Anne Mahoney, Creating an Infrastructure for Scholarly Publication On Line

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Abstract

The Stoa Consortium aims to promote collaborative scholarship, published on line and freely available to other scholars and general readers. As a publisher, we must provide the mechanisms for making these scholarly works available. As an on-line publisher, we intend to provide more than what a good print publisher can provide: electronic texts can be explicitly connected as books cannot.

A digital library project generally produces and controls its own texts and images. This makes it relatively easy to interconnect those resources. A digital publisher, on the other hand, does not produce texts itself, and indeed the works published under its auspices need not all live on the same computer system. Interconnection in this environment requires more explict co-operation by the authors and editors of the text: specifically, use of the same markup rules.

Markup for us means SGML or XML, conforming to the TEI DTD and following Stoa conventions for which features to mark, which values to use for certain attributes, and which meta-data to include in the document header. We have found that most scholars wishing to publish texts with us do not know SGML in general, or this DTD in particular. Although they quickly see the benefits of structured markup, they must learn the language and the local idiom. The first piece of publishing infrastructure, then, is support for markup: documentation, editing software, and validators.

Many authors also want detailed control over the appearance of their work. They expect, sometimes unconsciously, that the technology of the Web as it exists today is and will be the final, best way to publish their work. While we prefer to take a longer-term, more general view, we recognize that on-line publication today does in fact mean the Web. The second piece of infrastructure is display formatting, whether for the Web, for printing, or for some future delivery medium.

The third piece of infrastructure is interconnection, which is what makes on-line publication fundamentally different from print. Interconnection means that references to other objects, outside the text, can automatically be hyperlinked to those objects. The typical digital library model is that objects within the library can be hyperlinked to each other, while objects outside are not linked. Since the digital publishing house does not "contain" its texts, on the other hand, there is no reason for it to restrict these reference connections to only works it has published itself. The Stoa has developed a reference database that allows any work published by the Stoa to refer to any resource elsewhere on the Internet. Hyperlinks are generated when the text is displayed, which means they are always as current as the content of the database.

The Stoa's tool set will be made available as open-source software, and we hope that other on-line publishers and digital libraries may wish to share reference information.

This text is based on the following book(s):
Creating an Infrastructure for Scholarly Publication On Line. Anne Mahoney. December, 2000. Paper presented at Ancient Studies - New Technology.