DROP-IN PUBLISHING WITH THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB

The goal of drop-in publishing is to simplify digital publishing over the Internet. We would like digital publishing of non-commercial matter (e.g. technical reports, course notes, brochures) be as easy as sending e-mail is now, but with the virtues of archival storage and easy searching that we associate with electronic libraries. We propose a protocol, Dienst, to allow communication between clients and document servers by encoding object-oriented messages within URL's. A preliminary version of this protocol now runs at eight sites, and we describe some of its features. Next we present tools for automating the maintenance of document collections. Finally, we discuss the problems we've had with the Web as it stands, hoping to motivate changes that would improve performance of digital library systems such as ours.