Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
members should receive free copies. It can choose to mail copies in
paper form or provide the material through a passwordprotected
site on the Web. Members, subscribers, and library patrons have ac
cess to the material as before, but access is denied to the general
public.
As an additional service, the organization can maintain Web
based archives of their past journals, and all of their publications
are available to members, subscribers, and paying libraries through
welldeveloped and maintained indexes. Indexing, however, takes
some time, and there may be a time interval of a month or two be
tween when an issue appears in paper form and when the issue ap
pears (with indexing) in the online archives.
The circumstances of the organization's conference present spe
cial opportunities. As already noted, the proceedings of the confer
ence will eventually appear in the organization's journal, and thus
will be available only to members and subscribers. However, the or
ganization has found that publicity can help increase conference at
tendance. In particular, the organization advertises its conference by
making the program available to the world online. Attendance
seems to increase further when that online program contains links
to the papers that will be presented. (It has been demonstrated that
more people attend certain conferences if the full text of the sessions
is available in advance.)
With this experience, the organization provides links to all pa
pers to the general public before the conference and for a short time
afterwards. However, once the organization's conference issue is
mailed to members and subscribers, the online materials are no
longer available.
The circumstances described for this professional organization
illustrate three common situations in which materials would not be
publicly available on the World Wide Web:
An organization may limit circulation of its materials to pa
per form or to online subscriptions, because of strategic or fi
nancial considerations.
Even when an organization plans to place materials on the
Web, indexing and site preparation can take time. This can
cause a delay between when materials might be available in
paper form and when they appear on the Web.
