Proceedings of the 1996 DPF/DPB Summer Study on New Directions in High-energy Physics (Snowmass 96)

Production of the Proceedings of the 1996 DPB/DPF Summer Study in High-Energy Physics built on the methods, lessons, and technology of the production process used for the Proceedings of the 1995 Particle Accelerator Conference (PAC95). For PAC95, authors were asked to submit PostScript, source files, and hard copy. Producing the proceedings took 16 months of official FTE in addition to countless hours of volunteer work by two additional people--the entire production process was accomplished in just under 9 months. In that time, the PAC95 production team quality checked every file (1099 submissions, totaling 3429 pages) and rebuilt about two thirds of them to fix problems with fonts and figures, and various other problems. Needless to say, this was an expensive process. The Snowmass proceedings project started with a much smaller budget and a shorter production schedule, resulting in a much more ambitious plan. The goal was, as for PAC95, to produce both a paper and a CD version of the proceedings. This time, the goal was to complete the project in only 6 months, using half of a staff person from the SLAC Technical Publications Department (responsible for technical design and implementation as well as project management), along with 6more » months of a full-time temporary employee to answer the phone and coordinate author support. The conference editors and I decided on a strategy using the World Wide Web for submission and quality assurance testing. The resulting procedure allowed authors to check the quality of their own PDF files, prevented random browsing of papers before publication of the proceedings, and required minimal human intervention (though we easily could have used a few more bodies manning the help lines!). To this end, we set up a Power Macintosh running FileMaker Pro 3.0 (a relational database application), WebSTAR (Macintosh Web server software), WEB/FM (CGI package for FileMaker Pro/ WebSTAR interface), and NetPresenz (Macintosh ftp server) and created a gatewayed mailing list and newsgroup for authors needing technical support.« less