Quick Dips

Electronic Journal

DSIR Publishing has released New Zealand's first electronic journal on floppy disk. 100 Rivers on Disk is a special issue of the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research, covering the work of the Rivers Classification Project.

The disk holds text, tables and images, as well as user-friendly database search software. Free evaluation copies are available for IBM-compatible systems using 5.25" or 3.5" floppy disks. The project was undertaken as a trial to simulate publishing on compact disk. This medium is expected to become an industry standard for databases and publishing.

Maurice Duncan of the DSIR Hydrology Centre sees the development as of particular benefit for scientists. It gives them access to the basic data behind research papers and gives them a chance to expand their material outside the limited range of the print medium.

"A lot of scientific writing now is so terse because they're trying to write briefly that often the point is lost," he suggests. With the cost per kilobyte of information decreasing, scientists will no longer need to be constrained by the economics of publishing. There will be further gains in readability, too. Duncan sees the possibility of including animation to show things like the flight of birds or the movement of water.

"In this case a picture is certainly worth far more than a thousand words," he says.