on NCSTRL (National Collaborative and Scholarly Technical Research Library), Netprint and CUPID (online printing), activities of the Campus Bookstore, Media Services, the behind-the-scenes story of the Journal of Electronic Publishing, a report on trends in electronic publishing in higher education, and a presentation on the relationship between patterns of scholarly communication and rising materials costs in libraries.
To initiate the prototype digital press, the EPSC endorsed J. Robert Cooke's proposal for a Land-Grant Digital Press, which is planned as a series of monographs on primarily agricultural themes, edited by a voluntary guest editor for each title. The Cornell University Library is defraying the clerical costs of producing the volumes through a subsidy of $10,000, and CIT will provide server support once the volumes are published. Evaluation of the enterprise will proceed as the project develops.
Continuation:
The EPSC felt that the Committee performed an important function by bringing together stakeholders in electronic publishing who had had minimal interaction prior to the formation of the group. They thought it would be valuable to continue the committee, adding a few key representatives such as the Dean of the Graduate School, someone from University Publications, and a link with the Office of Distance Learning.
Charge:
Memo To: Distribution List
From: Don Randel
Subject: Electronic Publishing Steering Committee 3/28/97
Scholarly communication, that process of transferring knowledge and advances in scholarship, is one of the University's core activities. Electronic creation, publication, and distribution of academic materials is opening new opportunities for higher education. Digital technologies offer the possibility for transforming scholarly communication, and, as a consequence, they can have a dramatic impact on faculty publishing patterns, libraries, university presses, and other academic enterprises. To evaluate the potential of these developments for Cornell, I am establishing a campus-wide Electronic Publishing Steering Committee, to be co-chaired by David Lambert, Vice-President for Information Technologies, and Sarah Thomas, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. Lambert and Thomas will draw on their experience in managing a series of collaborative digital initiatives to lead a committee whose membership reflects a wide-range of Cornell interest and talent.
The Steering Committee will have both long-range and immediate goals. Long-range, I am asking the group to explore a vision and strategy that would position Cornell as a recognized center of excellence in the field of electronic publishing. In the near-term, Dave Lambert will support a small prototype "digital press" on an experimental basis. The Steering Committee will serve as an oversight body for the digital press, reviewing and accepting project proposals, establishing criteria for measuring success in projects, monitoring projects through ongoing reports, and establishing priorities. Through the laboratory of the digital press, the Steering Committee will gain first-hand knowledge of the issues involved in electronic publishing. The insights and experiences from the projects will inform the Steering Committee's recommendations for Cornell's strategic policy with regard to digital publishing and management of electronic information.
Among the many issues associated with electronic publishing are the importance of intellectual property rights, the technological infrastructure required to support the creation, dissemination, retrieval, and archiving of digital information that includes not only text, but also images, sound, spatial and numeric data; economic models that are feasible and advantageous to scholars, librarians, and the university as a whole; the interaction between electronic publishing and the academic review and promotion process; the potential for improving scholarly communication through faster, more economical, and wider distribution of ideas and data; and the incorporation of electronic media into the instructional process. The Steering Committee will be exploring these and other issues over the coming year and will make their recommendations to the Provost for consideration by senior administrators in 1998. The Electronic Publishing Steering Committee will publicize their efforts and findings through a web page, meeting presentations, and a final report.
Membership:
John Ackerman, Ross Atkinson, Karen Brazell, Robert Cooke, Ron Ehrenberg, John Guckenheimer, Dan Huttenlocher, David Lambert, Richard McDaniel, Don Randel, Norm Scott, Ann Stunden, Sarah Thomas, David Watkins, Steve Worona
Appendix II: A Baker's Dozen of Benefits of Electronic Publishing
Scholars and researchers are seizing the capabilities inherent in new technologies to transform the nature of scholarly communication. Electronic publications offer a multitude of advantages over conventional printed texts, although they possess drawbacks as well.
1. E-pubs offer timely access to ideas, a welcome change from the backlogs of articles waiting editing and printing.
2. They provide word-by-word access, creating the opportunity for more facile and rapid retrieval of relevant materials. The viewer can zoom in to inspect certain features of a digitally reproduced painting, and create windows for comparison of texts, objects, and data.
3. In the world of the Web, publications can be linked both with prior and future research, as it is published, creating a record of intellectual history, scholarly advances and influence.
4. Electronic documents can incorporate audiovisual materials and data and can even be interactive in a way that a static text cannot. A physicist might include sequenced data in his finding, or an architect could apply three-dimensional modeling to a design.
5. Digital documents are excellent resources for building the instructional content for residential courses or distance learning.
6. Size or length is unlimited, enabling complex and comprehensive presentations. Traditional publishers sometimes restrict the number of pages or photographs for an article or monograph, while electronic publications can include rich mines of data and appendices of primary source material.
7. Electronic publications can reach a broader population than traditional publishing markets. Initial experience demonstrates that material available on the Web receives many more "hits" than sales of paper copies of a book or circulations of a journal in a library.
8. Electronic publishing offers the tantalizing potential of solving the"serials" conundrum. For over a decade libraries have struggled with rising prices for journals and an expanding universe of documents in all formats. The materials budgets of libraries have not kept pace with inflation resulting in erosion of breadth and depth in library collections. If universities and scholarly societies can publish scholarship electronically in a cost-effective manner, they can break the negative cycle of declining purchases and simultaneously increase the potential for accessing published research. Ultimately, the consequences of a widespread electronic revolution in scholarly communication could produce savings in library materials budgets and reduce the growth of expensive buildings to house paper copies held redundantly throughout the world.
9. Electronic publishing enables the decoupling of certification from publication. Presently the appearance of scholarly work in prestigious journals conveys certification that is important for the tenure and reward process. By separating certification of the content from the form in which publication occurs, scholars will be able to create a new economic model for knowledge transfer.
10. Digital documents present the potential for a direct link from the author to the reader and vice versa, enabling a dialogue that can influence the direction of scholarship through correction and revision of ideas, as well as clarification of meaning for the reader.
11. Electronic publishing and its related products, such as printing and delivery services, can be revenue-generating activities.
12. Widespread adoption of electronic publishing by Cornell faculty and provision of a mechanism for the electronic dissemination of high quality, innovative ideas and research can increase Cornell's competitiveness as a University by making the work of its faculty known and by demonstrating leadership in areas of academic excellence.
13. The technology underpinning electronic publishing creates the environment in which new cultural approaches to ownership of intellectual property become feasible, which can end the abuse of commercial ownership of copyright, and bring the ownership of scholarly materials closer to the academic enterprise itself.
Appendix III: The Landscape of Electronic Publishing
The past few years have witnessed a growing proliferation of scholarly communications in electronic form. Digital publications fall along a continuum ranging from peer reviewed electronic versions of established print titles to novel manifestations, which exist only online and which are the unmediated expressions of their author's creativity. As so frequently happens in technological innovation, initial forays into online publication essentially mimic paper. The relationship between author and publishers remains much the same; journals are peer reviewed, and the nineteenth-century concept of the journal as a device for gathering together writings on related topics persists. The use of subscriptions to obtain access to content prevails, although the subscription is being replaced by the database license, parallel with the emphasis on access to information, rather than ownership of a physical volume. Enhancements such as timeliness, full-text searching, and delivery to the desktop are the primary characteristics distinguishing electronic formats from paper. Digital publishers who capitalize on an existing paper product with name recognition come from both the public and private sector, and include both commercial and not-for-profit ventures. For example, Elsevier (http://www.elsevier.com) offers over 1200 scientific titles available in a database; the John Hopkins University Press publishes under the rubric Project Muse (http://www.muse.jhu.edu) a selection of over 40 humanities journals, the majority of which have both paper and digital versions; Stanford's HighWire Press (http://highwire.stanford.edu) serves as the digital publishing arm for over 50 biomedical and core scientific journals such as Science and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and anticipates adding 50 additional publications in 1998. Frequently the electronic titles are bundled with print subscriptions in a pricing strategy that increases the publisher's revenue, or at the very least, protects the income from paper.
Another variation in electronic publishing is demonstrated in the Los Alamos National Laboratory 's xxx.lanl.gov e-Print Archive (http://xxx.lanl.gov), which began as a service to the high energy physics community, and which has expanded into related disciplines such as mathematics and non-linear science. Contributors post electronic versions of papers to an economical NSF-funded Web site. The papers are available for free over the Internet, and readers comment on them, providing an informal peer review. Subsequently they are codified through their appearance in peer-reviewed paper journals. The primary purpose of the electronic versions is rapid dissemination of new research, with a secondary motive being the abandonment of an archaic exchange of paper prints to a relatively small interest group of a few hundred physicists. Since libraries still subscribe to the paper titles for archival purposes, and there is as yet little or no cultural shift in the willingness of physics researchers to relinquish the local access to paper copies, the Los Alamos XXX server model has had no impact on library economics. However, inspired by the Los Alamos example, several new e-print archives have sprung to life in the few years. Cornell Computer (CS) Science faculty member Joseph Halpern and CS/CIT/CUL staff member Carl Lagoze have been negotiating with Paul Ginsparg, Cornell Ph.D. and mastermind behind the xxx e-Print server, to include the publications of the Association of Computing Machinery and to use NCSTRL as the protocol for distributed datafiles of computer science technical reports and other electronic publications. Other e-print services are COGPRINTS (http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk ), an archive of papers in the cognitive sciences, which is a product of the Electronic Libraries Programme, Great Britain, and the Social Science Research Network (http://www.ssrn.com/) , which focuses on legal and economic material. In its initial stages, access to the digital papers was free, but the Social Science Research Network was established as a commercial venture and will implement subscriptions.
Still another category of electronic publication is the title that originates digitally and which has no paper analog. The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music (http://www.sscm.harvard.edu/jscm/) is one such title, published by the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music. This particular title is peer-reviewed and cast in the familiar package of the serial, but offers graphics and audio in addition to text. The Society publishes single articles as soon as they are ready, rather than collecting several articles into the traditional multi-work issue. Urban Planning, 1794-1918: An International Anthology of Articles, Conference Papers, and Reports (http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/homepage/htm), a website created by John Reps, emeritus professor of urban planning at Cornell, is an example of a self-published monograph produced independently of editors, reviewers, and marketing advisors. Reps' website occupies subsidized space on the Cornell University Library's server and is available without charge. Another model of electronic publication in higher education is CIAO, Columbia International Affairs Online (http://www.ciaonet.org). A cooperative venture between the Columbia University Press and the Columbia Libraries, CIAO offers full-text books, abstracts of articles from key foreign policy journals, links to related sites, and a calendar of events in international affairs. Like HighWire Press and Project Muse, CIAO is a Mellon-sponsored enterprise.
The rich variety of electronic publications is indicative of the pioneering stage of development in the application of new technologies to scholarly communication. A host of issues present themselves for resolution, including the relationship of publications to the academic reward and tenure system, the degree to which mediation traditionally provided by librarians and publishers is useful and desirable; and the economic model that is the most advantageous for support of scholarly communication. In recent years there have been numerous conferences devoted to increasing the understanding of the problems underlying the present publishing environment and attempts to build consensus in higher education about appropriate strategies for surmounting the challenges facing the academy. In March 1997, the California Institute of Technology hosted a conference on scholarly communication attended by provosts, librarians, faculty, and technologists to look at strategies for enhancing scholarly communication while ensuring the integrity and longevity of the digital document. The conference examined the changing role of libraries, the relationship of publication to the reward and tenure process, and the role of scholarly societies. Sarah Thomas represented Cornell at this meeting, out of which grew an effort within the Association of American Universities to decouple the certification (stemming from peer review) and publishing processes. The AAU Digital Committee proposes that the AAU "initiative a staged program directed at enabling professional societies and other bodies to certify research and other scholarly works independent of other steps in the publication process. Since independent certification lies at the fulcrum of the publication process, it is the key to leveraging significant change to the current printbound traditions that are increasingly expensive to support. Perhaps of greater importance, this would increase the value of electronic-based methods of scholarly communication, adding much value to the academic world independent of cost savings that materialize in the long run." (Draft AAU Digital Committee paper); As an outcome of this transformation, the AU Digital Committee predicts that fewer papers would be printed. Highly -priced journals would feel the effect of this change most strongly, and electronic journals would begin to flourish.
Another meeting with wide resonance was the Pew Higher Education Roundtable (http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/ppcat.pl#V7N4) which brought together a galaxy of presidents, chief academic officers, librarians, and other leaders in higher education to develop strategies to address the unfavorable economics of scholarly communication that has marked the last two decades of the twentieth century. The Pew Roundtable recommended that university faculty and libraries place emphasis on quality, rather than quantity, in measuring the achievements of professors and the rank of libraries. It urged that a "well-organized campaign" be undertaken "to inform faculty of the new economics of scholarly publication," especially including the ramifications of their current practice of assigning intellectual property rights to publishers. Participants also stressed the importance of university and scholarly society investment in electronic publication. They viewed the scholarly associations as the "agencies best positioned to make the Internet serve the purposes of an orderly process of scholarly communication," in which peer review and certification are essential elements (p.8) Lastly, the Pew Roundtable endorsed the concept of decoupling publication and faculty evaluation for the purpose of promotion and tenure, just as the CalTech conference had six months earlier.
Some of the ideas emanating from the Pew Roundtable are finding expression in SPARC (http://www.arl.org/sparc/index/html), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, of which Cornell, through the investment of the Cornell University Library, is a charter member. The AAU, the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC), the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), and the Big 12 Provosts have endorsed SPARC. As a first step in achieving its goal of fostering expanded competition in scholarly communication, SPARC is working with the American Chemical Society to publish a new journal as an economical alternative to present modes of publishing on the topic.
Examples of types of electronic publishing in higher education
American Chemical Society http://pubs.acs.org/
One of several society publishers (IEEE, AIP, etc.) co-publishing print/electronic. 26 ACS journals are available as interactive Web editions. ACS has just entered into an agreement with SPARC (ARL"s Scholarly Publishing and Academic Research Coalition) to produce a lower-cost title in organic chemistry.
American Mathematical Society (AMS) http://www.ams.org/
AMS electronic journals feature searching within and across eight electronic journals--Bulletin of the AMS, Conformal Geometry and Dynamics, Electronic Research Announcements of the AMS, Representation Theory, Journal of the AMS, Mathematics of Computation, Proceedings of the AMS, and Transactions of the AMS. In addition, subscribers to AMSelectronic journals and MathSciNet can link back and forth among original articles, citations and reviews. Approximately 90% of AMS electronic journal articles provide links from the reference section to the MathSciNet review (for subscribers). Upon request, subscribers to AMS electronic journals are notified by email when new items are posted. The AMS guarantees to maintain an electronic archive in perpetuity. An escrow fund has been set up for the purpose of ensuring that files will be converted to readable electronic formats. In addition, back volumes of Journal of the AMS, Mathematics of Computation, Proceedings of the AMS, and Transactions of the AMS five years prior to the current year are being archived on JSTOR.
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) http://www.acm.org/dl/
The ACM Digital Library offers 23 of its 27 journals online (about 95% of all ACM articles and proceedings from 1991 on). That includes nearly 9,000 full-text articles from ACM journals, magazines, and conference proceedings. ACM publishes, distributes, and archives original research and firsthand perspectives from the world's leading thinkers in computing and information technologies. The ACM Press Books program covers a broad spectrum of interests in computer science and engineering.
Cambridge University Press http://www.journals.cup.org/
Structurally similar to Project Muse. E-publishing 28 CUP journals. Currently freely available via free registration. Subscriptions coming in 1998 (unknown pricing). Promise of many more CUP journals. Very wide range of topics. As with Project Muse, seemingly minimal impact on centralized economic structure and centralized communications process.
Catalog of United States Government Publications (MOCAT):
http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/dpos/a_mocat.html
This online catalog consists of bibliographic records published in the Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications (MOCAT) since January 1994. The records describe Government information products available through the Federal Depository Library Program. Once a product is identified, a link is available to locate depository libraries that receive that product. The MOCAT database is updated daily.
CIAO (Columbia UP) http://www.ciaonet.org/
Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO), launched in August 1997, contains a wide range of scholarly materials in international affairs, including a selection of working papers from a group of sixty academic institutes in the U.S. and abroad, conference proceedings, abstracts from the leading journals in the field, the full text of books published by Columbia, a calendar of events, and links to over 150 related online sites. This is a first-of-its-kind publication that features regularly updated and expanded material and has an interactive Respond feature that allows users to comment on published papers, exchange information about related work, and make announcements about upcoming conferences. It is offered on an annual subscription to research institutes, government offices, foundations, businesses, law firms, and academic libraries.
Electronic dissertations:
Many universities are now considering or have launched pilot projects to publish theses and dissertations electronically. Some are publishing their own dissertations independently, while others are joining the national initiative known as the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) www.ndltd.org, a federally funded program launched at Virginia Tech. UMI, in its ProQuest Digital Dissertations program (http://www.info.umi.com/solutions/), now has over 70,000 titles online, beginning with works submitted in 1997.
Elsevier Science http://www.elsevier.nl
Elsevier offers 1200 scientific journals online..
FedStats: http://www.fedstats.gov/
More than 70 agencies in the United States federal government produce statistics of interest to the public. The Federal Interagency Council on Statistical Policy maintains this site to provide access to the full range of statistics and information produced by these agencies for public use.
HighWire Press http://highwire.stanford.edu
Provides a technical solution to publishers ready to take their journals on-line. Thus far, working mostly with biomedical (academic and scientific society) publishers. Stanford has strong contacts to the editors in these fields. The site provides a linking point to numerous sites built by HighWire for each publication. Each site is built on the HighWire Press e-journal format (highly hypertextual journals, links to Medline and other HighWire content). Provides a way for already-active publishers not driven by profit interests to break through technical-cost barriers to e-publishing. Has found a synergy that could make a real difference in the economic problems of scholarly serials publishing by leveraging the activities of existing society publishers who all face the same cost-of-entry problem regarding e-publishing.
JSTOR http://www.jstor.org
An archiving service that provides electronically archived, full-text searchable articles from journals/proceedings, generally covering from the first issue to 2-5 years prior to the present and always delivered as images. Currently only institutional/library access. Individual access being investigated. JSTOR is an electronic database that resides at the University of Michigan and is mirrored at Princeton University. Launched officially on January 1, 1997, it includes back issues of journals in anthropology, Asian studies, ecology, economics, education, finance, history, mathematics, philosophy, political science, population studies, and sociology. It will provide search and retrieval of complete runs of a minimum of a hundred important journal titles in ten to fifteen fields within three years. Cornell participated in the second phase of the pilot project, providing feedback and advice before JSTOR officially went into production.
OECD Online Bookshop: http://electrade.gfi.fr/cgi-bin/OECDBookShop.storefront/
The OECD offers electronic publications providing comparative statistical and economic data in a form instantly readable and usable by computer. It gives a complete and timely picture of the economies of the OECD countries and puts them in an international context. Topics include, for example, agriculture, development and aid, economic analysis and forecasting, education, environment, industry, labor, trade, transport, and many more.
Project Muse http://muse.jhu.edu
Full-text HTML versions of 43 journals published by Johns Hopkins University Press (2 published as electronic-only). Typical availability is back to 1996 with plans to expand electronic back runs. Currently available only to institutions/libraries for site-wide access. Can subscribe to individual journals or entire collection. E-journals cost 10% less than p-journals. E-journals are available for 30% additional charge if p-journal is purchased.
Social Science Research Network http://www.ssrn.com/
Structurally and conceptually similar to Ginsparg's physics preprints. SSRN focuses on legal and economic disciplines in the social sciences. Abstracts and full papers can be submitted for working papers and published papers if the submission does not violate preexisting copyright. Submissions are classified into topical "networks" that are subdivided into "journals." Subscriptions to the electronic journals provide an email update capability. Currently, the searchable collection is freely available. Recent announcements and a subscription form indicate that access may soon be restricted to subscribers.
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) http://epubs.siam.org/
In August 1997, SIAM announced a substantial new enhancement to the electronic editions of its10 research journals: a significant amount of the most important mathematical research would be available only to those individuals and institutions that subscribe to SIAM Journals Online. Hundreds of papers scheduled to appear in SIAM's print journals over the next one to two year swill be published electronically beginning in March 1998, well ahead of the print versions. In addition, all papers accepted in August 1997 or later will be published electronically several months after completion of the peer review cycle. Although papers will continue to appear in print on a traditional schedule, in some cases there will be significant delays between electronic publication and the appearance of the print archive.
SGML Server Project (SSP).
SSP at the University of Michigan has been created to provide online support to other academic institutions for selected SGML-encoded text and reference collections. Operated by staff in the Humanities Text Initiative (HTI), the SSP provides participating institutions with the following:
Electronic Publishing at Cornell
ACADEMIC PROJECTS
College Of Veterinary Medicine http://www.vet.cornell.edu
Plumb's Veterinary Handbook, 2nd ed., by Donald C. Plumb. This Web site allows veterinarians to select drugs and then display detailed information. Drug details include topics such as 1) adverse effects, 2) chemistry, 3) client information, and 4) dosage (by species).
Consultant is a diagnostic support system for veterinarians used to suggest possible causes for clinical signs and symptoms and to provide a brief synopsis of the cause, including 1) a general description, 2) species affected, 3) the signs/symptoms associated with it, and 4) a list of recent literature references. Consultant is supported by a database consisting of approximately 500 signs/symptoms, about 4,000 diagnoses, and over 10,000 literature references.
DRAMMA. Notes toward a proposal for DRAMMA (Digital performing Arts Multimedia, Multilingual Archives). DRAMMA would be an international collaboration of institutions (universities, theaters, museums, scholarly journals, and presses) dedicated to furthering communication, research, creativity, and cross-cultural interaction in the performing arts through the development of digital databases available on the Internet and the electronic publication of multimedia modules about performing arts.
Digital Databases
Images (visual, aural, moving, 3D, etc)
Multimedia Modules
Modules (the multimedia equivalent of articles and books) would be solicited and refereed through existing scholarly groups such as university presses, other academic presses, and journals and electronically published by DRAMMA. Our aim is to create new formats for research and teaching and to have these formats accepted by the academic community as contributions to scholarship. The modules could use materials from the digital databases, and, conversely, all materials in the modules would become part of the databases. Publication would be jointly with the scholarly unit responsibility for the quality of the content and content editing, and DRAMMA would provide technical standards, support, and distribution.
Funding
The digital databases would have to be funded originally by institutions and grants. Once the databases where of significant size however, access rights could be sold to individuals and institutions if that were found to be advisable. Multimedia modules could be sold as individual pieces, as part of a DRAMMA subscription, or as part of subscriptions to the participating scholarly journals.
Current Collaborators
An informal working group composed of Karen Brazell, Cornell faculty; the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater (GSRT <www.gertstein.org>) in New York City (Cheryl Faver, John Reaves, Elizabeth Deyer); and the Cornell Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC <cidc.library.cornell.edu>: Tom Hickerson, Peter Hirtle, Oliver Habicht, and Ann Ferguson, the Shaw and theater arts curator at Cornell) met together for the first time on June 4, 1998.
GSRT is collaborating with several groups in Russia (the Brakushin Museums, the Moscow Art Theater, and the St. Petersburg Academy of Theater Arts) and is this summer making connections in Japan.
CIDC is negotiating with the Library of Congress to collaborate on digitizing and cataloging 12,000 Japanese theater slides (mostly kabuki).
Ann Ferguson is soliciting advice and cooperation from theater arts curators in the U.S. and Great Britain.
Karen Brazell is discussing the project with several units at Cornell, scholarly journal editors, individuals with large collections of relevant material, and university-related collections in Japan.
We expect other individuals and institutions to join the informal planning group in the near future. One of our next tasks is to design a formal organization.
Digital Database Plans
There are no accepted metadata standards for the performing arts. The first project of the current informal DRAMMA group is to help develop such standards. A draft of core categories has just been completed and will be tested by various groups in the U.S., Russia, and Japan in June 1998 and then revised. The draft was largely written by Karen Brazell and Ann Ferguson with input from GSRT and CIDC and drew a great deal of useful information from the VRA (Visual Research Archives) core categories (www.oberlin.edu/ ˜art/vra/wc1.html). An initial database will be developed by GSRT in July and small collections (under 20,000 records) of materials on Japanese and Russian performing arts will be entered into the database this summer by GSRT, CIDC, and the Library of Congress. They will be used for courses at Cornell by Karen Brazell and in a distance learning class designed by GSRT with students at Binghamton University and teachers from Binghamton, New York City, and Russia. The database will be maintained at two servers with GSRT and CIDC cooperating in its maintenance.
Multimedia Modules Plans
GSRT has been developing software for various theater-related projects including interactive textbooks on the Web for distance learning classes and a 3D (VRML) Japanese noh theater and representation of the Meyerhold Apartment/Museum in Moscow. Karen Brazell will work with one or two collaborators and with the support of GSRT to create a multimedia module on the Japanese noh play Yamamba. We hope to develop at least two demonstration modules in time to seek major funding in spring 1999.
Faculty Web Sites
Daryl Bem (Psychology). http://comp9.psych.cornell.edu/faculty/people/Bem_Daryl.htm
Full-text copies of presentations and articles not restricted by the journal of original publication and abstracts of all other articles.
Jacques Béreaud (Romance Studies) with Jeremy Paquette (student).
La France à la page http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/Courses/frlit320/
A Web site in French dedicated to resources on contemporary France and its culture, this site (created for the course French Lit 320) is a select guide to sites on politics, economics, daily life, education, culture, language and literature, cinema, gastronomy, and leisure pursuits in France.
Histoire de France http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/french_history/index.html
offers a selection of resources on French history that correspond to various sites on the Internet. Each site has been carefully selected according to the interest and richness of the information.
Interactive Media Group (IMG) http://www.img.cornell.edu/
IMG is an interdisciplinary research and design team directed by Professor Geri Gay in the Department of Communication. The goal of its research is to understand and improve the expanding role of computers in communicating, learning, working, and playing. It studies how humans interact with computers and how technology can mediate communication, as well as explores ways of using technology to allow evaluators and researchers to gather meaningful data.
Invention & Enterprise: Ezra Cornell, a Nineteenth-century Life. As part of a joint project with Kroch Library, IMG is developing an electronically accessible resource that would appeal to many audiences. The centerpiece of the project is an Internet-based exhibit that chronicles the life of Ezra Cornell in the context of nineteenth-century America. A narrative of his life is accompanied by illustrative images from the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and the College of Engineering. In addition, access is provided to the complete digital archive of Ezra Cornell's correspondence, about 30,000 scanned pages.
Global Digital Museum. This project combines the collections and staff expertise of museums in England and Japan, the technical skills of IBM-Japan, and the consulting and evaluation background of IMG. It represents IMG's effort to link with corporations in order to support its ongoing programs. Museum staff are digitizing selected holdings from the British Museum in London and the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. These materials will form the core of the Global Digital Museum Web site. As an example, Cornell graduate students prepared a model museum site, called Ancient Mexico Gallery, that provides for state-of-the-art networked multimedia with spectacular images of artifacts from Aztec, Mayan, and other Indian cultures. As a model, the site has been a valuable teaching aid, helping communicate concepts of navigation, interactivity, site mapping, and collaboration.
Carousel is a database created to support a laboratory exercise for engineering design. Information is provided for five topics: structure, power, gears, aerodynamics, and generators-and organized using the metaphor of a carousel. Animation, text, voice, and video illustrate concepts for students.
IDEaS, the Interactive Database of Electricity and Sound, was developed in a collaborative project with a professor at Hampton University to support design laboratories for students of electrical engineering.
The Field Guide to Insects and Culture, better known as the Bughouse, is an interactive multimedia database for the study of cultural entomology. Over 2,000 data items, including full-motion video, audio, pictures, and text are contained in the database and are organized using the metaphor of a large Victorian house. Students browse by clicking on the doors to different rooms around the house and see data items by clicking on their representations, for example, a fly on the wall.
Mobile computing at the Plantations. IMG is working with educators at the Plantations to test whether newly emerging and more powerful hand-held personal computers will enhance Plantations visitors' experiences. An electronic guide can keep a record of the interests of the visitor and collect information for the visitor to take a copy of when he or she leaves (perhaps by printing the visitor's "journal" at the Visitor Center). Eventually IMG wants to explore wireless options that enable the hand-held device to "follow" the user, giving information relevant to the path through the Plantations that the user has chosen.
Laboratory Of Ornithology http://www.ornith.cornell.edu/ http://www.ornith.cornell.edu
Birdscope. http://www.ornith.cornell.edu/Publications/birdscope/
The newsletter of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, dedicated to research, education, and conservation, offers up-to-date information about the laboratory's activities and volunteer research programs.
Living Bird, http://www.ornith.cornell.edu/Publications/livingbird/index.html,
the award-winning quarterly magazine, filled with stunning color photographs of birds; articles by top experts in birding and ornithology, reviews of the latest books and equipment, and advice on how to improve birding skills. Selected articles are available online.
Birds in Forested Landscapes (BFL). http://birds.cornell.edu/bfl/ The Web site links volunteer birders and professional biologists in a study of the habitat requirements of North American forest birds. The project will focus on species that are common in some areas but declining in others. A guide gives detailed instructions on how to conduct observations and transfer data to computer-readable data forms, which observers transmit to the laboratory. BFL findings will be used to develop management recommendations and descriptions of the kinds and amounts of habitat required to sustain healthy bird populations. The recommendations will become part of the North American Bird Conservation Plan.
Library of Natural Sounds. http://www.ornith.cornell.edu/LNS/index.html A Web site with audio that offers an archive of bird calls.
Land-Grant Digital Press
Project: Using Open-access, Internet-first Publishing, Supplemented by On-demand Printing to Resolve the Crisis in Scholarly Communications. Proposed by J. Robert Cooke.
Cornell should co-sponsor a national effort in higher education in conjunction with appropriate national organizations to fundamentally restructure the traditional paper-based communication paradigm in response to escalating financial pressures. The paper-based approach, made feasible by a change in printing technology, fundamentally expanded access to scholarship. The maturing digital technology, appropriately harnessed, makes another fundamental expansion in access feasible.
Universal access to scholarly communications would have a profound impact on all of higher education (and society, too). Having universities cease outsourcing their publishing needs; reclaim their control over distribution; and provide open digital access, the right to make a personal copy, and on-demand printing for a fee (including some cost recovery) is one model for "library-style" access. University funding to subsidize this approach could be obtained by redirection from 1) savings in materials costs (no need to purchase the free online materials, and only portions of these need be printed), 2) substantial reduction in the rate of growth in shelf space because the collection need no longer be proportional to the paper storage requirements, and 3) some slowing of the growth in library-staff expenses, which should be feasible as the materials handling of library resources becomes more fully automated.
Each campus would bear its own publishing costs, but a "University Digital Press and Library" would have a shared structure analogous to the Los Alamos E-print server for distribution. A worldwide on-demand printing utility could be provided through contract with one or more commercial distributed printing services.
The existence of a Cornell Digital Press would enhance, but not replace, a coordinated national effort to make this approach viable. Despite the already massive shift to digital formats by publishers, the costs of these materials remains high, thwarting a rapid transition from paper storage and the capture of the associated savings in construction costs. [J. Robert Cooke]
Law School
Cornell Law Review. http://www.law.cornell.edu/clr/index.html
Published six times a year, the Cornell Law Review is a journal devoted to the study and analysis of contemporary legal issues and problems. Each issue contains articles written by practicing lawyers, scholars, judges, and public officials. In addition, it contains reviews of significant books relating to the law and student-written notes on current legal issues.
Legal Information Institute. http://www.law.cornell.edu/
The institute's Web site holds all its Internet publications: a collection of recent and historic Supreme Court decisions; its hypertext versions of the full U.S. Code, U.S. Constitution, Federal Rules of Evidence, and Civil Procedure; recent opinions of the New York Court of Appeals and commentary on them; the American Legal Ethics Library, and other important legal materials-federal, state, foreign, and international. It holds the LII's e-mail directory of faculty and staff at U.S. law schools, as well as contact information on other people and organizations in the field of law.
NCSTRL (Networked Collaborative Technical Report Library). http://www.ncstrl.org
NCSTRL is an open-architecture, distributed digital library that provides access to some 18,000 technical reports at over a hundred institutions--including Cornell, Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT. It is a collaborative effort by a number of universities to make available to the public their computer science technical reports and other relevant materials.
Anyone can access NCSTRL on the Internet via a WWW browser. Currently, the system uses Dienst, a distributed storage and retrieval system co-developed by Xerox and Carl Lagoze of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell. A reduced-scale version provides access to reports stored in FTP archives. Dienst entails a separate server at each institution, on which each mounts its own reports, and a central Dienst indexer. Bibliographic information (metadata) is exchanged among the participating sites. The indexing and storage of images in the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture uses the Dienst server, and it could also be used for publishing electronic dissertations.
Plantations
The Cornell Plantations Path Guide Web site http://www.plantations.cornell.edu offers richly illustrated mini-tours of the Plantations Path-a seven-mile series of loops and trails through the campus quads, spectacular gardens, and all-but-hidden nooks and crannies. It features beautiful color photographs of Cornell Plantations gardens and the campus, as well as images and sound clips of birds the visitor might see or hear on a stroll and time-lapse video clips of flowers and trees bursting forth on any spring day at the Plantations.
Cornell Daily Sun. http://www.cornellsun.com
URBAN PLANNING 1794-1918: An International Anthology of Articles, Conference Papers, Book Chapters, and Reports. Selected, edited, and provided with headnotes by John W. Reps, professor emeritus, Department of City and Regional Planning. Equivalent to the length of a 500-page book, Professor Reps's anthology is the most comprehensive collection of its kind, in hard copy or electronic format. He describes the contents as "primary source material for the study of how urban planning developed up to the end of World War I." Alphabetical, chronological, and subject bibliographies and a keyword searcher make it easy to explore the more than 170 essays and articles. Because he was having difficulty mounting his work on the departmental server, Professor Reps thought of asking if he could mount it on the library server <http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/homepage.htm>. He notes that the site has received as many as 447 hits in one week, and it is being used in courses. His work has received numerous congratulatory reviews, e.g., "This is an excellent example of how the Web can be used to make documents and ideas public that might otherwise remain buried or forgotten, and give them new accessibility and potency."
CBS is leading a national initiative working with content providers, technology firms and others to re-engineer the distribution channel for course materials. This effort seeks to apply the best available technologies to lower total costs and increase the value of and access to information products used in the classroom.
CourseWeb
The Campus Store has pioneered in the development of a scaleable web based product to support faculty in the classroom. This product is now being developed and distributed through the National Association of College Stores. The Cornell implementation is focused on providing an advanced course materials infrastructure to help faculty and students. Current and developing features include... on line adoption, links to major databases and services, a standard look and feel, on line textbook listing, ordering, or reservation. Course materials supported include class notes, custom course packs, custom textbooks, articles, and a host of related materials for customization, view, print, and purchase.
Custom Publishing & Copyright Clearance
CBS has pioneered in the use of current technologies and processes to support the creation of custom course materials. Today this represents over 14% of the total mix, the second highest level in the nation. This involves the extensive use of a copyright clearance system co-developed with Xerox corporation called "PackBuilder". The system is used to clear approximately 9000 copyrights each year.
Digital Print Shop
CBS operates a business entity capable of efficient scanning, storage, and print on demand. Digital files can be transferred via the internet or sneaker-net. People, systems and equipment are also in place to accommodate basic electronic pre-press services. This infrastructure uses Docutechs and XDOD software. A partnership is under development with Danka Corporation to jointly operate DPS and to develop a targeted set of academic applications (i.e. course packs). This will enable access to state of the art technologies, processes and human capital.
CourseInfo
CourseInfo is a course web management tool for faculty interested in using a template approach to publishing course related material, from text to multimedia, on the web. CourseInfo also offers other course management and communication tools, including the ability to upload and download work submitted by either an individual or groups within a class. The Academic Technology Center provides support for CourseInfo by offering training and ongoing consultation, as well as monitored space for course Web sites on the Academic Technology Services INSTRUCT servers.
INSTRUCT servers
The INSTRUCT servers are a system of SUN machines that provide space for both course web pages and non-web material related to instruction. Faculty who have developed course Web sites can request an INSTRUCT account and server space for their work. These web pages tend to include more multimedia content and a higher level of interactivity. Other software applications, that enable faculty to share non-web work with students and colleagues, are also available to INSTRUCT users. The Academic Technology Center provides support by training faculty in the use of basic to advanced technologies that relate to publishing on the web, ongoing consultation, and monitored space on the INSTRUCT servers.
Training
The Academic Technolgy Center provides a wide selection of both on-line course material that can be used asynchronously as well as instructor-led workshops that demonstrate instructional technologies and how they can be implemented to meet instructional goals and produce material for publishing electronically.
Consultation
In addition to Web-related publishing, the staff of the Academic Technology Center consult with faculty who may choose a non-web electronic technology, such as a CDROM, to publish and deliver their work. Much time has been spent consulting on techniques for incorporating sound, images, video and virtual reality segments into a body of electronically delivered work.
Resources
The Academic Technology Center strives to explore and provide access to emerging technologies, including hardware and software. Some current areas of interest include streaming technologies for sound, video and most recently text, as well as the development of a web to database interface that is relatively easy to develop and maintain. The ATC does so through the computer equipment, peripherals and software available at the Center itself in
124 CCC as well as offering many on-line resources at our web site -- http://atc.cit.cornell.edu.
New Tools for Teaching and Research
Graduate students are also encouraged to use electronic media in their graduate work since we have offered the New Technologies in Teaching and Research conferences with Princeton these past couple of years. We have also invited speakers that motivate them to do so, and a few have started down this path.
Net-Print
Net-Print is a fee-based laser printing service available in Academic Technology Services (ATS) Computer Labs, the Residence Hall Network (ResNet) and elsewhere on the Cornell campus. The system authenticates users and allows them to pay for printing requests via student bursar accounts, cash debit accounts or other special accounts. Net-Print allows users to queue documents to any of a number of laser printers in several locations, view a log of their print jobs and track monthly printing charges on their bursar bills from any properly configured workstation
Networked classrooms
Through funding from FABIT (the Faculty Advisory Board on Information Technology), in collaboration with Classroom Technologies and the Academic Technology Center, there is a networked classroom up and running in Uris G28. It is an environment in which students and instructors could conceivably produce and publish a collective body of work,; this space is currently used for freshman writing seminars.
CUPID http://cupid.cit.cornell.edu/CUPID/
CUPID (Consortium for University Printing and Information Distribution) is an architecture and protocol for high-end, distributed network printing. An implementation of the system built at Cornell allows users to stipulate custom finishing operations such as double-sided printing, stapling, covers, or binding. The architecture has the capacity to facilitate billing, assess a usage or copyright fee, and access online documents from web sites, ftp servers and document archive systems (e.g., Dienst) without requiring that users download the document to their workstation. CUPID can send documents to networked laser printers, departmental printers, high-end printers such as the Docutech (Cornell has one at Media Services and two at the Digital Print Shop) and to commercial printers. CUPID jobs may currently be routed to the Digital Print Shop on Judd Falls Road, and to Kinko's and Arnold Printing in Ithaca. Cornell's Graphics Purchasing is facilitating arrangements with other commercial printers.
EZ-Publish II is a service built on the CUPID architecture which allows users to print certain types of common finished documents (e.g., booklets) at on- and off-campus printshops. An alpha version of the system was used in 1998 by the CIT/ATS Publications group to automatically send over 25 titles for printing at the on-campus Digital Print Shop, and to Kinko's and Arnold Printing in Ithaca. A beta version of EZ-Publish II and evaluation by additional users is planned.
PubWeb Collaboration
PubWeb, Inc. www.pubweb.com a startup company located in Woburn, MA, is using the CUPID architecture to facilitate the ordering, processing, printing and delivery of custom textbooks. PubWeb is attempting to secure rights to textbook content which may be combined with local content to produce textbooks designed for a specific course and printed on demand. Cornell (CIT/OIT/ATS) has executed a collaborative CUPID development agreement with PubWeb.
The CIDC operates under a campus-wide mandate from the provost and is administered as a unit of the Cornell University Library. The successor to the Digital Access Coalition, CIDC will continue its initiatives in developing shared digital collections of visual and textual resources drawn from across the campus, as well as enhancing those resources for classroom instruction.
The Ezra Cornell Papers consist of correspondence, financial and legal records, court proceedings, and other documents pertaining principally to the Cornell family, the telegraph industry, and the founding of Cornell University. The papers also show Cornell's career as a farmer, New York State legislator, entrepreneur, and philanthropist and include subsequently printed materials collected in support of his various affairs and enterprises.
IMAG/CU. CIDC will develop and administer a Web site for this shared university image catalog that incorporates collections from the Johnson Museum of Art, the Rare and Manuscript Collections, the History of Art Slide Collection, and the Architecture, Art and Planning Slide Collection.
L.A. Fuertes Image Database. Louis Agassiz Fuertes is the most notable ornithological painter since Audubon. The image database offers 2,500 of his bird illustrations, as well as an exhibit based on the journal he kept during the Harriman Alaska Expedition in summer 1899, which gathered an illustrious group of scientists, writers and artists. The site incorporates artwork from the Laboratory of Ornithology, as well as from the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and the University Library, and attracts both bird enthusiasts and academic researchers.
The Museum Digital Licensing Collective has involved the CDIC in an initiative to develop a nationwide collection of digital images of museum holdings that could operate in a not-for-profit as well as profit manner. The University Library at Berkeley and the Cornell Library are lead participants in developing plans for supporting the technical infrastructure of the database.
Museum Online Project. The Johnson Museum of Art, working in conjunction with the CIDC, is creating digital representations of the over 27,000 works housed in the museum, both images and objects. The goal is to broaden access to collections both across campus and publicly, in addition to making classroom use more feasible.
Plantations. During the next two years CIDC and the Interactive Media Group will assist the Cornell Plantations in the systematic use of digital technology to integrate taxonomic and historical data with real-time field study. The project will expand public and academic access to this important botanical collection, enhancing its usability, linking it to related collections, and testing hand-held and wireless devices for field study and public touring. Preliminary planning has begun on a pilot project to improve access to scientific specimens and historical data held by the L.H. Bailey Hortorium, linking this data to the developing Plantations database.
Utopia is a database of images of European Renaissance art, primarily from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a pilot project designed to test the feasibility of building a thematically-based image database comprised of art and information from four different campus repositories and evaluating classroom use of the digital collection. Based on the success of this endeavor, those four repositories (IMAG/CU) are now developing a more comprehensive shared collection. The participants are the Slide Library of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, the Department of History of Art, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. CIDC manages the partnership and maintains the database.
The Core Historical Literature of Agriculture is an electronic full-text collection of agricultural texts published from 1850 to 1950. Topics include agricultural economics, agricultural engineering, animal science, crop protection, food science, forestry, human nutrition, rural sociology, and soil science. This cooperative effort is preserving agrarian literature for future generations of scholars and farmers-irreplaceable literature, much of it in a fragile, embrittled state. The project's interface was originally based on the Making of America system, and images are stored and indexed with the Dienst document server, which was developed at the Department of Computer Science.
DAISY. In 1992 the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) issued a call for participation in the project "The Capture and Storage of Electronic Theses and Dissertations." It agreed to sponsor the joint proposal of Cornell, the University of Michigan, and Penn State (called DAISY) and Virginia Tech's SGML project. At Cornell the project was led by John Saylor with the collaboration of the Graduate School and CIT. From May 1993 through May 1995 CIT scanned 114 engineering dissertations in TIFF format, which were mounted on a gopher server. But they were a seminal idea whose time had not yet come, and they are now what we would call "a snapshot in time"--currently stored on library servers but not viewable by the public
Hein Law Review Project
William S. Hein & Co., Inc. of Buffalo, NY, in collaboration with the Cornell Law Library and Cornell Information Technologies (OIT/ATS), are preparing an online collection of historical law review journals. Hein, a re-publisher of historical law materials which services research law libraries, is scanning the materials and providing content and structure metadata in XML. These are sent to Cornell where the page images are OCR'ed and mounted in a Dienst-5 based digital document archive. An application to browse and search the collection online is being developed in CIT; the Cornell Law Library is coordinating an evaluation of the system's capabilities and interface with input from other research law libraries. The Dienst-5 archive is being developed in CIT in coordination with Carl Lagoze of the Computer Science Department. A CUPID gateway will facilitate printing excerpts of the online materials.
The Making of America. http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/MOA/moa-main_page.html
The Making of America (MOA) is a multi-institutional initiative to create and make accessible over the Internet a distributed digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. In the initial phase, the University of Michigan and Cornell collaborated in scanning over 900,000 pages, representing 991 serial volumes and over 242 monographs at Cornell (634,000 pages, representing 2,000 volumes at Michigan). Most were published between 1850 and 1900. At Cornell, the effort involved cooperation among the library, CIT, the Interactive Multimedia Group (which is assisting with ongoing user evaluation of the project), and faculty and students using the collections. Phase one of the project ended in December 1996. The interface of the Core Historical Literature of Agriculture project at Mann Library was originally based on the MOA interface.
MOA 2 is a Digital Library Federation (DLF) project that has been partially funded by NEH and is being led by UC Berkeley. The other participants are Stanford, Penn State, NYPL, and Cornell. It will involve the digitization of special collections materials (manuscripts, photographs, maps, and various materials other than books) relating to transportation in the U.S. between 1869 and 1900. These digital items will serve as a testbed and will reside on local servers. Encoded Archival Descriptions (EADs-basically digital finding aids) for each of these collections will be created and housed centrally on the Berkeley server. The aim is to find out how to use a central indexing mechanism to access a distributed collection. An important part of the project will be the development of the appropriate structural and administrative metadata, as well as the selection of a persistent naming scheme. At present a white paper, written at Berkeley, that describes the proposed architecture for the project is being commented on by the participants and by the DLF architecture committee. Once everyone agrees on the details of that plan, the project will commence. The evaluation component of the project has been contracted to Geri Gay in the Department of Communication (the Interactive Media Group). [Ross Atkinson]
Mathematics books. http://moa.cit.cornell.edu/dienst-data/cdl-math-browse.html
Around 700 mathematics books, representing the period from 1850 to 1920, were chosen for digitization for a number of reasons: the Cornell mathematics collection is especially strong, mathematics monographs from 1850 on are considered of current scholarly interest, the material is in poor physical condition and had been identified as one of the library's highest preservation priorities, potential users are technically sophisticated, the material falls outside of copyright restrictions, and very few libraries nation wide have strong retrospective holdings in this subject area. Further, the mathematics faculty had determined that these books had to be replaced in paper form, so many of the volumes had been scheduled for preservation photocopy. The monographs chosen included works of significant authors and those individual titles that have contributed substantially to the development of the discipline.
RLG DigiNews. RLG DigiNews is a bimonthly online newsletter <http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews> produced by the Cornell University Library Department of Preservation and Conservation under contract with the Research Libraries Group, Inc. This Web-based publication has the following goals:
2. Provide filtered guidance and pointers to relevant projects to improve our awareness of evolving practices in image conversion and digital archiving
3. Announce publications (in any form) that will help staff attain a deeper understanding of digital issues
The National and University Library of Iceland and Cornell, in association with the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland, have begun a cooperative project of large-scale digitalization of 380,000 manuscript pages and 145,000 printed pages. Access will be provided through the Internet. The material will consist of Icelandic sagas and rímur poetry and is kept in the National Library, the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland, and the Fiske Icelandic Collection. All manuscripts and printed editions and translations of the sagas, as well as relevant critical studies published before 1900, will be included. The items will be cataloged in the library systems at the National Library and at Cornell. The material will be digitized in a manner that will ensure long-term preservation, and the quality will be equivalent to, or better than, that of microfilm. The total budget is $1,300,000.
SPARC http://www.arl.org/sparc/index.html
The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a coalition of libraries, initiated by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), that seeks to partner with scholarly publishers willing to enter markets where prices are highest and competition is needed. SPARC intends to reduce the risks of entering the marketplace to publisher-partners and to provide faculty with prestigious and responsive alternatives to current publishing vehicles. It will accomplish these goals by soliciting or encouraging the introduction of new titles of high quality and fair price, by guaranteeing a subscription base and significant marketing support, and by generating support for SPARC and its projects from higher education, scholarly and professional societies, and scholarly publishing. The AAU has endorsed SPARC. Through the Cornell University Library, Cornell is a founding member of SPARC.
The Essential Electronic Library (TEEAL). This electronic library will contain the full text, complete with graphics and illustrations, of 125 agricultural journals stored on a set of 70 compact disks. Designed to support agricultural research in regions where there is an urgent need for increased food production, TEEAL will be made available to 113 of the lowest income food-deficit countries. By providing information to support agricultural education and research, it will aid in increasing food production. To be produced by Mann Library with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, annual updates will be issued for ten years.
Witchcraft database. http://www.psmedia.com/witchcraft.htm
Witchcraft in Europe and America is a Web site created by Primary Source Media, in partnership with Rare and Manuscript Collections, that features more than a hundred original monographs from the literature on witchcraft and demonology written from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century. The items are selected from Cornell's collection, the premiere archive for the study of the witchcraft phenomenon in Europe. Each page is offered as a digital facsimile with fully searchable electronic text. The cost for access is $575 to $2,000 per year, depending on the size of the subscribing institution. Cornell has a three-year contract according to which it will receive 20% of net revenues (sales minus sales tax, bad debts, and cancellations) plus free access for Cornell users (not yet implemented). There are no reports on sales yet.
The Press is not at present directly engaged in any electronic publishing projects, though the acquisitions staff are in ongoing discussions about potential projects and have had preliminary discussions with various individuals on campus about the feasibility of publishing the proceedings of Cornell conferences, symposia, lecture series, etc., online. An initiative of this kind would enable the university to extend the gain from projects in which it has already invested money. The most attractive of these "volumes" would no doubt eventually be published in paper, benefiting from the online review process.
Other Press efforts are focused on the development of a "virtual" backlist capability and the expansion of our Web site:
1) The Sales Department, Production Department, and distribution operation (CUP Services) are actively exploring on-demand printing with a number of our vendors, several of whom will be visiting in the near future to make presentations and to discuss how they might work together to develop this capability. This initiative is especially attractive to the Press, for it provides an immediate income stream--which is essential to the Press, whose lack of capital resources severely restricts its ability to experiment with electronic publishing.
2) Like many publishers, the Press is actively exploring the ways in which it can increase sales through the development of its Web site. At present, CUP is conducting a large special sale on the site; it has taught us much that will be invaluable as it moves forward in the development of a full-scale electronic sales and marketing program. In Fall 1998 CUP posted excerpts (contents and chapters) from selected titles on the site. It is a short step from there to making full text of some titles available on the Web, and within the next eighteen months CUP may well seek to publish some of our most specialized titles on the Web only. CUP is now contracting for several projects whose authors will be able to post updates on our Web site, supplementing the information in their books and attracting new readerships to the titles. This is an especially attractive option for books of current interest (Cambodian politics and the state of the Euro) and books with classroom use in rapidly changing fields (a cladistics text).
MEDIA SERVICES
Media Services wants to get all Cornell Cooperative Extension Fact Sheets (a maximum of 6 pages each with some illustrations) on the Web. They represent about 30% of Media Services' current publication inventory. It hopes to make them available at no cost but may need some electronic commerce component. That is the first step to getting more publications online.
|
Task |
|
|
|
|
|
| Infrastructure Development: servers, software, workstations, wiring, licenses, back-up |
$150,000
|
$250,000
|
$200,000
|
$200,000
|
$800,000
|
| Personnel: encoding consultants, software developers, trainers, editors, archiving experts |
$300,000
|
$500,000
|
$525,000
|
$550,000
|
$1,875,000
|
| Education and Outreach: speakers, travel, supplies |
$25,000
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
$ -
|
$ 25,000
|
| TOTAL |
$475,000
|
$750,000
|
$725,000
|
$750,000
|
$2,700,000
|