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This paper aims to suggest how the information journey of students with disabilities could be facilitated, by first revealing the existence of inaccessible formats such as Portable Document Format (PDF) and then suggesting the inclusion of alternative formats of accessible learning materials, thus improving retrieval.

A sample of 400 articles published over 10 years (2009-2018) from four journals are selected and analysed for accessibility against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0 by using automated accessibility checkers, a screen reader and manual human expertise. The results are presented and recommendations made on improving accessibility.

The findings suggest that the PDF versions of the selected journal articles are not accessible for screen reader users but could be improved by adopting accessible and inclusive practices. Including alternative formats of the learning materials could help support the student information journey.

The results of the study might not be very representative of all the articles in the journals given the small sample size. Additionally, the criteria used in the study do not consider all existing disabilities. Thus, although the PDFs may be inaccessible for some people with disabilities, they may be accessible to others.

Given that PDFs seem to be the preferred format of journal articles online, there is potential for a difficult information journey for some students due to the limitations posed by inaccessibility of the PDFs. Thus, it is recommended to include alternative formats which could be more accessible, giving the student the choice of accessing the learning materials in their preferred format.

If students are unable to access the learning materials that are required for their course, this could lead to poor grade, which might negatively affect the students’ morale. In some cases, some students might drop out.

This study analyses the accessibility of learning materials provided by a third party (journal publishers) and how they affect the student, something that is not usually given much importance when research in accessibility is carried out.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel approach to integrate portable document format (PDF) interface into Java-based digital library application. It bridges the gap between conducting content operation and viewing on PDF document asynchronously.

In this paper, the authors first review some related research and discuss PDF and its drawbacks. Next, the authors propose the design steps and implementation of three modes of displaying PDF document: PDF display, image display and extensible markup language (XML) display. A comparison of these three modes has been carried out.

The authors find that the PDF display is able to completely present the original PDF document contents and thus obviously superior to the other two displays. In addition, the format specification of PDF-based e-book does not perform well; lack of standardization and complex structure is exposed to the publication.

The proposed approach makes viewing the PDF documents more convenient and effective, and can be used to retrieve and visualize the PDF documents and to support the personalized function customization of PDF in the digital library applications.

This paper proposes a novel approach to solve the problem between content operation and the view of PDF synchronously, providing users a new tool to retrieve and reuse the PDF documents. It contributes to improve the service specification and policy of viewing the PDF for digital library. Besides, the personalized interface and public index make further development and application more feasible.

The use of “open data” can help the public find value in various areas of interests. Many governments have created and published a huge amount of open data; however, people have a hard time using open data because of data quality issues. The UK, the USA and Korea have created and published open data; however, the rate of open data implementation and level of open data impact is very low because of data quality issues like incompatible data formats and incomplete data. This study aims to compare the statuses of data quality from open government sites in the UK, the USA and Korea and also present guidelines for publishing data format and enhancing data completeness.

This study uses statistical analysis of different data formats and examination of data completeness to explore key issues of data quality in open government data.

Findings show that the USA and the UK have published more than 50 per cent of open data in level one. Korea has published 52.8 per cent of data in level three. Level one data are not machine-readable; therefore, users have a hard time using them. The level one data are found in portable document format and hyper text markup language (HTML) and are locked up in documents; therefore, machines cannot extract out the data. Findings show that incomplete data are existing in all three governments’ open data.

Governments should investigate data incompleteness of all open data and correct incomplete data of the most used data. Governments can find the most used data easily by monitoring data sets that have been downloaded most frequently over a certain period.

On the heels of the rapid growth of the World Wide Web have come advances in multimedia document formats and the hardware and software to support them. As a result of this combination of factors, the electronic journal is, at last, economically and aesthetically viable.

Acrobat, Envoy and Common Ground all launched commercially within a few months of each other in 1994, as did a format called Farallon Replica that will no longer be marketed from this year.

The purpose of this paper is to consider whether PDF formats are appropriate for long‐term digital archiving.

The approach takes the form of examining how well PDF's capabilities fit eReader devices that future scholars may use in addition to or instead of paper print‐outs.

Fixity is the advantage that PDF offers for archiving, while its alternatives generally offer greater flexibility for eReader devices. The question for long‐term digital archiving is whether fixity or flexibility best suits the interests of future readers?

PDF is widely accepted as a digital archiving format and PDF documents are found in virtually every repository. There has, however, been little discussion as to whether the fixed format is not in fact a long‐term disadvantage.

Materials for teaching, learning and research are moving into the digital sphere. This move is affecting scholarly communication, teaching and learning in the academic community in important ways. These are significant changes, operating at technical, service, organisational and cultural levels. In this paper we wish to examine some of these changes. However, our aims are modest: we will focus on technical developments and on some of the emerging services that these are making possible.

Working with documents in electronic format is inherently different from dealing with materials in print; nor can all electronic formats be considered equivalent. Processing and presenting SGML is not the same as processing and presenting materials in other markup or word processing formats. To maximize flexibility and extensibility, SGML is highly modular, which complicates implementation. Its emphasis on content structure rather than appearance enhances searchability but makes consistent and precise display difficult. Mechanisms used to maximize platform and software independence (e.g., entities, link protocols), though effective, can be used incorrectly or in ways difficult to implement on some systems or using certain software. Difficult questions remain for libraries planning to implement SGML.

Many scientific publications are now available on the World Wide Web for researchers to share research findings. However, they tend to be poorly organised, making the search of relevant publications difficult and time‐consuming. Most existing search engines are ineffective in searching these publications, as they do not index Web publications that normally appear in PDF (portable document format) or PostScript formats. Proposes a Web citation‐based retrieval system, known as PubSearch, for the retrieval of Web publications. PubSearch indexes Web publications based on citation indices and stores them into a Web Citation Database. The Web Citation Database is then mined to support publication retrieval. Apart from supporting the traditional cited reference search, PubSearch also provides document clustering search and author clustering search. Document clustering groups related publications into clusters, while author clustering categorizes authors into different research areas based on author co‐citation analysis.