Most science text books now come with a CD of additional materials for both students and teachers. They have all kinds of information for students: study guides, textbook graphics, quizzes, extra photos for graphic intensive subjects like microscopy. The faculty CDs will come with teaching guides, text banks, powerpoint slides, text book graphics to make our own powerpoints, suggested lab experiments, etc. These CDs have really been the difference in which textbooks are adopted for large classes. Science classes are often huge (>100 in single lecture rooms or multiple sections) and each department tends to adopt the same text book for all sections of say microbiology or anatomy, so these are truly large text book purchases. The publishers have really jumped on CDs and websites as making the difference in getting the textbook order. On the downside, textbook prices have skyrocketed. Its not unusual for a basic science text book to cost > $100.
Other digital publications include all kinds of government agencies and university institutes. Our Institute of Biosecurity (Public Health) at St. Louis U publishes about a half-dozen CDs on bioterrorism response that are sent out to government agencies and primary responders. I'm sitting here looking at an Avian Flu Compendium that was supplied in both paper and on a CD (in the same package). The CD contains the entire paper compendium as pdfs. Given that the CD has images of all the relavent public health notices and reports it is a modern primary source compendium as well.
I suspect that it won't be very long before science is virtually paperless....
Michelle Ziegler
-----Original Message----- From: daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca To: dm-l@uleth.ca Sent: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 4:24 PM Subject: [dm-l] Digital presses
Hi all,
I have a question: we all know presses that publish CD-ROMs of textual projects, and some graphics projects. But what about things like corpora, linguistic research, dictionaries, and other digital material that are not intended as representations of primary sources? I can think of some obvious examples (e.g. the DOE, I suppose the OED); but what about projects on a smaller scale?
Any ideas?
-dan