EAD - enabling armchair delivery : approaches to encoding finding aids at the University of Liverpool

EAD is increasingly being selected as the primary data format for constructing archival finding aids in the British Archive Community as the new technologies and know-how required to encode lists are being embraced in many repositories. One major problem facing archivists, though, is how to convert finding aids held in a variety of formats (including databases, word processed documents and paper lists with no machine readable form) into EAD. This article will discuss the methods used in Special Collections and Archives at the University of Liverpool Library in converting finding aids into EAD. Two main examples will be discussed: firstly, designing database output styles which automatically generate EAD tags to wrap around database fields using the ProCite bibliographic database and secondly, offshore keying of paper lists with the addition of basic EAD tags following a rigorous template designed by Special Collections and Archives staff. Both methods have proved effective and have facilitated the generation of EAD encoded lists for a number of our largest collections. Finally, there will be a brief discussion of our use of native EAD generation using AdeptEdit software and our continuing use of conversion methods

Design issues in the production of hyper‐books and visual‐books

This paper describes an ongoing research project in the area of electronic books. After a brief overview of the state of the art in this field, two new forms of electronic book are presented: hyper‐books and visual‐books. A flexible environment allows them to be produced in a semi‐automatic way starting from different sources: electronic texts (as input for hyper‐books) and paper books (as input for visual‐books). The translation process is driven by the philosophy of preserving the book metaphor in order to guarantee that electronic information is presented in a familiar way. Another important feature of our research is that hyper‐books and visual‐books are conceived not as isolated objects but as entities within an electronic library, which inherits most of the features of a paper‐based library but introduces a number of new properties resulting from its non‐physical nature

Special Libraries, Spring 1995

Volume 86, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1995/1001/thumbnail.jp

EDI - XML Standards and Technologies in the Agri-Food Industry

Due to globalisation, the new technological developments and the complexity of food supply processes, the European food sector is increasingly becoming more complex. The consumers’ trust in food, triggered and affected by a number of food crises, is low. Today, consumers increasingly expect safe and high quality food and demand information about the origin of their food. Also, the economic health of the food industry can be greatly affected by food crises; therefore, efficient and effective mechanisms are required to assist the food industry in tracking and tracing products along the food chain. In this paper, we discuss the criteria for an efficient and effective traceability system from an IT perspective (mainly data exchange) and we identify key requirements for ICT enabled traceability

SGML documents : where does quality go?

Quality control in electronic publications should be one of the major concerns of everyone who is managing a project. Big projects, like digital libraries, try to gather information from a series of different sources: libraries, museums, universities, and other scientific or cultural organizations. Collecting and treating information from several different sources raises very interesting problems, one being the assurance of quality. Quality in electronic publications can be reflected in several forms, from the visual aspects of the interface, to linguistic and literary aspects, to the correctness of data. With SGML we can solve part of the problem, structural/syntactic correctness. SGML provides a nice way to specify the structure of documents keeping a complete separation between structure (syntax) and typesetting. Today there are lots of editors and environments that can assist the user producing well-formed and valid SGML documents (validating their structure). However, current software still gives the user too much freedom. The user has full control of the data being introduced, creating a margin for errors. In this context there are situations where pre-conditions over the information being introduced should be enforced in order to prevent the user from introducing erroneous data; we shall call this process data semantics validation. The idea is to constrain the values of some structural elements of a document according to its final purpose. This way the user (who writes the documents according to that DTD) will not have full control of his data; he will be forced to obey certain domain range limitations or certain information relationships. SGML does not have the necessary constructs to implement this extra validation task. In this paper we will present and discuss ways of associating a constraint language with the SGML model. We will present the steps towards the implementation of that language. In the end, we present a new SGML authoring and processing model which has an extra validation task: semantic validation. Along the paper we will show some case studies that could have their quality improved with this new working scheme

SGML-based publishing

None provided