Guidelines for the Editors contributing to the 
Electronic Library of Mathematics

Version 2.3, July 2008

The following are guidelines for the inclusion of mathematical documents in the Electronic Library of Mathematics (ELibM). This library is a broadly based electronic distribution and archiving network for mathematics. It is provided by the European Mathematical Information Service (EMIS) under the auspices of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). The main URL is http://www.emis.de for EMIS and http://www.emis.de/ELibM.html for ElibM.

The following topics are covered in this document:

1.  ELibM services - what ElibM offers to Journals and where to look for information
2.  Journal structure - how files and directories should be organized
3.  Metadata - how to make sure that users can easily find an article they are looking for
4..  Mirroring - how to transmit the journal data to ELibM
5..  Journal Production - how ElibM can take care of the whole journal production process for you
 

1. ELibM Services

The Electronic Library of Mathematics (ElibM) is a WWW-based electronic distribution and archiving network for mathematical publications in electronic form. Mathematical publications in ElibM include: ELibM offers, in particular, the following services to editors: ElibM services are provided free of charge. User access to ElibM is free as well.

Journal editors will be supported by ELibM shall produce their complete webpages or if they want to produce and host them locally and have ElibM only mirror them. In the first case, editors should read and obey Sections 2-4 of this document, whereas Section 5 describes the process for those journals that want to have their master posting at ELibM.

2. Journal Structure

This Section describes basic features of the layout of files and directories of a journal. This information should be considered as recommendations to journal editors who want to produce and host the journal webpages completely themselves and use ELibM only for mirroring and archiving. Adherence to the principles set forth in this Section will ensure reliable mirroring.

ELibM suggests that editors follow these guiding principles:

(1) All files should reside within the directory tree of one directory, the home directory of the journal. The home directory shall contain the home page of the journal, which should be named index.html or index.htm. More Information

(2) All links to journal pages or graphical elements should be relative links, where relative means that paths should be given relative to the home directory (the root of the journal directory tree). More Information

(3) The home page should contain links to tables of contents of all journal volumes resp. issues that are present on the website. The journal volumes (and possibly issues) should be located in subdirectories of the home directory. Preferrably, the volume and issue numbers should also  be the names of the directories. Contents files should be made for either the whole volume or the single issues, not for both. More Information

(4) The content page of a volume or issue should contain links to separate abstract pages for each document of the volume (issue). These abstract pages should be in the same directory as the content page and may be named by the document number (e.g., 3.html for the third document in that colume resp. issue), by the first page of the printed article (e.g., 133.html for a document starting with page 133), or in some other way. More Information

(5) The abstract page of an article is recommended to contain the following information:

More Information

3. Metadata

For the inclusion in electronic catalogues, databases, and alerting services, it is vital that descriptive data for a document are supplied in a specified, automatically identifiable format. Such descriptive data are called metadata. By delivering metadata with their documents, journal editors can ensure that information about their documents is almost instantly accessible through mathematics-specific electronic document search services on the Internet. The information is also automatically supplied to relevant bibliographic databases and alerting services. In this way, publishers can ensure that, immediately upon its publication in electronic form, the interested reader will be able to find a document through a variety of sources.

The metadata system employed by ELibM is based on the Dublin Core Element Set.

In the case of ELibM-produced journals (see Section 5), metadata are automatically extracted from the content description pages in the journal production process.

If the journal webpages are not themselves produced by ELibM, journal editors should take care to provide the metadata in one of the following ways:

3.1 Augmenting HTML with META tags

This procedure has the advantage that automated indexing robots from extraneous search engines can read and use these metadata, i.e., it is not specifically required that ELibM transmits these data to electronic catalogues and indexes for them to include the information. The (slight) disadvantage is that the abstract pages become bigger and carry redundant information.

Metadata shall be provided in the HTML document head of the abstract pages (see Section 2, (5)). They can be conveniently created with the Lund metadata creator.

For more information, see an example.

3.2 Providing templates for abstract pages

The advantage of this approach is that it relieves editors from having to take care for providing the metadata in the heads of each abtsract page. The disadvantage of this approach is that it is very sensible to errors and requires the editors to be very careful that the general structure of their HTML pages does not change; furthermore, certain design restrictions apply. If design changes occur, then the template must be adjusted accordingly.

The idea of templates if that journal editors provide a sample abstract page which identifies the semantic structure of the documents of that journal. The semantic signifiers are called metadata identification tags. Thus, in the place where the author(s) would be listed, the template page would contain instead the metadata identification tag @authors.

The available tags are:

@journaltitle:
@ISSN:
@year:
@volume:
@issue:
@authors:
@affiliation:     (address information for author(s), optional)
@title:
@language:
@pages:
@classifications:     (MSC 2000 classifications)
@keywords:        (optional) English keywords
@abstract:        (optional)
@filename:        (required) without filename extension (dvi,ps,pdf,...)
@other:    (optional) used for other variable information in the page

For more information, see an example.

4. Mirroring

If the journal pages are set up by the publisher on a web server in the described fashion, ELibM will be able to mirror these pages as long as they are available on the Internet. Mirroring means that a copy of the files from the original server is made; although there may be some modifications being made to the page, the look-and-feel of the original will be preserved as far as that is technically possible. Typically, mirroring takes place once a week. The times and frequency of mirroring are negotiable; usually the times of least Internet traffic to both servers will be picked.

In the process of mirroring, the files on the journal's web server are checked by following recursively all links provided on these pages and checking the file's timestamps. If the timestamp has changed since the last download, then the changed file is retrieved. Otherwise, the local copy already present at ELibM is read and the links on that page are followed.

The fulltexts (all files in formats other than HTML) are never overwritten automatically, even if the time stamps have changed. They can only be exchanged by special request. This is done in order to account for the Permanence Principle set forth in the General ELibM Guidelines.

There is also the possibility to upload the files via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to the EMIS server, or for ELibM to mirror via FTP if the journal's pages are accessible also via this protocol. Details should be negotiated with the technical adminstrators of ELibM.

5. Journal Production

This Section describes how ELibM can take care of producing the complete web pages for a journal. It concerns mainly those journals that do not have their own web pages or whose web pages are not suitable for mirroring in EMIS.

Any journal issue delivered to EMIS consists of

(a) the single articles
(b) contents and summary information

The single articles should be provided as PDF, Postscript, DVI, or TeX files. An additional special contents file should contain table-of-contents information and references to the respective article files (basically the file names). The format of this file is in detail described below. All these files should be put in one empty directory and delivered to EMIS (see below for details).

The articles

While standards may change in the future, currently a complete PostScript file containing all the font information should be made available for every article in a journal participating in ELibM.

Provision of additional file formats (TeX, DVI, etc.) will be at the discretion of the editors of the corresponding journal. The contents of all versions should essentially agree, although there is no requirement that they all share any particular style.

Filenames should have a common structure. If there are multiple versions (DVI, Postscript, TeX) of the same article, the basename of the file should be the same (e.g., "mumble.dvi", "mumble.ps", etc.).

The contents information

A special contents file will be used to link the bibliographic information to the real articles. This file will be used to generate all the necessary index- and table-of-contents pages as well as individual journal articles homepages out of the editor-provided information.

The editor-provided information will also be used for dissemination activities such as current mathematical publications alerts (under construction), and for the faster processing of bibliographic references at Zentralblatt fuer Mathematik.

Furthermore, it will provide the basic means of enabling online delivery of the publications irrespective of protocols and formats. This is an important point when it comes to technology changes.

The contents file is the core for all dissemination activities wrapped around the single articles, and its preparation requires special care.

An example contents file is give in the appendix.
This example was used to create these journal pages automatically.

The file consists of the following parts:

The format identification is a simple line stating 
@version: EMIS-j-2.0
The general information on the issue gives 
@journaltitle: (required)
@ISSN:         (optional)
@year:         (required)
@volume:       (required)
@issue:        (required)
@remark:       (optional)
This section is ended by a line stating 
@EOH
Next, the single articles are listed: 
@author:          (required)
@affiliation:     (optional)
@title:           (required)
@language:        (required if other than English)
@pages:           (optional)
@classification1: (optional) primary MSC classification
@classification2: (optional) secondary MSC classification(s)
@keywords:        (optional) English keywords
@abstract:        (optional) 
@filename:        (required) without filename extension (dvi,ps,...)
Fields marked as "required" must be given for every article. Fields marked as "optional" can be given as an additional information. They will be used to construct more convenient access paths to the articles and improve searchability, quality, and usability of the final product.

Each article is ended by a line stating 

@EOI
An example contents file is give in the appendix.
This example was used to create these journal pages automatically.

Here are some other optional fields that can be used at the editors' discretion:

@contributor:       (e.g.,  the author of an appendix included with the article)
@alternative_title: (subtitle or title translation into English)
@publisher:         (publisher of the journal)
@date:            (date of publication)
@copyright:         (Information about rights held in and over the resource)

Delivery and file transfer mechanism

All the above mentioned files should be put in one empty directory and delivered to EMIS. Preferrably, the directory should be put into one archive file using the tar command. This tar-archive should optionally be compressed using the gzip (not "zip"!) or compress command. The resulting file should be copied via ftp to a special incoming area on the EMIS server (please ask the EMIS tech. admin. for details). Finally, an e-mail message should be sent to the EMIS administration, announcing the availability of the new issue.

Section 5 was prepared by Michael Jost and revised by Aleksandar Perović who authored all other parts of this document.
Last modified 30 Jul 2008 © 1997–2008 ELibM