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At first glance, this A4 size guide looks very much like the UKOLUG newsletter, sharing as it does the same cover design. However, this book is one of a number of publications from the group aimed at users of online and CD‐ROM resources, and builds upon two previous UKOLUG guides to CD‐ROMs.

It has become clear that business process re‐engineering (BPR) draws on the knowledge and skills from many of the traditional management disciplines. The adoption of the process paradigm for managing enterprises creates new challenges of reconciling the relative roles of functions and processes within an organization. While these issues have yet to be resolved there are other aspects of BPR concerned with activities to improve performance which have many similarities with existing concepts and techniques in the domain of operations management. There is a danger that the learning gained in areas of quality management, just‐in‐time and simultaneous engineering may be disregarded or hidden from those engaged in BPR programmes. Aims to indicate and identify some of the lessons learned from operations management so that they may be applied to BPR.

This work focused on a basic building block of an allocation unit that carries out the critical job of deciding between the conflicting requests, i.e. an arbiter unit. The purpose of this work is to implement an improved hybrid arbiter while harnessing the basic advantages of a matrix arbiter.

The basic approach of the design methodology involves the extraction of traffic information from buffer signals of each port. As the traffic arrives in the buffer of respective ports, information from these buffers acts as a source of differentiation between the ports receiving low traffic rates and ports receiving high traffic rates. A logic circuit is devised that enables an arbiter to dynamically assign priorities to different ports based on the information from buffers. For implementation and verification of the proposed design, a two-stage approach was used. Stage I comprises comparing the proposed arbiter with other arbiters in the literature using Vivado integrated design environment platform. Stage II demonstrates the implementation of the proposed design in Cadence design environment for application-specific integrated chip level implementation. By using such a strategy, this study aims to have a special focus on the feasibility of the design for very large-scale integration implementation.

According to the simulation results, the proposed hybrid arbiter maintains the advantage of a basic matrix arbiter and also possesses the additional feature of fault-tolerant traffic awareness. These features for a hybrid arbiter are achieved with a 19% increase in throughput, a 1.5% decrease in delay and a 19% area increase in comparison to a conventional matrix arbiter.

This paper proposes a traffic-aware mechanism that increases the throughput of an arbiter unit with some area trade-off. The key feature of this hybrid arbiter is that it can assign priorities to the requesting ports based upon the real-time traffic requirements of each port. As a result of this, the arbiter is dynamically able to make arbitration decisions. Now because buffer information is valuable in winning the priority, the presence of a fault-tolerant policy ensures that none of the priority is assigned falsely to a requesting port. By this, wastage of arbitration cycles is avoided and an increase in throughput is also achieved.

Janette Rowland has been appointed marketing services manager of General Hybrid. Based at their facility on Tyneside, and reporting to the general sales manager, Ms Rowland is responsible for all PR, marketing support and promotional activities for General Hybrid worldwide. She joins the company from CSM, a software house, where she held the position of marketing executive.

This paper focuses on academic, scientific publishing, as a form of documentation and communication of scientific findings in the changing world of converging information and communication technologies. It assesses the current state of technologies and forms of publishing electronically, and future trends and possibilities. This is linked to a discussion of the nature of the publishing industry, its form in relation to economic issues in demand and supply within publishing and specifically electronic publishing in this area. The paper suggests that the recent policy document from the European Commission, Strategic Developments for the European Publishing Industry towards the Year 2000 may present a number of difficulties for the scientific publishing industry. This strategy outlines a number of possibilities for increasing the extent of electronic publishing. These possibilities conflict with the particular situation of scientific publishers, which are generally small businesses with limited resources and expertise, and without the financial stability to be able to set up or initiate electronic publishing. The analysis of the policy suggests that the publishing industry and its representatives may need to work more closely with small publishers, so that the infrastructure may be developed to overcome these problems for these exciting new technologies, and methods of utilising them for electronic publishing, exchange of information and communication, to be fully utilised.

SGML, or Standard Generalised Markup Language, is an international standard (ISO 8879) allowing the logical structure of electronic documents to be represented rigorously and independent of applications. This article does not discuss the actual standard, but rather proposes a strategy libraries can consider when implementing SGML applications on top of existing products, or when embedding these in innovative end‐user services. Experiences of SGML within the VUBIS‐Antwerpen Library Network (Belgium) are discussed VUBIS‐Antwerpen has adopted SGML as a key standard for the exploitation of its bibliographical data (union catalogues, document ordering online contents, current awareness, publishing on the World Wide Web). With the move towards electronic publication and distribution of documents, SGML tends to become a crucial standard for digital libraries. Projects such as TEI, ELSA, DECOMATE and ELVYN now focus on access to and delivery of full‐text electronic documents, using SGML to manipulate, process and transform the document for the purposes of full‐text searching or hypertext navigation.

Chemistry as an applied science suffers from the fact that its necessarily close connection with various branches of industry is ill defined and generally very unsatisfactory in character. One result of this is that those who have made chemistry their profession find themselves more often than not in the position of having to subordinate their professional instincts to the temporary exigencies of some particular branch of trade and to find their professional status called in question and criticised by those who are not in the profession itself and who have no right to criticise.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

Libraries have become an established part of our scientific and social cultures. They provide an essential mechanism for storing, preserving and sharing documentary records of various types of human endeavour. Undoubtedly, the properties of a library are strongly influenced by the types of information that it contains and the various media used to store this information. Over the last few decades we have seen the emergence of new information handling technologies. These have significantly influenced the basic nature of conventional paper‐based libraries and have created a need for new types of ‘electronic library’. This paper discusses some of the changes that have taken place within library systems as a consequence of the emergence of new computer‐based technologies. Some case studies are presented which outline various developments within our laboratory relating to the creation of living books and dynamic electronic libraries.