SIGDA Publications on CD-ROM

SIGDA has long been interested in electronic publishing and in the potential for CD-ROM as an efficient data storage and distribution medium. In 1992, SIGDA published the DALibrary, an 8 disk set of CD-ROMs containing conference proceedings and one journal spanning the years 1974 - 1990. The DALibrary was a large and expensive undertaking, since the material used existed only on paper. Since that time, it has become feasible for authors to submit their papers electronically as PostScript files, which reduces the cost and preparation time, making it possible to have proceedings on CD-ROM available at the conference. SIGDA wanted to provide a service to the design automation community and in particular, provide a tangible benefit to its members. It decided to publish individual conference proceedings on CD-ROM. DAC 94 on CD-ROM, which was distributed free to all SIGDA members, was the first in a series called SIGDA Publications on CD-ROM. Since that time European Design & Test Conference, Design Automation Conference, European Design Automation Conference, Asia-South Pacific Design Automation Conference and International Conference on Computer Aided Design have participated in the program.

In late 1993, Jason Cong and Bryan Preas, the CD-ROM Projects directors, began investigating what retrieval software to use. Conferences in other areas have been put on CD-ROM and Jason and Bryan spoke with their producers and sponsors to gather information. Jason and Bryan decided to use Adobe Acrobat, primarily because of its ease of use to CD-ROM developers, the authors of conference papers, and to the end user. They added HTML indices and PostScript files for UNIX users. Thus, ASP-DAC98 on CD-ROM contains files which can be accessed using either the Adobe Acrobat Reader (included on the CD-ROM) or an HTML browser, such as Netscape (provided by the user) and a PostScript viewer, such as GhostScript or PageView. The key to the project was the requirement that each paper accepted for a conference be submitted electronically. A server at the University of Pittsburgh was set up where papers could be submitted via ftp or email. Floppy disks could also be mailed in. Authors were requested to submit their files in PostScript, if possible. Once the papers were gathered, they were "distilled" into Portable Document Format (PDF) files using Adobe Acrobat Distiller. A few of the files could not be distilled. Those, along with papers for which we received no electronic version, were scanned from the camera-ready versions submitted to the publisher of the paper version of the proceedings. PDF files were combined and hyperlinks were inserted. Indices were prepared and hyperlinks inserted for the HTML browser, also.

SIGDA also publishes an "end of year" compendium containing material from each of that year's conference CD-ROMs, plus SIGDA-sponsored symposia.