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Web-enabled CDs
By Adam Corson-Finnerty

The Penn Library is experimenting with publishing web pages on CD-ROM, a relatively new concept often referred to as "web-enabled CD." Last November the Library released its first web-enabled CD, which contains the full text and images from web exhibits by the Library's Special Collections Department. The CD-ROM, University of Pennsylvania On-Line Exhibition Sampler, includes four highly graphical exhibitions:

• Household Words: Women Write from and for the Kitchen;
• Bibliotheca Schoenbergensis: Selected from the Collection of Lawrence J. Schoenberg;
• Robert Montgomery Bird: Writer and Artist; and
• John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer.

The CD works on both Macintosh and Windows platforms and can be viewed using any graphical web browser. Viewers navigate the disk just as they would any other web site. This is a simple but powerful electronic publishing concept, and surprisingly, one that is just beginning to catch on.

"As exciting as the net has become, it has not been without its frustrations," comments Michael Ryan, Director of Penn's Special Collections Department. "Bandwidth limitations have severely reduced the capacity of remote users to receive and download images. Thus, surfing the net at home is often not like surfing at all. Rather, it is like riding waves of molasses: slow and frustrating. With the disk, you can enjoy the rich color of the images without the aggravation of a lethargic net."

The CD advantage

1. You have "instant find." All of the material is right there on disk, ready to use. The reader does not have to search through hundreds of thousands of sites to find the exhibitions.

2. You have "instant bandwidth." Images will load very quickly for people who are used to accessing the web with 14.4 or 28.8 modems. Even for those who have higher-bandwidth access, the images will load as fast or faster, since they do not have to traverse the ever-more-crowded Internet.

3. You have "instant scalability." The disk acts as a trampoline allowing viewers to jump back and forth from "local" to "online" reading. For example, if an exhibition links to another site on the Internet, when you click the link, you will go to that site. Hit the "back" button and you are back on the CD-ROM.

4. You have "instant access." Everything on the disk can be read without connecting your machine to the Internet. This "local browsing" allows readers to view the disk on machines that are not connected to the Internet.

The Library distributed 1,500 free copies of the Exhibition Sampler CD to alumni and Friends of the Library during Homecoming last year. The disk contains the four online exhibits, plus a significant portion of the Library's "Visions for the Future" site. An eight-panel printed insert describes the offerings and credits the many people who created the contents and made the disk possible. The printed insert also contains careful instructions on how to access the disk.

The disk also contains many live Internet connections to other Library and Penn web pages. It contains an electronic form allowing viewers to sign up as a Friend of the Library and receive the first year of membership free. Similarly, there are comment lines at the bottom of key pages that allow readers to send e-mail questions or comments to the publishing team.

New possibilities

The Library is considering several new web-enabled CD projects to be lead by the Center for Electronic Text and Image, whose home page already provides an exciting glimpse of the future. For example, a "Women's Studies site contains the full text of three American women's diaries and a Shakespeare site contains three online versions of King Lear, plus a very ambitious "First Folio" project which aims to mount facsimiles of the first printed versions of all of the Bard's works.

Both sites "take a lot of K" as they say in netspeak, meaning that they are laden with extensive graphics. Such material could be easily downloaded to a web-enabled CD, and used in low-bandwidth settings. One can imagine a Shakespeare "First Folio" CD being of interest to secondary schools and individuals, as well as to Universities. And the same would apply to a Women's Studies CD. Or a Marian Anderson CD, complete with musical excerpts.

Here are some other ideas:

• The readings for a course could be assembled on a disk. This might include images of manuscripts, works of art, comments by the professor, links to other sites of interest, and even copyrighted material (with permission or under "fair use" provisions). Such disks would be particularly useful for students who do not have direct access to a high-speed campus network -- including "Virtual University" students who may be thousands of miles away.

• An entire continuing-education program could be managed with the use of periodic issues of web-enabled disks. The disks could "anchor" to a larger web site maintained by a department or school.

• Recruitment disks could be created, just as college recruitment videos are prepared today. Such disks could contain the best of the campus web, with pictures galore. And they could contain links to other "hot" campus sites. A student could fill out an application form right on the disk and rush it off to Penn by clicking "send."

• Athletics departments could produce a yearly disk for distribution or sale to fans. The disk would contain the complete schedules for all games, all sports. They could contain profiles of star athletes, and golden moments from the past. The disk could also include a ticket-ordering electronic form so that viewers could purchase seats online. (See Penn's ambitious Athletic Department site as an example of a cutting-edge web site.)

• Penn Schools and departments could create web-enabled CD "case statements" for use in fundraising and public relations.

• Scholarly disks could be distributed by the Library for networked use by other libraries. The contents of the disk could be uploaded to a server, thus allowing for creation of a campus "mirror" site that would run faster on the campus intranet. Or the disk could be used in a network disk-farm scheme for CD stations. Libraries could establish "swap" arrangements for such publications, or even sell them to each other. (Though automated site downloading tools, like "Milktruck," may be a better approach to maintaining a mirror site.)

• Web-enabled disks could be produced as companions to print publications. That way the reader can use the disk to navigate to interesting sites. Such disks could also contain extensive additional material, including full-color images that would be too expensive to reproduce in a print publication.

• Web-enabled disks could be produced instead of books and journals.

• Any non-profit of substance could create a disk that starts with whatever has been placed on the Web and builds from there. Amnesty International, with its extensive online country-by-country human rights reports would be a prime candidate for issuing a quarterly disk to its most active members.

Single copies of the Library's Exhibition Sampler CD are available at no cost to members of the Penn community who want to experiment with this concept. Contact the Library's Department of External Affairs at 800/390-1829. The Dolphin Disks site will be used as a marketing tool. (The dolphin in Dolphin Disks is drawn from Penn's shield, which incorporates it as an element from Ben Franklin's family crest.) The e-mail address for Dolphin Disks is doldisks@pobox.upenn.edu.

[Editor's note: A version of this article will appear as a chapter in Gifts on the Web: A Handbook for Libraries and Other Non-Profits by Adam Corson-Finnerty and Laura Blanchard, to be published by ALA Editions.]