In Praise of Search Engines and Portable Documents David Alan Walker Robert Hill Institute, University of Sheffield, U.K. A role for digital books in facilitating retrieval of information from a library which never closes is proposed ABSTRACT To many, a digital book which is intended for reading on a computer screen is not a particularly attractive prospect. Nevertheless, in texts which depend heavily on cited references, 'books' in Portable Document Format (PDF) which contain embedded hyperlinks can guide and facilitate rapid retrieval of reliable information from the Internet Clark Kerr (2001) has described the advent of electronic communication as the first revolution in the technology of education for 500 years. To someone like myself, who first stepped cautiously over the threshold of the South Shields High School for Boys early in 1940, it is more a miracle than a revolution. My first reluctant steps should have been in September 1939 but air raid shelters had to be built and, when the call finally came, it was to a school requiring my presence for only four 'half' days a week. Untroubled by television, which did not penetrate the Walker household until 1953, when Stanley Mathews finally got his Football Association cup-winners medal, I took three books from the excellent and copious school library each (half) school day and devoured them before the next. This voracious appetite for the written page was sustained by an equally well stocked local library and a central town library, of modest magnificence which, blissfully unaware of political correctness to come, did not, even in time of war, shrink from exposing its readers to such unlikely tomes as 'Mien Kampf' So I read much and I read widely. Even in my final year at university, vastly concerned by what I perceived as a last chance to reward my parents indulgence with a reasonable degree, I still somehow found time to get through one novel a week.. Eventually, however, the magnitude of my recreational reading gradually diminished and my childhood love of libraries was replaced by a growing impatience with the British university libraries that housed the scientific journals and texts that were the tools of my trade. When I was free to use these libraries they were mostly closed. What I wanted to read was rarely on their shelves. If they had it at all it was as either ''out'' in use or at the binders. This state of affairs grew steadily worse with the passing years. Returning, in 1997, to the library of my alma mater, I was astonished to find it necessary to be escorted by 'security' from entrance to front desk and there to be told that I would only be permitted to penetrate further if I could produce documentary evidence of my degrees and pay £10. When all seemed irrevocably lost, came the revolution that preceded the miracle. The Internet struggled to its feet, scientific journals started to publish 'on line'. Computers became faster, telephone connections struggled to keep up. At first I was slow to realise that I was living in a new age. Then, a professional illustrator, Mic Rolph, proposed that he and I approach the Millennium Commission with a view to furthering 'the public understanding of science' by putting questions on beermats in British pubs. The idea was that customers might pick up a beermat, read the question and engage in conversation with their neighbour about science rather than more pressing everyday matters. The beermats (Rolph & Walker, 1997), which have long since gone from the pubs and into the hands of collectors, were intended to carry somewhat arresting questions and answers. Perhaps the most startling of these was the answer to the question 'What percentage of your cells are human?' (Had space allowed, this question might have been better put as 'What percentage, by number, of the cells in the human body are human?' thereby alerting the thoughtful reader to the very large number of E. coli etc which live happily in our gut.) The 'correct' answer of 10% could have been designed to calm the concerns of those who, fearful of genetic manipulation, worry about ingesting alien DNA along with their corn flakes. However, in view of such an unlikely small percentage I looked for chapter and verse before proceeding further. The medical friend who had suggested this question referred me an article by Hart (1998) in the British Medical Journal. This sought to remind doctors that, when they prescribe medicines, they are, in actuality, prescribing for a 'menagerie' rather than a single organism. Having spent a lifetime checking references in the time honoured fashion I reckoned that this article might have taken me at least an hour or two to find, even if my university library had been on my doorstep rather than many miles away. Instead, for the first time, I turned to Stanford University's remarkable search engine, 'Google', now reckoned to be pre-eminent and more likely to ask 'do you mean such and such?' than to demand an impeccably precise 'URL'. Boldly, I simply asked it to look for 'BMJ' and, when it immediately presented me with that site, entered 'menagerie' in the 'British Medical Journal's' own search engine. That gave me half a dozen titles to choose from and, within a minute, I had the original article (Hart, 1998) in front of me. Try it yourself if you don't believe me! So, sitting in a modest hut at the bottom of my garden, forty miles from the nearest conventional library of any consequence, I now have the most remarkable library imaginable. It is open, as modern parlance has it, '24/365'. With the help of Google it can find me almost anything at the drop of a hat. What is more, it can often show me where to look further. Thus, doubting the veracity of illustrations in which DNA spiralled to the left I simply asked the world at large via a relevant newsgroup. Within 24 hours, two leading authorities told me, with the merest hint of impatience, me that everyone knows that it is almost invariably a dextral helix. Going to the extremes of esoteric enquiry it took me little longer to confirm that the fruit of the castor oil plant, infamous for its role in the murder of Georgi Markov, came to have 'Ricinus' as its generic name because of its resemblance to a relatively obscure dog tick called Ixodes ricinus. It is true, of course, that there is an awful lot of incorrect or dubious information on the Net (not least, in my own area of competence where, even respected encyclopaedias could do better). The same is true, of course, of information on paper on library shelves despite the fact that this has (supposedly) been refereed. It is not too difficult for someone who has spent a lifetime devoted to a particular speciality to separate the wheat from the chaff but where does this leave the student or indeed anyone venturing into unknown territory? In the end we all look for guidance and information to those we trust, whatever the nature of the medium we turn to. Where finding time is even more difficult than finding reliable information, we must rely on others to do this for us. In my own field, for example, I am immensely grateful to Orr and Govindjee (2001) for compiling what I have somewhat frivolously referred to ''as everything you might wish to know about photosynthesis but are too shy to ask''. However, such a source is, by the specialist for the specialist and it occurred to me, as it must have occurred to others, that a scientific 'book' in ŒPortable Document Format¹ (PDF) might have much to recommend it. Of course there are real books, on paper, that I would not wish to read on a computer screen. Books like 'The Summer of a Dormouse' (Mortimer, 2000), vastly comforting to someone like myself who has already squandered his allotted span, would be better read in bed or in a deckchair. As I became accustomed to Adobe PDF however, I began to realise that it has much more to offer than the fact that 'you can view and print PDF files across a broad range of hardware and operating systems'. For example, I have written texts that I can no longer find my way about, such is the inadequacy of conventional indexes, lists of contents and fast failing memory. PDF on the other hand, has an infallible Œfind¹ function familiar to anyone who has used a word processor. In addition it has 'bookmarks' which can be substituted, to great effect, for a list of contents. These two alone make navigation through and around a text more of a pleasure than a chore and there is more to come. The real jewel in the PDF crown, however, is its ability to embed both internal and external hyperlinks. The internal links simply take a reader from one part of the text to another without recourse to searching or turning pages. At the click of a mouse, the external links can whisk you to the ends of the earth, to 'The Restaurant at the End of the Universe' or even 'The Klingon Language Institute'. If the link is highlighted on the page you can learn, in an instant, about the mass of a photon, what the letters 'pH' actually stand for, or even what Max Planck thought about Albert Einstein. Anxious to illustrate some tutorial or whatever with some particularly esoteric image (see, e.g., Walker, 1982) you may well be able to have it at your fingertips in a matter of minutes. Here, I believe, is the real potential for the digital scientific text. There is the immediacy with which a student can turn to a relevant reference. There is a reasonable expectation, given a knowledgeable and diligent author, that the cited references are no less authoritative than those that might be found on a written page. By now, a well-respected search engine like Google can find you just about anything. A PDF 'book' such as 'Like Clockwork', can function both as a guide, a filter and a vehicle to take you where you want to be safely, quickly and by the best route. References Adobe Acrobat (2001) Google Search Engine (2001) Clark, K, (2001) The uses of the University. Harvard Univ Press. 1-256 Cummings, R (1996) Georgi Markov,Victim Of An Unknown Cold War Assassin Hart, CA (1998) Drugs: good, bad, and failing BMJ;316:1255-1256 Mortimer, J (2000) The Summer of a Dormouse -A year of growing old gracefully. Penquin Books. London 1-230 The Summer of a Dormouse Orr,L & Govindjee (2001), Photosynthesis and the Web: 2001 Rolph M & Walker, DA (1997) The Pub Understanding of Science Walker DA (1982) Chlorophyll fluorescence in vitro Walker, D.A. (2000) Like Clockwork, Oxygraphics, Sheffield 1-129 >