RE: Browsing, Fixation & Canadian Gov't Report

> Interesting, eh?

Very. If only some of that could filter across the border.

> The rest of the report (in pieces) is available at:

And this points out an issue that keeps coming up for me: the assumption that a transmission is necessarily the transmission of a whole, or even significant part, of a work. The White Paper seems to base its analysis on a rather passe' concept of uploading/downloading in which mainly entire documents/files were passed from one system to another. On the Web, the transmission is often of a piece of a document, the piece being a paragraph or section (where most would agree that the "work" is the larger document). In addition, as we move into more interactive online systems, such as with Java, what the user sees on the screen has less and less to do with the "copy" that has been transmitted, and is more likely to be a derived work that could even be unique.

Does the White Paper concept of transmission as copy cover these cases?

In terms of browsing, I think we are moving toward the use of meta-documents that would contain abstracts or portions of the documents (document surrogates) that will be offered as part of the selection process that we now tend to call "browsing." In the hard copy world, we look through the actual item when we browse. Online, we will probably use a surrogate. In that case, the author can have control over how much of the document is made available prior to purchase.

Karen Coyle --- kec[_at_]stubbs.ucop.edu University of California, Library Automation http://stubbs.ucop.edu/~kec Received on Mon Oct 02 1995 - 20:51:52 GMT