Simon Grange

Extending the role of the digital library: computer support for creating articles

A digital library, together with its users and its contents, does not exist in isolated splendour; nor in hypertext terms is it merely the intertextual relationships between its texts. There is a cycle of activities which provides the context for the librarys existence, and which the library supports through its various roles of information access, discovery, storage, dissemination and preservation. This paper describes the role of digital library systems in the undertaking of science, and in particular in the context of the recent developments of the Grid for computer-supported scientific collaboration and Virtual Universities for computer-supported education. This paper focuses on a specific framework, the Dynamic Review Journal, which supports the development and dissemination of documents by assisting authors in collating and analysing experimental results, organising internal project discussions, and producing papers. By bridging the gap between the undertaking of experimental work and the dissemination of its results through electronic publication, this work addresses the cycle of activity in which a digital library rests.

Towards grid services for a virtual research environment

VOEU is a virtual university which we designed, implemented and deployed in the Wessex Region of the UK for use by higher surgical trainees in the orthopaedic domain. A particularly original part of this virtual university is the virtual research environment (VRE) which provides the infrastructure to support trainee surgeons in carrying out and publishing research and clinical trails. The current implementation of the VRE is tightly coupled, but we are now engaged in a new project to redeploy the VRE as loosely coupled grid services. This paper describes the VRE, and discusses the advantages that will be achieved by implementing it as grid services.

The dynamic review journal: a scholarly archive

A digital archive, together with its users and its contents, does not exist in isolation—there is a cycle of activity which provides the context for the archives existence, and which the archive supports through its various roles of information access, discovery, storage, dissemination and preservation. This paper describes an extended digital library environment that we have developed for orthopaedic surgeons which assists in collating and analysing patient data, organizing internal project discussions, and producing articles. By bridging the gap between the undertaking of experimental work (surgical trials) and the dissemination of its results through electronic publication, this work addresses the cycle of activity in which a digital archive rests.