More than 3200 full-content journal articles were processed, indexed, and added to the testbed. In addition to the journal articles, we have added two complete volumes (1 and 2) of ASM International's Metals Handbook, comprising approximately 2300 printed pages contained in 115 XML files.

ASM International was added as a new industrial partner for the testbed. As mentioned under Collection Growth, ASM has provided articles from their Metals Handbook for inclusion in the testbed. These materials, because they are substantially different from journal articles, offer some new and interesting research challenges. One issue which we are addressing with these materials is how to partition the articles, some of which can run to hundreds of printed pages, into appropriately sized chunks for delivery to users over the web. Other issues include how to implement the page number based index for each volume for use over the web, and how to deliver useful and meaningful search results for such a large handbook.

In addition to the above, we are using the Metals Handbook as a test of some of the latest standard web technologies which we are exploring, such as XSLT and XLinks. Plus, we plan to use the ASM materials to explore alternate full-text indexing strategies which utilize standard relational databases, instead of our current OpenText LiveLink database.

During this time period we also completed our participation, on behalf of AIP, in the DOI-X / CrossRef prototype, delivering our final evaluation report to the DOI-X committee. This report detailed our extensive testing of the metadata query process developed for the prototype, as well as numerous suggestions for improvements to the query and metadata registration processes.

We completed the conversion of all our metadata to the new format described by the ISO 11179 standard. This included retroactive conversions of all our metadata, plus changes to our processing scripts to now generate and utilize the new metadata format for searching and long citation views.

We are continuing improvements to the mathematics rendering. We have completed XSLT scripts for transforming one publisher's XML files into HTML for web browser rendering, and we plan to implement this for all of our publishers' articles. Raster image versions of all the mathematics, for use with older web browsers, has been completed for all publishers except one.

Bill Mischo, the project's principal investigator, visited Tokyo, Japan for technical meetings and presentations at the request of the NTT J-Stage project, one of our newest industrial sponsors.

We demonstrated our system and discussed the DLib project with the Sr. Vice President of Technomic Publishing Company, Inc.

We held discussions with the President of Openly Informatics, Inc. about their LinkBaton technology and its possible application for scholarly linking. We are considering incorporation of LinkBaton into our testbed on an experimental basis.

We also held discussions with the Director of the Internet Math Consortium regarding issues of mathematics and the Internet, specifically using MathML for rendering mathematics on the web.

We also held discussions with Elsevier and ACM about their possible inclusion in our industrial partners program.

A presentation about the project was also made to the President of the Grainger Foundation, the primary contributor to the construction of the Grainger Engineering Library.