Including Ancillary Material in Digital Library

This describes conventions that have been set up to allow ACM journal Information Directors (under direction of Editors-in-Chief) to prepare additional material for automatic insertion into the citation pages for individual journal articles in the ACM Digital Library. Examples include detailed proofs, data sets, software, or other author-supplied files. (Citation pages are the "home pages" for individual articles in the ACM DL.) The included information appears in an "Additional Information" section of the citation page.

Information provided by the mechanism described here is considered ancillary material, related but not essential to an article. The material is not necessarily peer reviewed. While it is linked to from within the DL, it is neither indexed for search nor access controlled by subscription. ACM is not liable to its subscribers if links provided on these pages become unavailable at some point in time. (ACM is developing a separate mechanism to incorporate material other than traditional printed articles more directly into the DL, making them a permanent part of the ACM archive which ACM takes responsibility for.)

Examples

TOPLAS has used this facility to provide links to online appendices. An example of this can be found at

http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/toplas/1998-20-4/p724-tofte/

where the Additional Information section provides a link to a PDF file containing the appendices.

TOMS has used this facility to provide links to software which is considered part of the published paper. An example of this can be found at

http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/toms/1998-24-3/p261-peters/

The Mechanism

When generating a citation page for a given article, the DL generator looks for a file with a particular name. If found, it includes the contents of that file in the article's citation page. This convention allows volunteer Information Directors to prepare material for inclusion independently. The material is usually automatically inserted within a few days of the file's creation.

The following filesystem on turing.acm.org is used to store material for inclusion:

/usr2/info/pubs/toc/includes

Material associated with each article is stored in its own directory. The naming of these directories mirrors that of the articles directory, i.e.

/usr2/info/pubs/toc/includes/journals/<j>/<yyyy>-<v>-<i><s>/<t><n>-<a>/

where

<j>	is the journal abbreviation
<yyyy>	is the year
<v>	is the volume number
<i>	is the issue number
<s>	is the optional tag 'es' for "electronic supplement"
<t>	is 'p' or 'a', indicating whether <n> is a starting page number or an article number
<n>	is the starting page number or article number
<a>	is the last name of the first author

Note: see http://www.acm.org/pubs/urls.txt for a more complete explanation of the naming convention.

This directory, if present, may include additional content to be included in the citation page for the associated article. These files are owned by the Information Directors for the publication. (They should be kept group writable so that ACM staff can aid in their maintenance.)

The presence of a file named include.html in this directory is used to store material for inclusion in the citation page for the corresponding article. A portion of this file's body (see below) is copied into the citation page.

The file include.html may be a complete HTML file, but this is primarily for debugging purposes. The portion to be included in the citation page must be delimited by HTML comments as follows

<!-- *** BEGIN ACM INCLUDE *** --> HTML to be included goes here <!-- *** END ACM INCLUDE *** -->

Preparers should not rely on any markup (e.g. centering, font selection) that occurs outside of the include delimiters. URLs placed in this file should be absolute. Additional files referred to by these HTML files may be placed in this directory if necessary. The directory containing the file include.html can be referred to by the HREF /pubs/toc/includes/journals/<j>/<yyyy>-<v>-<i><s>/<t><n>-<a>/.

Also realize that changes to include.html will not be visible to readers until the citation page is regenerated.

The include files used to generate the citation pages in the examples above can be seen at

/usr2/info/pubs/toc/includes/journals/toplas/1998-20-4/p724-tofte/
/usr2/info/pubs/toc/includes/journals/toms/1998-24-3/p261-peters/

Access

Journal Information Directors need to have accounts on acm.org, as well as a directory for their journal established. For information on obtaining an account on acm.org, see http://turing.acm.org/infodir/.

To have a directory created for your journal, contact Laura Lander [email protected].