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ELPUB 2006: The Tenth International Conference on Electronic Publishing - Digital Spectrum: Integrating Technology and Culture

14-16 June 2006

Bansko, Bulgaria

Thumbnail image of Rila Monastery Ann Apps attended the ELPUB 2006 conference held in the Hotel Katerino, Razlog, near Bansko, Bulgaria on 14-16 June 2006. She presented a paper about IESR, which is published in the conference proceedings: Disseminating Service Registry Records. This paper focuses particularly on the support for, and use of, OAI-PMH by IESR.

Thumbnail image of religious paintings at Rila Monastery This was the tenth annual international conference on Electronic Publishing, which were held in previous years under the auspices of the ICCC, the International Council for Computer Communication (now disbanded but formed before the World Wide Web). The ELPUB series of conferences was instigated to develop ideas about using computer communication to provide electronic publication of research literature, and has always had an emphasis on open access and dissemination of research publications in developing as well as developed countries. The closing workshop reflected on experiences of previous conferences, which are generally held alternate years in an EU or non-EU country, and discussed ideas for future conferences. The first day of the conference was given over to workshops, covering both open access publishing and the Text Encoding Initiative. Each main conference day began with a keynote plenary talk followed by paper sessions. As always the conference had two parallel tracks, general and technical, and a poster session.

Thumbnail image of a tavern in Bansko The first keynote speech was by Herbert Van de Sompel, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, about 'The Brave new World of Scholarly Repositories'. He presented ideas about holding several versions of scholarly works within a repository as complex digital objects, with different data streams available for each object. Applications and repositories would communicate details of these objects in an interoperable way using 'surrogates', which are packages of metadata. Registering details of these objects, their providers and the data streams (possibly similar to IESR services) seems relevant to IESR and collaborative service registry work. Several use scenarios presented will be useful to inform IESR development work.

Thumbnail image of the Pirin mountains from Hotel Katerino The second keynote speech was by Dan Matei, of CIMEC - Institute for Cultural Memory in Bucharest, Romania, about 'Worldwide "Communitarian" Online Publishing: An Exercise in Wishful Thinking'. He discussed the explosion of enthusiastic publishing by the general public using blogs, wikis, etc., and how that should be balanced with the controlled authority of traditional publishing and cataloguing.

There were many interesting paper presentations, many of which continued the tradition of exploring electronic publishing by computer communication. This obviously included IESR. But there were presentations about:

  • Portals, such as a Dutch gateway to scientific information
  • Use of OAI-PMH, such as development of OAI static repositories as a method of exposing publishers' metadata to the wider information environment
  • Networking international news using semantic-based content retrieval and composition
  • Using technologies like RDF, SRU and Connotea for online journal publication
  • Using semantic ontologies to drive a walking navigation system

Several papers and posters reported surveys of user experiences, including:

  • A poster report from Slovenia evaluating digital repositories from an end-user perspective
  • Prospects for publishing online scholarly journals in Malaysia
  • A survey of British bloggers, particularly looking at gender differences

Thumbnail image of the singing and dancing grannies at Dobarsko As always with ELPUB conferences there was an extensive social programme providing opportunities for networking, with trips organised to the Rila monastery, the traditional village of Melnik, and the tiny old church in the village of Dobarsko. Musical entertainment was of high quality, with a performance by the Yulangelo ensemble (male voice, mainly unaccompanied but with some percussion, drumming and a wind instrument called a kaval), the 'singing and dancing grannies' at Dobarsko (who pressed on us refreshments including yoghurt drink) and en excellent group of musicians at the conference dinner in a restaurant in Bansko.

Conference attendees represented many countries within Europe, including Eastern Europe, as well as Canada and the USA. ELPUB 2007 will be in Vienna, Austria, and ELPUB 2008 in Toronto, Canada. The conference papers and presentations are available via the conference website.

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