Ross Scaife, University of Kentucky A New Consortium for Electronic Publication: Adventures in Stoicism

   With the help of a three-year grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, classicists and classical archaeologists have in 1998 begun a new consortium for electronic publication in the humanities. This talk will introduce the audience to the project and will also provide both an overview of accomplishments and a glimpse at future directions.

   Our purposes are: to foster a new style of refereed scholarly publications in the humanities not only of interest to specialists but also -- and just as importantly -- accessible by design and choice of medium to wide public audiences; to develop and refine new models for scholarly collaboration via the internet; to help insure the long-term interoperability and archival availability of electronic materials; to support resolutions to copyright and other legal issues as they arise in the course of scholarly electronic publication.

   This consortium, which we have named The Stoa, operates under the primary direction of the editor-in-chief, who is assisted on general questions of policy by an Advisory Board and supported in detail by Editors for particular areas and by ad hoc Working Groups. The Editors frequently seek out the advice and opinions of experts in particular fields of specialization. Criteria for editorial review include: the quality and importance of the work from a disciplinary perspective, accessibility to wide audiences, and consistency with the technical considerations advanced by this consortium.

   The Stoa will continuously explore and implement the best available technical practices and solutions to problems in electronic publication as they emerge. Two specific examples include the DOI and XML. The Digital Object Identifier not only ensures authentication of content and protection of copyright, but also provides a flexible yet stable content management and tracking system with constant identifiers for specific content. Moreover, the DOI facilitates a variety of automated cost-recovery strategies. The Extensible Markup Language, on the other hand, is designed "to make it easy and straightforward to use SGML on the Web: easy to define document types, easy to author and manage SGML-defined documents, and easy to transmit and share them across the Web." Even more to the point, XML has been designed to allow groups of people or organizations to create their own customized markup languages for exchanging information in their domain: classics, archaeology, music, surfing, linguistics, mathematics, history, engineering, rabbit-keeping, etc. (from the XML FAQ, slightly modified).