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The impact of electronic publishing on library services and resources in the UK

Appendix 3 - Current BLR&DD projects relating to electronic publishing

Electronic library at De Montfort University, Milton Keynes
Professor Mel Collier
De Montfort University, Leicester
February 1992 to July 1994
£42,500

The ELINOR project is aimed at setting up a pilot electronic library at the Milton Keynes campus for the Business Information Science course. Over the next two terms, the system will be evaluated. As well as scanning lecturers' notes the project has negotiated with several publishers for permission to scan selected texts for the pilot. Publishers include: Basil Blackwell, Blackwell Scientific, Edward Arnold, John Wiley, Macmillan, Open University, Pitman, Stanley Thornes and West Publishing. Chapman & Hall are interested in discussing an electronic book project with DMU, possibly new editions of standard textbooks to be published in electronic form as well as on paper.

Feasibility of the electronic distribution of a scholarly journal
Professor Jack Meadows
Loughborough University
August 1992 to May 1994
£59,500

This is a joint project with the Institute of Physics Publishing and support from SCONUL which is investigating issues involved in the delivery and use of IOPPs Modelling and simulation in materials science and engineeringÆ in electronic form at selected test sites, including UCL, the universities at Loughborough, Hertfordshire and Exeter, and the ARE at Harwell.

Online access to multimedia documents
Professor Peter Kirstein
University College London
October 1992 to January 1994
£109,500

The project investigated the provision of online access to a database of ten years of American Chemical Society journals, which include text, tables and bit-mapped graphics. The work complements that of the Chemical Online Retrieval Experiment (CORE) in the US, which involves the ACS, Cornell University, Bellcore and OCLC.

Office for Humanities Communication
Dr Marilyn Deegan
Oxford University
August 1993 to July 1996
£138,000

HC is funded to provide information services and research in computer-aided communication in the humanities. Among other activities OHC maintains HUMBUL (the Humanities Bulletin Board). They have also recently produced reports on the computer encoding of primary texts (explaining the recommendations of the Text Encoding Initiative based on SGML) and on digitising manuscript images (an overview of current techniques), both by Peter Robinson. They have also published 'The politics of the electronic text', the proceedings of a one-day conference held in February 1992 on the impacts of new technologies.

Estimating the size of the future electronic publications industry
Mr David Brown
DJB Associates
November 1993 to June 1994
£9,200

This study aims to produce estimates of the size of the market in electronic publications of all kinds in five and ten years time. It will also attempt to produce figures for the expected speed of changeover from current forms to electronic publishing systems. The idea was initially discussed in the context of legal deposit. The Corporate Research Group has funded this study as it will be of interest to all parts of the BL as well as to others involved in the publishing industry.

Sources of digital information survey
Mr Marc Fresko
Imaging and Information Technology Consultancy
September to December 1994
£10,000

The Corporate Research Group funded this study in support of the Library's strategic objectives for establishing the Library as a major world centre for the storage and transmission of digital texts required for research and scholarship. The final report will consist of an inventory of collections in the UK and abroad, and a summary of the issues involved. Further updates will be made up to the end of 1994.

The scientific journal
Mr Alan Singleton
Institute of Physics Publishing
October 1993 to February 1994
£500

This is an article commissioned by BLR&DD for its Information UK Outlooks series. It looks at the past, present and possible future of the scientific journal. It is due to be published for the Department by the Library Information Technology Centre at South Bank University in the summer of 1994.

Electronic journals
Mr Fytton Rowland
Loughborough University
December 1993 to April 1994
£500
This article was commissioned for the Information UK Outlooks series. It looks at possible models for the electronic scholarly publishing system and how the system might develop. It is due to be published by the Library Information Technology Centre in the summer of 1994.

An online electronic journal for training purposes
Professor Jack Meadows
Loughborough University
May 1994 to October 1995
£25,400

An electronic journal containing the abstracts of LIS dissertations will be created and maintained by LIS students in order to establish the education needs of intermediaries. Strathclyde and City University in the UK, Chalmers University in Sweden and Adelaide University in Australia are also involved. May 1994

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