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Unit 4: Technical Digestion

Descriptions and analyses of the information needs of emerging sciences and technologies Notes
comparison of features, coverage and costs of new information products
Competition among publications, publishers, platforms, and the for-profit vs. non-profit vs. Open
Access sectors within the STMA information industry
Examination of the accuracy and quality control of scientific information resources and publications
Institutional repositories
The relevance or lack of it in federated searching on retrieval of more specialized scientific and
technical information
The impact of distance education on the in-person of use of science libraries and their electronic
resources
The professional training of science librarians
The education of science library users
The evaluation of scientists and their grant proposals using bibliometric measures
Building strategic alliances and advocacy groups within your sponsoring organization and much
more!

Science and Technology Libraries matters to the working lives of today’s scientific,
technical, medical and agricultural librarians, and serves as a foundation for the
development of the next generation of information professionals in our field.

4.1 Technical Digest: Type and an Application Server

Technical digest movable Type is a powerful publishing and content management system that stores
website content and layout templates in a database (in our case, MySQL). When we want to add a
new item or tweak a page, we fire up Movable Type, make our edits and press the “Rebuild” button.
Movable Type then generates a series of static HTML files that display our content in the templates
we have designed. Publishing systems like this are very powerful as they combine the benefits of
template-based data-driven publishing with the stability of serving static files.
However, we wanted to go a little further with our site. Our “related items” functionality is based
on a keyword vector space engine that allows us to calculate the similarity between different content
items. This engine not only includes all our own content, but also monitors over 70 external websites,
with new items being added to the engine every 10 minutes. With all the different possible
combinations of related items, a static publishing system would quickly demand the generation of
tens of thousands of different pages and would very soon be overwhelmed.
So we decided to handle this feature using an application server. There are many different
technologies that allow websites to talk to databases on the fly (ASP, JSP, PHP, Coldfusion, etc.) but
the basic principles are the same – when a user asks to see a particular page, the application server
can query a database to populate a pre-coded template with information in real-time. The diagram
below shows this arrangement.
This means that we can embed Coldfusion code into the templates that we author in Movable Type,
allowing us much more scope for dynamic functionality for the user such as:

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