ADONIS – document delivery in the CD‐ROM age

Abstract

Presents results of a two‐year trial, undertaken by the ADONIS Consortium, in which CD‐ROM containing facsimile images of pages of articles, abstracts, editorials, letters and other items from 219 biomedical journals were delivered to document supply centres. Shows sufficient potential for the members of the ADONIS Consortium to introduce a commercial service.

Digital Preservation and Long-Term Access to the Content of Electronic Serials

“…With this in mind, the early publisher-led ADONIS project, for example, scanned the paper copy of the serial and distributed the pages as bitmapped images on CD-ROMs. 42 The most difficult, and therefore expensive, types of serial to produce in any format are STM serials because they contain specialised terminology and frequently include detailed mathematical formulae, complex artwork or tabular data. 43 For these reasons networked STM serials often tend to use formats that retain the features of print serials.…”

Online Serials

“…ASCII is fine for articles comprised largely of text, but is inadequate for representing visual complexity of STM literature. ADONIS, with this in mind, scanned the paper copy of the journal and distributed the pages as bit-maps on CD-ROM [34]. ASCII and bit-mapped images are still used to distribute electronic journal articles, but a variety of other formats are emerging and growing in popularity STM serials have been described as the most difficult (and expensive) to produce in any format because, according to Hitchcock, Carr and Hall, they contain "specialised terminology, they frequently include detailed mathematics and often have complex artwork and tabular data" [35].…”

Primary science on CD-ROM: The New Zealand experiment

“…Examples are ADONIS (e.g., Stern & Compier, 1990), which publishes CD-ROMs to deliver pages scanned from biomedical journals to document delivery centers as well as a plethora of "snapshots" of established fulltext, abstract, and bibliographic online databases. Many new electronic journals have been established using the Internet (Strangelove,Kovacs,& Okerson [ 199 1 ] and updates), but these were not perceived as a suitable alternative to traditional primary scientific publishing (see Discussion).…”