P&P Online:

One Library’s Adventure in Electronic

Publishing

By Bob PisciottaAssociate Director, Library Systems and

Technical Services,A.R. Dykes Library,The University of Kansas Medical Center

The Premise

Dykes Library, KU Medical Center, is the Publisher of the Electronic (WWW) Version of the E-journal Photochemistry & Photobiology.

Why Did We Do This?The “right” reasons: Test of scholarly publishing/ printing

capabilities on the web R&D test bed for new WWW technologies

Why Did We Do This?The “wrong” reasons: To make money Because I could I have an indulgent boss

The Principal Players ASP (American Society for Photobiology) KUMC (Dykes Library, University of Kansas

Medical Center) Allen Press

The Print Journal Monthly 2 volumes per year 15-20 articles per issue Typical STM fare: text, some photos, tables

and line art

The Proposal Prototypes Contract terms Cost estimates

Tour of the Periodical Front end Free content: Tables of contents and

abstracts

Tour of the Periodical Restricted content: full-text HTML and PDFs Search functionality Browse functionality

Ingredients SGML files Penta files Hi-res tiffs Gifs (symbols) PDFs

Tools WordPerfect 9.0 Renamer application Adobe Photoshop FrontPage (aargh) MS access ASP scripts

Tools (Continued)

Shell scripts combining Unix and Perl FTP app One Unix web server, and one NT web

server

Production Roadblocks Tiff files without extensions

(solution = Renamer) Greek characters

(solution = gif symbol files)

Output Html Low-res gifs PDFs Browsing database with associated scripts

Processes For documents For images Site processing

The Responsible Parties J.C. Scaiano, editor Dennis Valenzeno, electronic editor Bob Pisciotta, site coordinator Scott Tichenor, tech support Loretta Wright, production support

The Future XML Informix database Conversion on the fly

Lessons Learned Think long and hard before leaping

Lessons Learned Identify dedicated resources

Lessons Learned Solidify support throughout the chain of

command

Lessons Learned Don’t expect to make money

Lessons Learned SGML is a mixed blessing (but XML may

have a brighter future).

Lessons Learned Run in fear from FrontPage

Presentation is available athttp://www.aspjournal.com/ala/