July 26, 1995

12:30 pm

Introduction by Bob Ainsley, SIGMULTEC Co-chair

Attendees introduce themselves:

Sheldon Fisher
Virginia Galvin
Richard A. Green
Michael Markowitz
Marie Pinho

== Presentation by John Graves, Multimedia Developer

My name is John Graves. I am the SIGCAT Webmaster, which means that if you come to the Internet you'll see all of the essentially word processing work that I've done to produce this document on the World Wide Web.

The things I want to talk about here today are kind of two fold. My background is I've been working on PCs for about 12 years, six and a half years with the County of San Diego District Attorney's Office and during the time I was there we went from having about 5 PCs to having about 500 PCs, of which I was helping develop applications for and support. And I found there were two applications that really made a big difference in that office. One was e-mail and the other was this on-line legal research using CD-ROM. And I got out into the real world and started thinking. You know these same technologies could be beneficial in a lot of other situations besides in my own office. And what I found out was there's a thing called the Internet and it is very much like the e-mail system that we were using internally at the County, but it was for the whole world. And ultimately that led to the SIGCAT Web page. Which is the first items here on the Agenda.

But the lawyers really got a big benefit out of this CD-ROM legal research, and that led me to multimedia. And with the power of CD-ROM and combining the flexibility of authoring with HTML, which is the Hypertext Markup Language that used on the Internet, I realized you could do a tremendous with HTML on CD-ROM, which is the second part of my little presentation here.

Any questions about that so far?

My idea is basically to combine all these technologies together into something I call the Virtual Book. And what I'll try and do is show you what the Web page looks like in action, show you the SIGMULTEC page as it exists today and hopefully we can get some ideas about what will eventually go on that page. How you can have your own Web Page at SIGCAT.

And what I'm going to do is switch right over into Netscape here.

Under the SIGCAT Web Page is something called What's New.

How many people have actually seen the World Wide Web like this before?

[all]

OK, Great, so I don't have to go into the detail of how it works. Does everybody know how you can see the document behind here. View Source. Literally this is nothing but word processing. The thing that makes it into a Hypertext document are these tags in here. You can see that this tag says that the TITLE of this page is going to be SIGCAT and sure enough it is. That's all there is to it.

I scroll down the page. What's New at SIGCAT. This is the place you will want to come to find out what's been added, and I expect there are going to be a lot of things added here in the next few weeks.

Ainsley: Now John, you do the adding right?

I do the adding of the major portions. The real concept behind this Web page is not so much for it to be a place to hold content, although it certainly can do that, but to find out what's available at your sites, or elsewhere on the Internet and make sure that you have a way of finding them and getting there. Because that's one of the problems. I mean the Internet is a really big place and you need somebody to help you get to the resources you need.

Ainsley: Let me bring up a point that you and I talked about this morning. The question was asked of John, "How big is a CD-ROM?" If there was someplace on the Web that could respond to those sorts of questions ...

A good example here is this bibliography of CD-ROM publications. This is a list, I think Gabe compiled this? 84 different CD-ROM publications. I pulled this off of Compuserve to make it available on the Internet. And this is just an alphabetical list of 84 different books, magazines and you pick one and it tells you exactly who published it, how much it costs and so forth. And this is a shared resource. I you come in here and say, oh, there's another publication that isn't in this list, right down at the bottom of the page is a place where you can send in your suggestions -- or should be. Well, you can come back and, at the bottom of most of the pages, and I'll put one there as soon as I get back, is a place for comments, "Hey John, you forgot about the CD-ROM Guide to Australia, make sure it gets added." And I'll drop it right in there. And everybody in the world will benefit from that when they come back to check the bibliography next time.

What I used to get around here is these Back and Forward buttons and this Go To feature, which lets you pick which Web Page that you've seen already you want to go back and see.

Q: How many can you have open at one time?

You can only see one page at once. So you are always essentially turning a page, turning a page back.

Q: Is there a limit to the number you can have stacked up?

No. The way Netscape works is it, from your first access, it tracks where you are going on the Net and if you come back, all those intermediary links disappear. So it keeps track of where you are from your initial starting point.

Q: Who does the house cleaning?

Well, hopefully, if things don't connect right, again, use the comment forms to say, "Oops, this link doesn't work, fix it John" and I'll get on there and figure out what's happening.

I wanted to show you about some of the content that is available so far. Today's session will be noted, but there were also notes from back at SIGCAT '95 when SIGMULTEC had a session there.

And the way you would find those notes is actually to go to the SIGCAT '95 conference. This was the original impetus for creating the SIGCAT Web Page was to publicize that event. It was in Reston. Here's some notes from the different sessions, including the SIGMULTEC session, which, if any of you were there, was May 23rd at 1:00 pm and we had the presentation by Frank Garber of U.S.Video. You can turn directly to that section of the session and start reading the notes about what he had to present that day.

So it shows you. Another example of this the SIGCAT publications. Here is a back issue of the DISCourse and each article is a hypertext link, so you can just flip through, and if you seem to remember something about that Career Outlook article and you want to find out about that, you can just turn right to it.

Q: All the back issues are on the Web?

Every one that I've been able to get in electronic form is on line already. So. This is the kind of thing you can do with your own publications, as well. Just put them on line, let me know that they're there, and I'll provide the linkages so that people can access them.

OK?

So then we can talk about the SIGMULTEC page, let me get us there first. A couple of things, we can't put anything up on the Web page that's copyrighted. That would be a copyright violation so if you are creating content, make sure that it is original and in your copyright if you are going to provide it for use.

Q: Can you get a copyright waiver from the author?

Yes, that's also possible. There is some material that was in the DISCourse that apparently had those waivers and is now on the Web. And the other thing about it is, I don't want necessarily to be the central warehouse for all the information. If you can put the information on your Web site, just tell me it's there, I'll provide a linkage to it.

And then we need to think about some other things that we can use this for. Just networking. I'd like everyone to sign up to have a SIGCAT Member Web Page so we can find one another's e-mail addresses and contact one another. But we could put up some product reviews, any particular software that you're using, if you want to just write up a little about your experience and share it with people, it could really be very beneficial. And then, of course, we want to talk to the vendors about getting some samples and demo software.

Does anybody have any other materials that right of the top of their heads they know they would be able to contribute?

Q: Problem solving: problems encountered and solved.

Right, that would be great. You've been there and done that.

Q: Sharing experience.

You can save people a lot of time and effort.

Q: ...

Yep.

Q: A real, real service.

Sure, absolutely.

What I'm showing you now is a listing of all the SIGCAT Special Interest Groups and here's what exists for SIGMULTEC currently. It is really literally nothing but contact Gabe and Bob. So we've just gotten started here. But we can certainly add the information about the meetings that are coming up and other references.

You want to see a couple of these SIGCAT Member Web pages?

This is all running off a CD and I can show you a little bit about that.

Here is the Member Web Page application form, on-line. Have your own Web Page. This is exactly what the handout literature talks about. And here's the form that you fill out to sign up for a Web page. And down at the bottom is a listing of the people that already have Web pages, of which there are only a few, so far.

That fade in effect is called an interlaced GIF file and people like that because they can preview the graphic before. And here is Lee Burchinal who just came up to see me a few minutes ago. He has a very exciting program with his organization called Assist International. They send multimedia CD-ROMs to 25 different libraries in Eastern Europe. Provide information. He's a director of SIGCAT.

You can see basically, it's like a business card on-line.

Is that something that people would be interested in? Possibly.

The last thing I want to talk about is the use of Hypertext Markup Language on CD-ROM. And I've got a couple of demonstrations. I've been using Gold Disk Astound to provide these slides and the first presentation is going to be this I- View off-line browser. It works with the CD. So you don't need to have Mosaic or Netscape, in combination with Astound.

And this is the concept of having a book on a CD. You are going to be browsing using the I-View browser, which is what you are seeing here now. It has image map capability built in, which means I can click on this image and make this button do something. And this book is a book about how to write Hypertext Markup Language, HTML. And I will just run one of these presentations. A whole bunch of short presentations on individual topics, so that you can listen to them one after the other, but then when you want to go back for reference, you can pick the particular presentation you want to hear.

[From the CD: "HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. The key word is Markup. The hyper part may be sexy and exciting, but you get access to the hyper functions through the markup. And Language is just a highfalutin way saying that you've got a bunch of codes, or a way of saying something. So learning HTML amounts to learning a bunch of text markup codes.

HTML. You markup text in HTML using tags. A tag is set off from the text being marked up by a less than and a greater than symbol. In between is some tag. Most tags work in pairs, with one tag before and the other tag after the text to indicate the beginning and the end. The only difference between the beginning tag and the ending tag is this slash which means "STOP." That's the end of that tag.

Tags can be in upper or lower case and give the same result.

The following training segments introduce ...]

... the basic HTML tags. Astound is still clipping off the end of my presentations unless I make the timelines a little bit longer.

But as you can see that would proceed.

[turned to additional HTML pages]

What I want to show you here is that this can go on and on, covering all the different topics about HTML which you may be familiar with, but there is also a capability now to have those voice overs compressed and downloadable over the Internet. Let me play a sample of what that sounds like.

[From 3,820 byte file: "Here is an on-line update in a compressed file."]

That was about 15 seconds of voice over.

Q: Now that idea was you click on that file while on-line and that's when I would hear it?

Right.

Q: While you're on-line with Netscape?

With Netscape, that's correct.

Q: And you would hear the sound?

You would hear the sound with that sound quality.

Q: What do you need for that?

The software that decompresses that sound which is a piece of software called VoxTools from a company in New Jersey. There is information, if you go into my Web site, you can find the link to VoxTools.

Q: Don't you also need a sound card?

Right, and, of course, the PC has to be a multimedia PC too.

Q: Mac?

VoxTools, I believe has the Mac compression, or they are coming out with it very soon.

Any other question about how the HTML working with an Astound presentation?

And the other real simple one is one I just did for my kids to show you what it looks like if you use a lot more graphics. Maybe we can get a volunteer from the audience to do this bicycle puzzle?

It starts off:

[From CD: "Start building the bicycle with the bicycle frame? Click in the big picture to place the frame there"]

Is there some way to turn that down? Our audio technician has gone to lunch.

But it steps you through, and you get to build a bicycle. My four year old did this and when she was all done she was so excited, "Mommy, I've built a bicycle." And even my nine year old thought it was, "Cool." So.

If you don't click in the right place:

[From CD: "The rear wheel goes in the back of the bicycle."]

It gives you a clue about where it belongs. Or you get some information. And hopefully a younger child would learn the words.

[From CD: "Fantastic! Now add the pedals."]

And again, this could all be deployed over the Internet using that sound compression.

[From CD: "Congratulations! You've built a bicycle."]

So, if there are any other questions.

I'd like to encourage you to take a look at the two sides of this combination. The SIGCAT Member Web pages and everything that the SIGCAT Page is going to have to offer and the I-View and CD-ROM multimedia side. Combined together I think offer a really dynamic and exciting combination that will help us to distribute knowledge very inexpensively.

Yes.

Q: ...

If you want to just record straight voice in compressed format you need to buy some type of voice compression software such as VoxTools or TrueSpeech or there's a number of other products available as well. But some of the voice you heard here is just a standard .WAV file for use under Windows. And that's all uncompressed, but, of course, you've got plenty of room on the CD for that.

Yes.

Q: ...

Absolutely. Well, if you are taking advantage of the fact that HTML browsers like Mosaic and Netscape many people already have them or can obtain them for as little as $35. If you author your material using HTML and combined with one of those browsers, I mean, that's your entire cost. And, of course, you get into the CD-recordable to produce your product, once you have the recording device each blank disc is only $6 - $7 and if you have them replicated, they are less than $1. So, extremely low cost, high volume distribution is feasible. And, of course, with the Internet you advertise the fact that you've got a CD on a particular product, people can come to your Web page, find out about it. I see a really dynamic combination taking place there.

Any other questions?

Thank you.

Ainsley: John, thank you very much for that.

e-mail

John Graves