Announcing JEDDS

[Tom Worthington]

Dr Brian Cook wrote (c/o S.Pace@gu.edu.au) Fri, 21 Jul 1995 16:48:19 +1000:

>A joint project to develop electronic document delivery software will give 
>library users in Australia greatly increased access to electronic information.
>...document delivery software which 
>has a MIME-compliant delivery system...allow streamlined or 
>transparent interworking between the document delivery system...
>provide an ability for the end user to receive electronic 
>documents via MIME mailers, and view and print documents on a variety of 
>platforms...

Tony Barry mentioned this project at the Friday afternoon Internet Reality 
Check in Canberra (drinks). He suggested it should be based on the Web and 
HTML, rather than MIME, which looks like a much better idea to me.

MIME is an e-mail standard which doesn't provide on-line interactive access. 
Providing a "user friendly" interface for this will result in a clumsy 
system for users. It would be an idea application for a Web interface. This 
would only take a few days to prototype using HTML and a scripting language. 
An e-mail/MIME interface could be provided as an option for those without a 
direct Internet connection

I suggest you also look at the work of Professor Ron Sacks-Davis's 
<rds@citri.edu.au> team at the Collaborative Information Technology Research 
Institute (CITRI) in Melbourne. Their approach is to prepare documents in 
SGML and convert to HTML or other formats on the fly.  They have developed 
MS-Windows and Web interfaces for document retrieval using Z39.50. The 
technology has been commercialised as "Structured Information Manager" (SIM) 
available from Frentree Corporation.


Tom Worthington (tomw@adfa.oz.au   http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw/)
Chair of the IESC Electronic Document Management Subcommittee & 
Deputy Director, Information Management Strategic Planning
Communications and Information Systems Engineering Branch
Department of Defence
Room APW2-1-06, Anzac Park West, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
Ph: +61 6 2666605, AH/Pager: 041 1182326, Fax: +61 6 2666758