AN ARCHITECTURE FOR SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING ON THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB

The explosive growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) is due in part to the ease with which information can be made available to Web users. The s implicity of HTML and HTTP servers lowers the barriers to network publ ishing. The high-quality rendering of HTML in WWW browsers such as Mos aic raises the aesthetic appeal of information and makes it more usefu l by virtue of enhanced readability. But the simplicity that makes WWW technology so appealing also makes it difficult to represent the comp lex markup and typography necessary for scholarly publishing. The need for extensive character sets and more effective interface facilities for inter- and intra-document navigation stretch the limits of the cur rent standards that underlie the Web and its clients. In addition, the stateless nature of WWW client-server interactions presents certain c hallenges to the effective implementation of search and retrieval func tionality so important to effective document retrieval systems. OCLC d istributes several scholarly journals under its Electronic Journals On line program, acting, in effect, as an ''electronic printer'' for scho larly publishers. As part of this effort, OCLC is prototyping a WWW-ac cessible version of these journals. This presentation will describe th e problems encountered, detail some of the short-term solutions, and h ighlight changes to existing standards that will enhance the use of th e Web for scholarly electronic publishing.