Digital Libraries in Computer Science: : The MeDoc Approach

Citation

Treloar, A. (1999), "Digital Libraries in Computer Science: : The MeDoc Approach", Asian Libraries, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 54-55. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1999.8.2.54.1

Over the last decade the level of interest in the related areas of digital libraries and electronic publishing has steadily increased. This interest has been driven by changes in the amount of information being produced (and the problems of providing access to that information) and by advances in computer technology (including hypermedia, high‐speed computing on the desktop, and ubiquitous networking). In this environment, a number of pilot projects have both served as proofs of concept and testbeds for technologies that may one day be commonplace.

One such project is the Multimedia Electronic Documents (MeDoc) initiative in Germany. This was a major digital library pilot, funded by the German Informatics Society, and included a range of stakeholders: authors, publishers, librarians and computer science departments. The initial project ran from September 1995 to the end of 1997. This book contains the definitive collection of research papers on the project. Most of them were written fairly late in the life of the project and were therefore able to document what had been learned to that point. The project homepage (English version) is available at <http://medoc.informatik.tu‐muenchen.de/english/medoc.html>. The MeDoc project is continuing and currently provides access to a range of materials in the field of computer science.

The book is divided into five parts. The first provides a project overview and is the most useful if the reader just wants a sense of what MeDoc sought to do. The second part examines the design considerations and contains some quite technical material. The third part looks at some of the complimentary activities undertaken by other organisations: ARIADNE, NCSTRL and CD‐ROM publishing of conference proceedings. The fourth part examines usage patterns and problems encountered in document conversion. The final section deals with reports from related projects (although it is unclear how this differs from the “complimentary activities” already discussed).

As the series title suggests, the primary audience for this publication is the computer science community (or at least, that section of it with an interest in digital library initiatives). To give some feel of the flavour of the papers, they have clearly been produced using TeX, and the screen dumps are all of X‐Windows clients. A number of the papers will not be of interest to most librarians, either because of their narrow technical focus or the lack of wider applicability of the results. The most useful general material is the overview and the section dealing with application of results. I would recommend that potential purchasers have a look at a copy before placing an order.