Digital Publishing - Data Handling

SuperJournal is a research project aiming to identify what factors will make electronic journals successful and why. The project brings together some 20 society, university press and commercial publishers, who are providing electronic versions of around 50 journal titles in discrete areas of academic research. The “why?” is being established via a formal evaluation study being conducted by Loughborough University. In order to undertake the study, an application is being developed by the University of Manchester which offers choice over both content and functionality to the users, who are based at targeted universities. This report focuses on the technical development work undertaken so far to support the scalable distribution of digital journals in an academic network environment. University of Manchester receives data files from the different publishers in a variety of formats: principally SGML, HTML, PDF and PostScript, plus GIF, TIFF and EPS; and via various transfer mechanisms. All SGML is ‘synthesised’ to conform to a DTD defined by the project, converted to HTML including enhancement. The associated scalability issues are discussed. Data is loaded into a number of datastores: an objectbase, a relational database and application-specific databases; and indexed via a number of search engines. The application is accessed over the WWW and consists of an integrated assembly of software, providing the core functionality to maximise use, e.g. searching, browsing, linking, screen presentation and personal preference setting.