HUTpubl: Electronic Publishing at the Helsinki University of Technology

Abstract

Paper to be presented at the Nordic Conference on Electronic Publication at Universities and Colleges, Bergen, 17-18 February 1998

This paper describes the present stage and findings of HUTpubl, a project conducted by the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) Library. The goal of the project is to establish a working model for producing HUT scientific publication series structurally. HUTpubl emphasizes the importance of open standards, descriptive markup, platform-independence, and information preservation. In-house project partners include the Department of Automation and Systems Technology and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. HUTpubl is also a member of an umbrella project with the provisional name JURA, a newly formed consortium of three Finnish universities. JURA seeks to define guidelines and to give recommendations for the use of structured documents in higher education in Finland.

One of the key issues of electronic publishing in higher education concerns the longevity of information. This in turn is closely connected to the question of long-term costs. The longer the life expectancy of the information the safer it pays. The deeper one is able to search and analyze the semantic content of the document the higher the value. The fuller one can take advantage of the data by producing different applications for different publication platforms from the same document repository without affecting the integrity of the original document, the bigger the benefits. It is here that standardized, generalized, descriptive markup shows its real strength and value.

Tuija Sonkkila
Helsinki University of Technology Library
P.O.Box 7000
FIN-02015 HUT
tuija.sonkkila@hut.fi
http://www.hut.fi/~sonkkila/