While we have been delighted with the
success of both of these publishing platforms, each has its own technological
hurdles, sometimes even walls, that we must clear in order to keep moving
forward with the development of these services.
For the Repository, the hurdles lie in the
fact that the technology is optimized for journal and journal article
publication.A few of our distributed
monographic series (e.g. UC International and Area Studies) publish
monongraphs within the Repository and report that is at times an awkward fit
– seemingly more comfortable producing documents at the level of the chapter
than the book.In addition, bepress
currently supports PDF publishing exclusively, necessitating a bifurcation
between the technologies of our two publishing platforms.
The challenge for eScholarship Editions, on
the other hand, resides precisely in the fact that it is an XML publishing
platform.Our first hurdle:how to translate the Press’s post-compositor
manuscripts into XML-tagged files.The
solution thus far has been to send the manuscripts off to India to be rekeyed
and tagged:an expensive and
logistically difficult endeavor.Alternatives?Developing a
system for producing, as part of the editorial process, XML-tagged files that
can serve as master files for any kind of publishing the Press desires for
its content.Though the Press has
shown strong interest in this emerging technology, we have yet to identify a
reliable way for extracting XML from their editorial practice without
disrupting it rather significantly.
And such potentially
dramatic shifts in editorial practice necessarily beg the question [next
slide]:Why XML?