Bernard Rous of the Association for Computing Machinery outlines the efforts of a large learned society's publishing arm seeking to manage a transition from print-oriented to electronic publication. Michael Van Steenberg of NASA provides a similar overview of a government agency's venturesome plans. Other presentations talk about ways in which existing materials can be organized and accessed. The community of traditional publishers is represented in several untraditional ways. Evan Owens of the University of Chicago Press provides a more nitty-gritty survey of what one press is actually doing with the electronic manuscript at various stages of the traditional publishing process.
Common concerns run through many of the presentations.
Broadly speaking, economic concerns seem the most naggingly disconcerting. Questions of cost recovery are often brought into the open, and beyond them questions of intellectual property laws and the way the new technology makes those laws both more difficult to enforce and at the same time in many ways more necessary to protect and assure the possibility of creating and distributing important new work. To sketch the highlights and attach the majority of the papers, does not exhaust the riches of the symposium, especially the informal discussions impossible to represent here.