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 documentsin 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 offersto Journals and where to look for information
2. Journal structure - how files anddirectories should be organized
3. Metadata - how to make sure that userscan easily find an article they are looking for
4. Mirroring - how to transmit the journaldata to ELibM
5. Journal Production - how ElibM can takecare 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:

• Journals
• Proceedings/Collections
• Monographs
• Classical Works, Selecta, and Opera Omnia

ELibM offers, in particular, the following services to editors:

• Worldwide distribution and archiving via a system of distributed mirror sites at cooperating institutions (libraries, universities, mathematical societies)
• Production and hosting of electronic journals and collections from electronic files provided by the 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 describesthe 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 andmay 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:

• metadata (see Section 3) (optional)
• authors' names
• title of article (with English translation)
• MSC classifications (optional)
• keywords (optional)
• abstract (optional)
• links to the article document files in DVI, PostScript, or PDF formats

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 ensurethat information about their documents is almost instantly accessible throughmathematics-specific electronic document search services on the Internet.The information is also automatically supplied to relevant bibliographicdatabases and alerting services. In this way, publishers can ensure that,immediately upon its publication in electronic form, the interested readerwill be able to find a document through a variety of sources.

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

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

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

• augmenting the HTML pages with META tags carrying the metadata information (Section 3.1)
• providing templates for abstract pages which identify the occurrences ofrelevant information (Section 3.2)

3.1 Augmenting HTML with META tags
This procedure has the advantage that automated indexing robots from extraneoussearch engines can read and use these metadata, i.e., it is not specificallyrequired that ELibM transmits these data to electronic catalogues and indexesfor them to include the information. The (slight) disadvantage is thatthe 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)).

For more information, see an example.

3.2 Providing templates for abstract pages
The advantage of this approach is that it relieves editors from havingto 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 errorsand requires the editors to be very careful that the general structureof their HTML pages does not change; furthermore, certain design restrictionsapply. If design changes occur, then the template must be adjusted accordingly.

The idea of templates if that journal editors provide a sample abstractpage 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 wouldcontain instead the metadata identification tag @authors.

The available tags are:
 

For more information, see an example.

4. Mirroring

If the journal pages are set up by the publisher on a web server in thedescribed fashion, ELibM will be able to mirror these pages as long asthey are available on the Internet. Mirroring means that a copy of the filesfrom the original server is made; although there may be some modificationsbeing made to the page, the look-and-feel of the original will be preservedas far as that is technically possible.Typically, mirroring takes place once a week. The times and frequency of mirroring are negotiable; usually thetimes 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 recursivelyall links provided on these pages and checking the file's timestamps.If the timestamp has changed since the last download, then the changedfile is retrieved. Otherwise, the local copy already present at ELibM isread and the links on that page are followed.

The fulltexts (all filesin 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 TransferProtocol) to the EMIS server, or for ELibM to mirror via FTP if the journal'spages are accessible also via this protocol. Details should be negotiatedwith 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.

File names should have a common structure. If there are multiple versions (DVI, Postscript, TeX) of the same article, the base name 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 für 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:

• An identification of the format,
• general information on the issue,
• and entries for the single articles.

The format identification is a simple line stating@version: EMIS-j-2.0The general information on the issue gives
 

This section is ended by a line stating@EOHNext, the single articles are listed:
 

Fields marked as "required" must be given for every article. Fields markedas "optional" can be given as an additional information. They will be usedto 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
 

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:
 

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 becompressed 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.