Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground: Serials Vision and Common Sense is a compilation of presentations from the proceedings of the 13th annual North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. Conference held June 18-21, 1998, at the University of Colorado at Boulder. From this informative book, you will discover technology trends that will impact the relationship among authors, publishers, and libraries including the shift to digital masters; the rising importance of the web and its impact on the economics, manufacturing, and distribution of publishing; and the growth of the World Wide Web as the gateway to what people get from libraries. Through Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground, you will also find guidance in good design principals for your libraries Web page or Web site.

Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground will help you discover why planning is the first step in web design as your consideration of your target audience as well as their preferences and technical level are very important to your design. Also discussed are such important issues as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), designing interactive forms, pages with or without frames, and graphics animation. From Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground, you will gain valuable insight into many unique areas, such as:

• Neodata--the world’s largest magazine fulfillment center
• the astronomy World Wide Web infrastructure named Urania
• the current and future pricing of Scientific, Technical, and Medical (STM) information distribution
• how to use project teams to evaluate and implement new services for electronic serials
• discovering what you can do to help better prepare your library for the inevitable disaster
• learning how the steps your institution takes now can make the difference between prompt, effective action or unnecessary collection and equipment loss
• examining four issues raised by library consortia regarding electronic journals: pricing, authorization systems, integration, and permanent digital archives to help you meet the changing needs of your patrons
• the successes and failures that well-known print newspapers who have launched successful Web versions encountered along the way
  
  Through Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground you will find vision as well as common sense advice and practical methods to help you get your job done. You'll discover many practical insights on information delivery and use trends that will effect higher education, libraries, and publishing and examine evaluative criteria for online resources as well as other new library services. You will find each section of Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground practical and informative and discover that each idea or piece of advice can be incorporated into your own area of expertise. It is the editors hope that you gain vision and common sense from every word.