Web document management

[Peter C. Gorman]

Karen G. Schneider writes:

>Some of the questions we have raised as we talk these issues
>over include: should we save all revisions of a document? If not,
>how do we draw the line?  If so, how and where?  Do we archive
>every minor change, or do we offer guidelines and instruct
>authors to notify us when a document has changed editions?

I had to think about these issues when I edited (produced?) an HTML edition
of an existing book, John Nolen's _Madison, A Model City_
(http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/ModelCity/ModelCity_top.html). All of
the revisions to date have been corrections of (my) typos or changes in the
markup. Since these haven't affected the content of the book in a
substantive way, I decided to log each set of changes in a comment at the
top of the first (HTML) page rather than create a new 'edition' or
'version'. The use of HTML comments lets you do some other useful things,
like marking editorial corrections, original page breaks, etc. in the body
of the text without having it clutter up the display. Interested readers
can view the source of the document to see those details (look at the
source of the page at the URL above for examples).

>What *is* an edition, anyway?

That's the really interesting question. In the print world, new editions
are relatively few because of the cost involved in producing the document.
In the electronic world, however, it's very easy to publish the document
anew every time you change a comma, and almost as easy to get rid of
previous versions. Every author's draft is a potential 'edition'. I guess
we had it easy with Nolen's book, because he isn't around to make changes.

I suppose I'd draw the line when the text of the document changes in some
non-trivial way. It's up to the 'publisher' of the electronic document
whether to accumulate changes and create new editions sparingly (as in the
print world, of necessity) or to implement every change as soon as it
occurs. Using the former approach, and therefore having clean breaks
between editions, makes the archiving problem more manageable.

PG
_______________________________
Peter C. Gorman
University of Wisconsin
General Library System
Automation Services
pcgorman at facstaff.wisc.edu