Thursday, June 12, 2003

Medical Library Proposes New Standards to Ease Exchanging and Archiving of Journal Articles By SCOTT CARLSON The National Library of Medicine has created a set of standards for publishing online journal articles in hopes of simplifying the process for publishing, transferring, and archiving scholarly information. The library's model, announced on Tuesday, includes formats for creating journal articles and for archiving and exchanging articles. The formats -- called Document Type Definitions, or DTD's -- identify and encode various elements of an article, like a quotation, a bibliographic reference, or the start of a paragraph. By adopting those formats, scholars, librarians, and journal publishers could more easily transfer the files to different types of archives, or recreate the articles in new journals. The library's new formats are based in XML, a Web-programming language. "It's a standard model to allow the exchange of journal articles -- a model that we figure can handle any journal article out there," says Jeff Beck, a technical-information specialist at the medical library. "Say you have two groups that want to exchange articles, like one publisher wants to submit articles to an archive or collector. If they agree that they will both use this, then the publisher will tag the articles in this format, the archive will be able to read them." So far, no other organization has proposed standard formats for electronic journals, he says. At present, he adds, publishers have been using formats of their own creation. The National Library of Medicine's formats are free for public use, although nothing compels publishers to use them. However, Dale P. Flecker, associate director of planning and systems at the Harvard University Library, expected the formats to become widely used among publishers. "Just because they have been so well designed and so well thought through, I think we'll find that publishers that haven't committed to a DTD for their journal content will decide to use these," he says. "I have heard a lot of enthusiasm." "It's an important step," he continues. "The primary importance of this is that it will greatly simplify the process of publishers' depositing stuff into e-archives. By having a common format for the transfer of e-journal article information, it is going to make it possible for many more relationships between archives and publishers." More information about the project can be found on a National Library of Medicine Web site. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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