D. Anderson & R. Healey
Recent public announcements about the creation of very large electronic archives of printed books have highlighted the growing importance of electronic books as information repositories. However, many e-book initiatives by existing commercial publishers are very closely allied to the ‘old model’ of paper-based book publishing, with added facilities to locate words or phrases in the text. In fact, existing web-enabled technologies already provide extensive capabilities for a much wider range of publishing models, many of which have no obvious requirement for commercial intermediaries. Yet the adoption of these new technologies seems to be proceeding at a relatively slow pace.
This paper focuses on the creation and dissemination of e-resources, reference materials that provide significant volumes of value-added information to their internet-enabled readership. Such resources are necessarily stored in back-end databases directly connected via a suitable user interface to the web. A comparison is provided of alternative methods of developing such resources, the one based on ORACLE PL/SQL web programming, the other on use of the PHP public domain scripting tool and My SQL. The comparisons are made using two case studies. The first is an electronic resource on the anthracite mining industry of Eastern Pennsylvania during the 19th century. The second provides access to a digital collection of the papers of the mathematician and pioneer of computing M.H.A. Newman, the originals of which are held in the library of St. John’s College, Cambridge. An assessment of the merits of the different approaches is given and the greatly enhanced capabilities for data linkage and flexible searching compared to standard e-book technologies are discussed.
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