The World Wide Web and emerging Internet resource discovery standards for scholarly literature - Networked Scholarly Publishing

Library Trends, Spring, 1995 by Stuart L. Weibel

INTRODUCTION

Access is the heart of the library. All other functions - selection, acquisition, cataloging, and preservation - derive from the basic objective of matching the information needs of users to the materials that will satisfy those needs.

The rapid development of networking and electronic dissemination of information forces upon us both opportunities and burdens. The opportunity is to provide the greater flexibility and convenience that networked information affords. The burden is to integrate these services with the existing library infrastructure such that users are not confronted with two disjoint information environments.

Technology is at the heart of all aspects of networked access to scholarly information: economics, protection of intellectual property rights, preserving the record of scholarship, and even the politics of publishing. The choices made - and those forced upon us - comprise the landscape in which the information ecology will evolve.

The present discussion focuses on the technological issues of electronic access to scholarly publishing, and, in particular, the World Wide Web (WWW) as a medium for the delivery of scholarly information. The role of structured text on the Internet is addressed (specifically the relationship between Standard Generalized Markup Language and HyperText Markup Language). Finally, the relationship of MARC standards to the evolving Uniform Resource Identifiers and related standards are discussed.

The World Wide Web: The Front End of the Internet

World Wide Web browsers, such as NCSA's Mosaic, are the front end to the Internet; in a year's time they catapulted the Internet (and the WWW in particular) to the forefront of the public consciousness and garnered enormous attention in the national press. Will the WWW persist or is it simply the latest technology du jour.? Is it a suitable vehicle for the delivery of scholarly information or simply a pretty (inter)face? The ability of Web protocols to embrace other Internet protocols (such as ftp and Gopher) augurs well for its extensibility over time. The WWW is likely to be an enduring part of the Internet landscape and should be considered a keystone for the delivery of scholarly information. What makes this technology important, and how will it affect access to scholarly information?

The Pretty, Easy Answer

WWW browsers provide users with an easy-to-use interface that introduces some of the virtues of print aesthetics to online interactions. Pretty is more than just attractive; good typography improves reading speed and comprehension and makes reading easier on the eyes (Gould et al., 1987). The ability to convey typographic emphasis - bold, italic, font size, and style changes - allows authors to provide visual inflection that is unavailable in the unembellished display of ASCII text.

The ease with which graphics are made available on the Web also accounts for much of its appeal. One can argue whether the information content of the net has been improved in proportion to the additional demands that graphics impose on network bandwidth and workstation performance, but there is no question that users are attracted to graphics, and the old saw that a picture is worth a thousand words still applies (the problem is, it costs ten thousand words, but not to quibble); without graphics, scholarly (or any other) publishing will not prosper on the Internet.

The point and click idiom of hypertext makes it simple for even an inexperienced user to traverse links among documents and collections. The enormous popularity of NASA's Shoemaker - Levy comet images (JPL-a, 1994) illustrates the potential to afford rapid public access to the latest information in the sciences. Reports of this extraordinary event were not limited to grainy newspaper images or the glossy selection of news magazines a week later but were available to millions of Internet users on their desktops within hours of being available to the scientific community. Almost 2 million files were served to nearly 50,000 unique host computers in approximately three weeks in July 1994 from NASA's jet Propulsion Lab (JPL-B, 1994). The Shoemaker-Levy home page was visited more than 3 million times in the next six months.

The same virtues that make the Web appealing to the neophyte netmaven will improve access to ideas by scholars. Every chemistry student learns the law of mass action in the first week of class: molecules are more likely to combine chemically if they bump into one another more frequently. So it is with ideas; make it easier to bump into them, and they will combine more often in the minds of users to form more complex ideas.

The ease of use of Web browsers is complemented by the ease of publishing information on the net. Any determined user can master the technology of mounting a Web server; never has the technology of mass distribution of information been so accessible. The technology of the Web is the modern equivalent of a printing press, except you could never get a printing press for free. Anyone with an Internet connection can download a Web server and browser for free from places like the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois (where NCSA Mosaic was developed) (NCSA, 1994) or CERN, the European High Energy Physics Research organization where the Web began (Berners-Lee, 1994).