From: Tibor Beke <tbeke@math.mit.edu>
Subject: xxx discussion
Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 20:10:15 -0400 (EDT)

> Another point is implicit in Morava's comments:  ease of
> publication and large numbers of papers are not necessarily a
> virtue.

Having resolved the double negation, could it be that you're saying
(i) electronic publication invites the dilution of scholarship
(ii) the more information there exists, the harder it is to find what one
seeks?

As regards (i), dilution of scholarship (not specific to the mathematical
sciences) began -- according to certain beholders -- with the rapid growth
of journals and journal pages in the 80's.  I am fairly certain that you
can dig up articles with dire predictions as to the future of scholarship
appearing well before the term `on-line' ever made the first page of the
New York Times.  In the field of mathematics, Ulam formulated his famous
dilemma in the 1940's, I believe.  (He estimated the number of theorems
produced per year in his time to be around 200,000, prompting him to
wonder how one can *gauge* the state of the art before producing new(?)
mathematics.)

I don't happen to agree with these beholders, but that is not my point.
My instinct is that the "ease of publication" issue has little to do with
electronic publishing.  It is a fact about 20th-century civilization which
would find a technological outlet anyhow.

(But writing "ease of submission" instead of "ease of publication", I do
wonder: how will xxx safeguard itself against bozos painfully compiling
and submitting 20-page proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem?)

As regards (ii), I think once you're past a few thousand preprints, and
past a few hundred users, any "open-stack reading room" magic is gone:
you're back to submitting calling card numbers, or being on the alert
every week.  As for the un-humanness of information retrieval, or
primitivity of indexing and hierarchization schemes, blame the miserable
state of knowledge representation...  The problem existed for the Library
of Alexandria already.  Switching to electronic formats is, if anything, a
glimmer of hope.


I do agree with all those speaking before me for both the possibility and
need for co-existence of an ambitious central depository and specialized
``niches''.  But, to be honest, I find no value added in any of the
specialized preprint depositories I am aware of.  (There may be arguments
for ``value subtracted''.  Something with decided added value is, by the
way, this very mailing list.)

Morava's suggestion brought to mind that "niches" may plausibly serve as
depositories of near-finished-works, lecture notes, specific questions one
is dying to know more about, papers that died half-way TOGETHER with
context, intuition, commentary on them...  ephemera one would not show to
NON-experts yet reluctant to toss.  (Often one posts such on one's
homepage, which is quite sure to minimize the chance of a like soul
stranded on like grounds finding it.)  I do not mean to insult any of the
special-purpose depositories!  One the contrary, I believe personal
commentary and the utterance of the *unknown* is what makes the
difference between your neighborhood pub and Alphaville.


> I also don't have access to a PDF viewer at the moment.  This makes me
> wonder if it is really true that electronic literature will continually
> be updated to take account of changes in media and formats.  I
> don't know about you, but I threw away my trays of punched cards
> some time ago.  I did not convert them to newer formats.

Aside: this is one of the reasons that made me a believer in TeX-based
submission (I didn't start out as one).  It's a high-level specification
of the logical structure of the text, allowing it to be recompiled into
the then-state of the art "physical" representation anew.

As to whether it's computationally feasible to convert (say) 500,000
e-prints, 20 pages each, from one format to another, and whether xxx
expects to have the resources to make any such transitions, I'm quite
positive the archive maintainers can produce empirical evidence, since the
system has survived, I understand, transitions already.  Incidentally: is
it the case that xxx is among the largest public libraries of (formatted)
electronic texts?  Or can some order-of-magnitude comparisons be given
with other projects, so as to help with any feasibility and cost
estimates?

Tibor Beke