Our ultimate result was a new system for dealing with electronic records a carefully constructed metadata set of roughly 30 items from which we would use a Perl script to build actual MARC records to populate the library catalog. Our metadata set included much of the same information as a standard MARC record authors, author affiliations, controlled-vocabulary subject terms, etc. For example, we have two fields with different names but identical content. The company s search engine will only index an article s abstract if it is in a metadata field named description. The corporate records-management guidelines for electronic documents specify that if there is an abstract field in the metadata, it be in a metadata field named abs.
Authors cope with Instructions for Authors documents on a routine basis.
All scholarly publications have them. Although our instructions for producing a Web-ready technical report were widely distributed, they were largely ignored. They were too long and no one read them. Our first instructions were six pages long and gave detailed information for each step of the process from describing exactly when authors should use which Word version to enumerating the kinds of graphics formats they could use and explaining how they could insert images into their Word documents. We soon realized that this was too much information, and it was simply being ignored.