Digital libraries and electronic publishing

"Will the emerging global information infrastructure (GII) create a revolution in communications equivalent to that wrought by Gutenberg, or will the result be simply the evolutionary adaptation of existing behavior and institutions to new media? Will the GII improve access to information for all? Will it replace libraries and publishers? How can computers and information systems be made easier to use? What are the tradeoffs between tailoring information systems to user communities and standardizing them to interconnect with systems designed for other communities, cultures, and languages?" "This book takes a close look at these and other questions of technology, behavior, and policy surrounding the GII."--BOOK JACKET.

"Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest. The great libraries of the past - from the fabled collection at Alexandria to the early public libraries of nineteenth-century America - stood as arguments for increasing access. In The Access Principle, John Willinsky describes the latest chapter in this ongoing story - online open access publishing by scholarly journals - and makes a case for open access as a public good."--Jacket.

Instant electronic access to digital information is the single most distinguishing attribute of the information age. The elaborate retrieval mechanisms that support such access are a product of technology. But technology is not enough. The effectiveness of a system for accessing information is a direct function of the intelligence put into organizing it. Just as the practical field of engineering has theoretical physics as its underlying base, the design of systems for organizing information rests on an intellectual foundation. The subject of this book is the systematized body of knowledge that constitutes this foundation. Integrating the disparate disciplines of descriptive cataloging, subject cataloging, indexing, and classification, the book adopts a conceptual framework that views the process of organizing information as the use of a special language of description called a bibliographic language. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is an analytic discussion of the intellectual. foundation of information organization. The second part moves from generalities to particulars, presenting an overview of three bibliographic languages : work languages, document languages, and subject languages. It looks at these languages in terms of their vocabulary, semantics, and syntax.