ALPSP Seminar reports

This one-day seminar was arranged to give a number of the eLib project co-ordinators the chance to inform publishers about the progress of their respective projects, many of which are relevant to scholarly publishing. The day was most ably chaired by Chris Rusbridge, eLib Programme Director, and featured 10 presentations in total. The presentation of the first-ever Charlesworth Awards for Electronic Journals was made at the half-way point. (see judges report page 169.) The topic of the first presentation was Copyright Management Systems: the ERCOMS Project, by Anne Ramsden of De Montfort University. ERCOMS (Electronic Reserves Copyright Management System) aims to provide a WWW-based system in support of an electronic library of textbooks, providing students with quick and easy access to digitised materials, while measuring usage and reporting on the occurrence of copyright events. The project hopes to produce a platform-independent system with a number of portable software modules, such as a statistical management system, an accounting system and a rights management system. It is hoped that the ERCOMS system will be ready by August 1997 and will be available for use by other eLib projects, many of which need to obtain copyright permissions from a large number of publishers. More information about the ERCOMS project can be found at http:// www .i iel r .dmu.ac .uk/Pro jects / ERCOMS. The second speaker was Robert van der Zwan from the Open University, whose project, EDBANK, relates to on-demand publishing from an electronic database of digitised materials. The Open University has a particular need for its students to have electronic access to course materials, and the EDBANK project focuses on those students taking the Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). The aim is to deliver a full text database to those students, while dealing with issues of digitisation, clearing rights, pricing, royalty payments and emerging technologies.