Background The Trend Towards an Accumulation of Acrobat

FIGURE 7.1 Menu pages in the Acrobat 8 Professional program, relating to document information and meta-data for (a) a typical journal reprint, with (b) the standard metadata schemas and (c) the advanced menu, where additional, more chemically relevant, metadata schemas can be added. The values, or more accurately, the absence of values for the various fields are typical for most Web-resident PDF files. 

The other major source for student acquisition of PDF files is the primary literature in the form of journals. The modern electronic journal functions in much the same way as a content management system. Retrieval of individual articles has been vastly expedited by the recent introduction of the widely implemented digital-object-identifier (DOI) [4]. This provides 1-click access by means of a hyperlink embedded directly in other documents, or from e.g. the navigation tree of a HTML-based Web document. Although ostensibly introduced to provide rapid access to the published scientific literature, the DOI identifier is also the first of the technologies discussed here that has the potential to achieve the holistic and interlinked information structures implied in the title of this article. 

One consequence of the introduction of the DOI for document delivery is that it facilitates the accumulation of significant numbers of PDF files onto a local storage device. Whilst there are no formal statistics available, an estimate of perhaps one thousand such documents acquired by a student during a typical 3-4 year study period seem not unreasonable. The present author for example has updated his own taught courses to include around one hundred DOI markers dis- 

A PDF collection has a number of characteristic features, several of which present 

Subject SemenlicEye, an ontology with aisociated loob, ii 

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Introduction The Impact of the Web on the Chemistry Curriculum 99 Background The Trend Towards an Accumulation of Acrobat 101... 

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