From generic to descriptive markup: implications for the academic author

Electronic publishing is confronted with a multitude of demands and hopes, expressed by users and by institutions. One of the key issues concerns long term availability of digital information. In addition, research findings indicate that users would like to place more detailed full text information retrieval requests. Due to differing interests, some users focus their attention on figure captions, others in tables or bibliographies, etc. Furthermore, there is a wish to deliver publications on many platforms, which asks for suitable mechanisms of combining information with different sets of output specifications. In all these three cases, the capabilities of today's desktop editors fall short. Yet they are among the most frequently used tools to produce scientific publications. It is claimed that the answer would lie in the use of structure oriented editors and descriptive, platform independent markup. But the move is not a trivial one. One of the first big challenges is the author himself. To what extent is he willing to modify his working habits? Does he accept the possibility of letting someone else define the layout of his work? Another major issue is the publication process. The nature of changes in work flow are as much organizational as they are technical. The paper describes some of the lessons learned in HUTpubl, a project conducted by the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) Library. The goal of the project is to establish an SGML based (Standard Generalized Markup Language) publishing model for HUT scientific publication series. The paper elaborates on findings in other related projects and research activities.