EXPERIMENTS IN ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING AND DOCUMENT DELIVERY: RESULTS OF THE EEC's DOCDEL PROGRAMME Available to Purchase

The Commission of the European Communities initiated over 1983—1986 a set of experiments in electronic publishing and electronic document delivery, in order to test the performance, costs and user acceptance of such systems. The experiments aimed to break the mould of conventional electronic information services set by the limitations of the ASCII character set and packet‐switched data networks. Full texts, including graphics, diagrams, mathematical formulae and different typefaces were experimented upon, as regards their electronic capture, storage, retrieval and distribution. A systematic independent evaluation of the experiments was carried out. This paper gives an overview of some of the results obtained, and of the major findings or spin‐offs which have been identified, which go to show that the impact of DOCDEL upon the information market has been considerable.