About the

Columbia University

Working Paper

Server Project


Under the aegis of the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of American Universities, a working group of librarians university presses, and learned societies with publishing programs met in September 1994 at Columbia University for strategic and tactical discussions about how best to influence the development of scholarly publishing to favor the widest and freest flow of information for the benefit of education and research. One outgrowth of this meeting for Columbia has been the establishment of the Columbia Working Papers Server. The Working Papers Server Project uses the World Wide Web in an attempt to coordinate and disseminate working papers at Columbia more efficiently, while at the same time reducing expenses and administrative workload. A cooperative effort between AcIS, the Libraries and a range of departments, centers and institutes, the Project's goal is to provide a forum for distribution and discussion of current scholarly work in a broad variety of fields.

The Project functions as a clearinghouse for working papers from a variety of disciplines, each available for searching, browsing or downloading over the world wide web. At present the collections are centered in economics and business, with a selection of papers from the Law School to be forthcoming. Each collection is stored and managed centrally in the University's Digital Library. Central management functions include conversion, mark-up, indexing by author and by title, support of full-text searches, and production archive services.

Most of the working papers in the collection have been translated into html, including tables. Other images or special characters are scanned and embedded into the html documents as gif images. If the paper contains a large number of special characters or formulae that are not readable in html, the paper has been made available in postscript, pdf, and other word processing formats as may be demanded by the particular discipline, with an html version of the paper's abstract or introduction for easier browsing and searching. The goal is to present each paper in a number of appropriate formats, across platform, to maximize the accessibility of every document.


Columbia University Working Papers Server Project