ERCIM News No.25 - April 1996 - VTT
A Web Publishing Project at VTT Information Service
by Riitta Alkula and Pirkko Eskola
VTT Information Service
acts as the Nordic Centre of Excellence for Electronic Publishing (NordEP).
The aim of NordEP is to increase and promote knowledge on electronic publishing
and implementations in the field among Nordic publishers, libraries, and
information services. The centre is financed partly by NORDINFO (the Nordic
Council for Scientific Information) and partly by VTT Information Service.
One of the projects carried out by the centre is a network publishing project
"Electronic publishing and dissemination through network" in cooperation
with some Scandinavian publishers. In this project: the current situation
of electronic publishing and dissemination in the Nordic countries will
be reviewed; characteristics of a generic publication database and applicability
of related standards will be assessed; and recommendations for possible
solutions will be presented. The main part of the project will concentrate
on practical experiments carried out by NordEP Centre in cooperation with
two Nordic publishers: Scandinavian University Press (Oslo, Norway) and
the Nordic Council of Ministers (Copenhagen, Denmark). HTML and SGML mark-up
languages and the Acrobat PDF file formats are of major interest.
As a test pilot, one issue of "Fokus på Familien" journal
by Scandinavian University Press was converted to both HTML and Acrobat
PDF formats and made available via the WWW at http://www.vtt.fi/inf/nordep/projects/scup/fokus.htm or http://www.scup.no/journals/fokus/fokus.html.
The opinions of the readers of the journal will be surveyed by a questionnaire
placed on the same web page as the journal issue.
As an end result of the project practical recommendations about how to reorganize
the publishing process for electronic distribution of publications will
be created. A generic, step-by-step guideline on actions needed for producing
a network publication will also be compiled. Thus the project will strongly
benefit any organization planning to publish through the Internet.
Please contact:
Riitta Alkula -VTT
Tel: +358 0 456 4372
E-mail: Riitta.Alkula@vtt.fi
or Pirkko Eskola -VTT
tel: +358 0 456 4410
E-mail: Pirkko.Eskola@vtt.fi
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