Report on the retrodigitization project “Archiv der Mathematik”

Speaker: Gerhard O. Michler Institute for Experimental Mathematics Essen University Ellernstrasse 29 45326 Essen, Germany In this lecture a detailed report was given on the results obtained in a digital library project sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft 1997 to 2000. The following text is taken from the introduction of the authors’ article “Report on the Retrodigitization Project Archiv der Mathematik“ which is to appear in Archiv der Mathematik in 2001. Nowadays many mathematical journals are published electronically, in general in portable document format (PDF). For example, the servers of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) contain at present more than 4700 articles published electronically from 1996 to date in the journals of the AMS that are accessible and searchable online to subscribers via the internet address: www.ams. org/journals. The PDF-format offers many advantages over the traditional paper format of a printed article. Authorized users can also link from journal articles references to the reviews in the Mathematical Reviews of the AMS, and in due course from there to the original quoted articles, if available in PDF. The online access also allows to make printouts of wanted articles at the user’s printer and to view abstracts of recently posted articles to be published shortly. In view of the vaste literature in mathematics the search functions provided by the software of a distributed digital library for specific articles and/or specific results or concepts explained in such an article are very useful for researchers and graduate students. They also would like to have such a comfortable access to the back issues of the mathematical journals published only in paper format. The proofs of many important old theorems have never been incorporated into standard textbooks because they are still too complicated to be derived from generally known theoretical results. Therefore modern research articles have to quote arguments, methods, partial and final results of old papers. Thus it is desirable to retrodigitize the back issues of a mathematical journal and combine them with the electronically published recent issues in such a way that all the volumes of the resulting digital journal are searchable and linked to “Mathematical Reviews“ or “Zentralblatt Mathematik“. Through these review journals the retrodigitized volumes could then be linked to all other mathematical journals belonging to a distributed digital mathematical library. In particular, an authorized user of such a library would be able to read on screen an original article and a cited article or a review at the same time. This retrodigitization task is very demanding and requires a deep understanding of mathematics, computer science and the support of the publisher. Using the IBM digital library database and the MILESS software developed by the Computer Center of Essen University we have been able to construct a prototype of a searchable and retrievable digital library “Archiv der Mathematik“. It contains 1) the retrodigitized volumes 60 (1993) 67 (1996) in MVD format, 2) the electronically published volumes 68 (1997) 73 (1999) in PDF format. The cited journal articles of the references of all 13 volumes are recognized automatically as well as the layout of the first page of each article. Thus it is possible to produce the bibliographic data including the ISSN of all journal articles of the 13 volumes and their references in XML format. In particular, all these articles and the cited journal articles of their references can be linked automatically to MathSciNet or Zentralblatt MATH. The methods developed in this pilot project can be adjusted for the retrodigitization of other mathematical journals and older back issues of “Archiv der Mathematik“.