Technologies have expanded the variety of formats that are used in today’s business. The myriad forms of digital content are common in the researcher’s workflow and have become a necessary part of scholarly communications. The Scholarly Kitchen brought this interesting information to us in their article, “Born Digital – The Expanding Universe of Research Content.”
Meanwhile, scholarly publishing has remained predominantly page based and dependent on PDFs. However, that may be about to change.
The idea of publishing media makes sense when you consider the review process involved in selecting presentations and posters for conference meetings. In fields such as computer science and electrical engineering, the conference proceedings are more timely and may be more important than the journals in their field.
The real challenge for societies is that the conference software used to record and host posters and presentations is likely in a database that functions as a silo. It will be interesting to see if conference vendors will adapt their programs to accommodate metadata requirements. Will the emerging companies grow and expand to serve a broader association market?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
