CONFERENCE ON A DISK: A Successful Experiment in Hypermedia Publishing (Extended Abstract).

Academic conferences are a long-standing and effective form of multimedia communication. Conference participants can transmit and receive information through sight, speech, gesture, text, and touch. This same-time, same-place communication is sufficiently valuable to justify large investments in time and travel funds. Printed conference proceedings are attempts to recapture the value of a live conference, but they are limited by a fragmented and inefficient approach to the problem. This problem was addressed in the multimedia proceedings of the Dartmouth Institute for Advanced Graduate Studies (DAGS) '92 conference. The recently published CD-ROM delivers text, graphics, audio, and video information as an integrated whole, with extensive provisions for random access and hypermedia linking. The CD-ROM includes: a navigation shell that facilitates hierarchical navigation in hyperspace; hypertext of the 22 papers presented; Apple QuickTime movies of the eight invited speakers delivering the conference talks along with the slides they marked during their talks; hyperlinks connecting relevant parts of the proceedings; and a bibliography. This project provides a model for future conference publications and highlights some of the research issues that must be resolved before similar publications can be quickly and inexpensively produced. (Author/MAS)