The ACM digital library goes live

ACM has taken reasonable steps to ensure the security and proper use of the Digital Library within an economic framework intended to make it self-sustaining. Ultimately, however , ACM relies upon the professional integrity of the community it serves for the security of this facility. ACM Headquarters staff have been involved in a number of initiatives to support its evolving digital library. ACM authors now submit accepted articles in LaTeX, Word, FrameMaker, WordPerfect, or ASCII. These manuscripts are automatically translated to SGML for input into ACM's new internal publishing system. After editing, the resulting files are composed into issues, sent to the printer, and mounted online in PDF format. Information about each article is maintained in ACM's central publications database, which is used to automatically generate biblio-graphic reference pages. Procedures have also been established that allow journal information directors to add more information to these pages as necessary. Finally, ACM has brought significant new computing and communication hardware and software online at its New York headquarters to support widespread online access to its assets. The Future The unveiling of ACM's Digital Library effectively transitions all of the society's print journals to dual print/online publications. Indeed, several existing publications pioneered this cause, starting with ACM's Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), which debuted online a year and a half ago, and by the Journal of Experimental Algorith-mics, ACM's first electronic-only journal. At the discretion of the editor in chief for each publication, reprints of accepted articles are mounted for online access months before appearance in print. Electronic appendices, available only online, are offered by ACM's Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS). Computing Surveys published an entire " electronic section " for its December 1996 issue. This online-only section contains about 200 short articles in HTML form from last year's conference on Strategic Directions in Computing Research. Communications also published a " virtual extension " edition containing twelve articles in December 1996. We expect that such uses of the digital medium will become prevalent. Each of these steps are helping to realize the vision first outlined three years ago in ACM's Electronic Publishing Plan and conferences are now becoming input streams to an online information space which members can access in ways tailored to their own interests. New techniques for tapping into the Library facility are now being implemented, such as individual member profiles to support automated notification of …