36. Introduction
Academic conferences are a well-established and effective form of communication. Conference participants communicate by sight and sound, that is, by viewing individuals, text, and graphics, and by hearing the spoken word. This same-time, same-place communication is sufficiently valuable to justify large investments in time and travel funds. Traditional printed conference proceedings and session videotapes are attempts to recapture the value of a live conference participation, but they are an insufficient substitute for having personally experienced speakers giving their presentations. Although multimedia conference proceedings are no replacement for interpersonal communication at the conference, they offer an integrated hypermedia environment combining printed proceedings with the audiovisual experience of listening to the speaker that would be impossible with audio or videotapes and printed proceedings.
As figure IV.1 suggests, hypermedia conference proceedings include much more than just papers and talks. Obviously, implementing such proceedings offers an exceptional testbed for addressing a broad range of research and development topics in the field of hypermedia publishing.
Figure IV.1 Components of hypermedia conference proceedings
Our work on the DAGS Multimedia Conference Proceedings series addresses these open issues. One of our immediate goals is to deliver more of the value of an academic conference to the audience. Recently, the potential of multimedia proceedings has been recognized by conference organizers, and some first efforts at multimedia proceedings on CD-ROM and on the Internet have been published (see next section). The results are, however, mostly a collection of papers in two or three different formats that can be used mainly as "digital microfiche," along with a few digitized movies. Their main problems are a lack of interaction between the components, and a lack of fast searching mechanisms. They were produced to serve as an alternative to printed proceedings, yet printing the articles reveals many missing pictures or graphics. Even though these are efforts in the right direction, we believe that they fall short of the capabilities of multimedia.
The DAGS multimedia proceedings deliver text, graphic, audio, and video information in an integrated hypermedia learning environment, with extensive provisions for random access and hypermedia linking. We believe that this project provides a model for future conference publications and highlights some of the pending research issues that must be resolved before similar publications can be quickly and inexpensively produced. The experience gained from this effort is equally valid not only for multimedia conference proceedings of the future, but also for multimedia textbooks and learning environments.