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Last modified: 2006.11.15.

Author: Renkecz Anita Orsolya

Previous version: http://epa.oszk.hu/html/irattar/epa_str.htm [outdated]

Contents

1. Agenda of the EPA
2. Levels of the EPA
3. The EPA archive
4. The EPA database
5. The EPA article archive
6. National periodical digitisation support

1. Agenda of the EPA

The Electronic Periodicals Archive and Database (EPA) is an archive and registry collecting and distributing the content and data of Hungarian e-periodicals. On the one hand, the EPA is the separate collection for e-periodicals of the Hungarian National Library OSZK), and on the other hand it is a national catalogue of online resources.

The EPA, as a service of the OSZK is charged with the following responsibilities:

• 1.1. regarding publications handed over for re-distribution by the copyright-holder
  • archiving of e-periodicals
  • providing infrastructure and storage for the distribution and preservation of electronic periodicals
  • developing and maintaining the user interface for the services
  • enabling fulltext search options in the archived content
• 1.2.Regarding the publications defined in 4.1.
  • standard bibliographic description of the resources
  • reliable and updated information about availability.
• 1.3. Based on bibliographic and availability information
  • buliding an online registry of the resources
  • enabling search options for users in the database
  • on demand distribution of the contents of the database in standard metadata formats for other electronic services.
• 1.4. Program development for the automated modules of the database and the archive. The application created in this process should be
  • maintained
  • updated
  • documented
  • distributed on demand
  by the EPA.
• 1.5. Drafting professional guidelines based on experiences with digitisation
  • publishing explicit recommendations about online formats and archiving structures

2. Levels of the EPA

The Electronic Periodicals Archive and Database is built on the following three levels:

• 2.1. Open-access (free) content-providing service, that archives and distributes electronic periodicals on the internet to the extent provided or permitted by the copyright holder. The archive is not a copy of an online publication, it could be a reduced or extended version of an original resource (if any). The resource is published with the features available in the EPA. Updating depends on the maintenace of the original resource or the stipulations of the publication agreement with the copyright holder.
  The EPA provides a bibliographic description for the resource, and makes its metadata searchable in the database of the EPA. Full text search is also enabled in the contents of the resource.
• 2.2. Resource registry, that contains the descriptive and availability data of the online available electronic periodicals with contents related to Hungary. The EPA creates an online searchable database based on the registry and regularly checks the validity and updates of the online resources.
• 2.3. The third level of the EPA is a work in progress: searchable article-database with online fulltext content.

3. The EPA archive

3.1. The EPA-archive is a fulltext content providing service, which is based on a manually operated online archiving system.

The archived periodicals in the EPA

• are available to the extent the copyright holder made possible
  • are archived and distributed
  • are provided with metadata
• The EPA takes responibility for regular updates of the
  • content of the resources
  • descriptive and availability data.
• The EPA is also responsible for the
  • uniform format
  • technical quality.
• The EPA enables
  • indexing
  • fulltext search options within the resources.
• The EPA builds uniform and interoperable online structures for the e-periodicals in the archive, which is the sufficient basis for the future searchable, fulltext article-database.

A periodical is acceptable for the collection if

• it is in Hungarian language or it is related to Hungary
• its main interests are related to academic research, science, culture and education
• it is available in an accessible, convertable file format (HTML, XML, Word, RTF, PDF, QXD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, GIF)
• the technical quality is acceptable (text, spelling or clear images)
• its publication is not in violation of the copyright law

3.3. The structure of the EPA-archive:

1. Base level (files belonging to the service as a whole)
2. Periodical-level [00000/00000]. This level consists of a series of numeric entries, divided into groups of 100. Each numeric entry represents an e-periodical. Each entry contains further numeric entries, each containing one issue of the resource (this is the third level), as well as complementary files of the e-periodical (illustrative graphics, style sheets, etc.).
3. Single issues. The issues are placed in directores in numeric order within the level of a single e-periodical. Supplementary issues, cumulative indexes may create individual directories as well.
4. Dynamic properties (e.g. database, search functions) are not transferred into the EPA-archive.

3.4. The online formats used in the EPA :

• HTML
• PDF
• JPEG
• GIF

With respect to the online formats, we collect content in the following formats:

• HTML, PDF, XML, JPG, PNG;
• ASCII, WORD, RTF, TIF (provided they can easily be converted into the first group of formats)
• DTP formats (only in special cases).

The EPA distributes only online formats, we do not provide compressed versions for download purposes.

3.5. We modify the absolute hyperlinks and remove all external references, advertisements, counters, banners.

3.6. The individual issues are available from the "Holdings" link on the expandpage of each archived resource. The holdings page shows available issues in reverse order (newest updates on the top) with issue numbering and publication dates, and sometimes complementary comments about content and format.

The online contents of each isse can be opened from this page.

4. The EPA-database

This is the online registry containing the bibliographic and availability information about online e-periodicals.

4.1. The e-periodicals described in the database must be:

• available in electronic format
• unambiguously identifiable by an URL
• readable in full-text (at least to some extent)
• in Hungarian or in relation to Hungary
• a continuing resource or the online version of such resource.

Furthermore, they must have

• publications on their own
• an identifiable person or organization responsible for the contents.

4.2. The EPA creates a concise bibliographic description for each of the periodicals within its scope, and makes the descriptions available both for web-users and for data-providing systems.

4.3 The EPA is responsible for regular updates on the descriptive data.

4.4 The content of the database is searchable through multiple data retrieval options provided on the user interface of the service and programmed interfaces, created on demand for other databases.

4.5 The periodicals are represented with an uniform "expand" page in the service, with further options depending on the availability of the publication.

5. EPA article archive

5.1. The future third stage of the EPA is an article-database, based on the archived periodicals, enabling information retrieval on the individual articles of periodicals. As a first step of this project, we extracted in XML-format the analytic data of 68 periodical-archives with the support of the Hungarian TOC-Database. The XML-HTML conversion of the data and the building of the searchable database is underway.

6. National periodical digitisation support

6.1. The EPA is responsible for documenting its experiences with the archiving of e-periodicals in the format of public guidelines.

The EPA also produced an extensive TEI DTD applicable to the electronic publication of periodical articles.

Our documents are publicly available (with respect to respective copyright issues).