The topic of this paper is Electronic Publishing and Digital Libraries. We have limited the topic to those areas of the subject that pertain to the Internet. There is a vast amount of information available and the paper gives the reader a good overview of what is available currently. The Digital libraries document takes a look at some of the libraries that are on the WWW and what they might offer in the future. The Electronic Publishing document takes a look at how magazines and newspapers are represented. Our final document Electronic Publishing Tools gives the reader a look at the technology currently available to publish a document on the Internet.

Digital libraries and Electronic Publishing are still in their infancy. New forms of digital libraries are being developed that will allow the use of video on demand. Electronic publishing will under go changes as more people take advantage of the technology and new technologies are developed. Magazines and newspapers will be forced to expand their publications on the Internet as the Internet becomes the medium of choice for many of their readers. Presently we are seeing the beginning of a change in how our society interacts with information. We are moving from a predominately paper based society to a society that will use information in an electronic format. This is the beginning of the Electronic Publishing revolution.

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The idea of Digital Libraries has been with us for only a few decades. It has only been since the early 1970's that we have had the luxury of enough storage capacity on computer systems that we could make books, and other literary works available in a digital format. Many institutions and universities have converted journals and other scholarly works into digital format. These repositories were largely disconnected and it was difficult at times to access the information from these institutions. FTP and Gopher were the main methods of obtaining copies of this information until the introduction and wide acceptance of the WWW. Hypertext has made it much easier for libraries and other institutions to place their collections on the internet for the public to access them. With Hypertext a library can use links to connect a great many diverse and widely scattered collections into one convenient location for it's patrons.

"To make information, books, and other material available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs, and people can easily read, use, quote, and search."

The project was started by Michael Hart in 1971 with $100,000,000 of computer time at the University of Illinois.

The first available text was the American Declaration of Independence which he then attempted to mail to everyone on the net. He eventually decided to make it the first posting of an electronic document.

As storage capacity improved longer texts were made available.

The project selects books that have a wide appeal (to 99% of the public).

Gutenberg Etexts are done in Plain Vanilla ASCII so that the text can be used on any platform with any operating system. This will insure their availability in years to come.

The project is scheduled to have 10,000 books available by the year 2001 when it will have completed it's Project Gutenberg Electronic Library.

The Michigan Electronic Library was the first "real" virtual library.

The library went on line on February 1st, 1993.

It was established by the University of Michigan to serve the citizens of the state. This is done through it's MLink program which is a community and information partnership between Michigan's public libraries and the University of Michigan Library (which is one of the largest research centers in the United States).

The library collects information on Michigan and from all over the world .

The Michigan School of Information and Library Studies also runs an on-line library called the Internet Public Library. The focus of this library is to "provide services and information which enhances the value of the Internet".

The Internet Public Library also has a MOO (Multi user Object Oriented service) that allows guests, patrons, and staff to interact with one another.

One of the best of the `Virtual' Libraries on the internet.

The library uses a text or graphic user interface. The metaphor for the GUI is a library floor plan. Each room on the floor plan is named with a seperate topic heading. By using the floor plans you can drill down through the application interface to reach the item or topic that interests you.

The library has very extensive topic and subject headings. There are a great many links to United States government departments and agencies. In all there are over two hundred subject headings available at this library.

The library itself seems to have little real material of it's own, but the library makes good use of the word `Virtual' by giving you an extensive list of links to subjects, and other sites.

Currently the Carnegie Mellon University along QED Communications of Pittsburgh are trying to establish a digital video library.

Initially it will have 1,000 hours of raw and edited video available.

The technical approach will be to "integrate speech, languages, and image understanding for exploration and creating the library".

New technology is needed to organize and search the collection, and to be able to retrieve and reuse the information.

It is hoped that this project will be able to develop these technologies and use them in a video library for use in education and training. The project will be at the fore front of new developements in speech to text technology, and intelligent, automatic methods that will provide full-content search of, and retrieval from, a large on-line video library.

Many newspapers are now placing their files, photographs, and even their entire newspaper text into an electronic format.They are building these archives to save time and money for searching and retrieval of information.

There is some conjecture on whether or not this material will be made available to the public. It is quite possible that public access will require user fees for some of the material in the data bases.

Some people in the newspaper business believe that eventually newspapers will replace the public library system as the place for people to access reference material.What do you think? One of the possible problems in this could be the political bias of the newspapers tainting the information in their archives.What other problems might arise from newspapers controlling our information?

Currently there is no globally accepted method to catalogue electronic material. There is work being done on a new USMARC scheme for cataloguing, but it will be some time before it will be acceptable.

Copyright laws make it difficult for libraries to offer all their materials on-line. Once a book is in an electronic format it is simple to replicate it. Most Digital Libraries have a copyright disclaimer available that the users can read before they down load any of the material.

There is also a problem with too much material being available. Desktop publishing has made it possible for anyone to a write book. Unfortunately a lot of these books are of very poor quality. Libraries that normally would have relied on an editor at a publishing house weeding out the poor material are having to do it themselves.

Currently Digital Libraries are undergoing a period of radiant evolution. Different forms of libraries are evolving to fill specialized niches on the Internet. We will see an increase in the number of libraries on the Internet in the near future. Some of these libraries will fill a need for the public and will flourish, and there will be those libraries that will fade away as they fail to adapt or change with new technology. At the moment there is a great deal of information available to the public on the Internet but it is sometimes difficult to find. It will be electronic libraries that will make this information available in a format that will be both easy to search and easy to use. The librarians who work with these libraries will need both the traditional skills of a librarian and the skills of a data base administrator.

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