Are Mainstream Scientific Researchers Using the Internet to its full Multimedia Potential? As a research presentation medium, the Internet has been designed to offer vastly more to publishers than easy text access. It's astoundingly simple to incorporate photographs, diagrams, illustrations, sounds, animations, movies and all kinds of non-text content into a website using today's user-friendly web development software. This subject, Networks and Multimedia in Science and Technology, has been designed to open its students' eyes to the exciting multimedia possibilities available that can communicate research findings more accessibly, effectively and concisely than plain text. A look through some of the research presented by many of these students, found linked to the NAMIST CONFERENCE PAGE, makes it clear that well-designed web sites can make even the most potentially boring topics (statistics? butterflies?) attractive and interesting through the use of intuitive structures and appropriate multimedia.However, a browse through the web site of Australia's principal government-funded Scientific organisation, the CSIRO AUSTRALIA page, reveals myriads of research papers published almost exclusively in text-only format. The http://www.nobel.se/announcement-98/physics98.html official 1998 Nobel Prize award announcement for the field of Physics includes some diagrams, but nothing one would not find in a 1970's textbook. Many of the links from american science organisation www.Sigmaxi.org's science resource page, http://www.sigmaxi.org/scienceresources/scienceresources.htm, have a small amount of graphical content, but only one site I found, http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/ - a site dedicated to volcano research - made consistent use of movie files, sounds and animation, and this site was filed under "fun for kids" on sigmaxi's resource list.I believe there are many reasons for the scientific community's apparent dislike for multimedia. Not a smal...
