Multiple use of primary full text information — a publisher's perspective Available to Purchase

Mounting primary full text information into an online database requires journal text be segmented into the proper fields and indexed. The American Chemical Society keyboards its primary research journals for publication directly into a publishing database with all of the fields identified. Using this database, photocomposition software inserts the appropriate typesetting codes based on data type to produce the printed journals. Database building routines use this same resource to create an online full text file that allows for search and display of text based on data type. This dual purpose of the initial keyboarding step affords substantial savings in using the journal information for multiple purposes in electronic publishing. Many publishers of scholarly journal information, however, keyboard their journals with the primary intent of composition for publication in hard copy form. In order to mount these journals into a full text database, their computer composition files must be preprocessed to identify the field elements (authors, text, tables, figures, references, and so on), sentences, paragraphs, and special characters not included in the standard ASCII character set. This paper contains a description of the use of a generalized markup format for primary information that facilitates its conversion into an online full text database or other media for electronic publishing.