DIGITAL BINDING

Dr. Rama Chellappa and this author coined the concept of "digital binding" during discussions and site visits in Japan. For a while, thought has been given as to how to expand the definition of metadata backwards, if you will, to physical artifacts, and aspects of their physicality that give us information about use. The fact that a book is bound and that in Western languages should be read from left to right are implicit pieces of metadata. To present that same book in digital format, each file representing every page image and the beginning and end of the book must be coded in a way to allow for coherent display to the user. It is nice to allow the user to "turn" pages of a document, which requires encoded information indicating digital file sequence and document boundaries as they relate to the original artifact. As this illustration suggests, activities that are taken for granted with artifacts, such as knowing in which order the pages should be read and where the boundaries of the document lie, must be recreated and made explicit for digital presentation.

Other thoughts about the "digital binding" concept came in a session with President Makoto Nagao of Kyoto University. Professor Nagao developed Ariadne, a multimedia digital library system that was demonstrated publicly in October 1994 (Nagao n.d.). Nagao discussed the difference between traditional book publishing versus publishing on the Internet, stating that, "There are so many information creators besides professional publishers on the network, and some parts of information created by these creators are so important that the collection of these digital information content(s) is urgent for libraries (Nagao n.d.)." This led to the thought of other attributes of published materials that might be emulated in the "digital binding" arena to allow for the study of information that is naturally inherent in published materials and that indicates authorship, provides version control, and defines the document. For example, in libraries or bookstores, electronic or physical stamps on the artifact indicate ownership; the date of creation and printing is fixed and is usually expressed on the verso of the title page; the content is physically immutable because the item is bound or packaged together; and the status and reputation of the publisher provide verification and to some extent authentication of the information. One relies more on material printed by Oxford University Press than vanity publications from typewriters and photocopy machines. For "digital binding" to occur, would not these same authentication and verification features need to be replicated in an electronic environment? How then, might one recreate these aspects of "boundness" or "publishedness" in the electronic environment, assuming that the information is critically important? Both legal and technical aspects of this question are interesting to explore and potentially prototypical in this context.

Publishers function to collect fees from consumers of information, either through sales or database access fees. The publisher takes a risk and may be rewarded or penalized economically for the gamble of publishing an author's work. In the online climate, President Nagao suggests that "a digital library cannot exist without a charging mechanism to users" in order to charge and collect licensing or usage fees for digital books. Dr. Chellappa and this author hope to explore some of these issues further by prototyping technical means through which to provide a "digital binding" scheme from the perspective of multimedia and text materials.