Digital Publishing

Abstract

This presentation covers the general topic of ‘Digital Publishing’ in the context of - the German MEDOC Project and - the German Strategic Digital Library Initiative V3D2 and, more specifically, - in the context of organizing EUROGRAPHICS’97 from the publication point of view. MEDOC is an effort by the German Computer Society (GI) to identify and to address the implications and challenges of digital libraries and electronic publishing on a wide scale. Starting in September 1995 the MEDOC project, partly funded by the German Ministry of Technology, has not only tried to implement a novel architecture for bringing relevant documents to the researcher’s desktop it has also raised the awareness on this important subject within the scientific community as well as within the group of publishers. The scientific counterpart to the application oriented MEDOC project is the strategic initiative V3D2 which is the (German) acronym for ‘Distributed Processing and Delivery of Digital Documents’. This initiative, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) over a period of six years and starting in 1997 provides a solid base for researchers from different disciplines (Computer Science, Library Sciences,Applied Sciences, . . . ) to tackle basic research and application issues focusing on ‘generalized electronic documents’. EUROGRAPHICS’97 is the first conference in its series to fully exploit the power of electronic documents and computer networks. This year, the submission of papers, the delivery of papers and attached multimedia material to the IPC members and to the reviewers as well as their online access, the feedback to the authors, and the delivery of the final documents (with the accompanying multimedia data) has been (almost) exclusively carried out electronically. This report briefly describes the architecture behind the work of the program committee from the first call for papers to the production of the printed proceedings and the CD-ROM holding the technical papers, STAR’s and tutorials. The experiences and lessons learned might be valuable to a general audience and not only to those organizing a scientific event in the near future.