Educational Resources for Particle Technology
an archived electronic journal of reviewed contributions

History of the Project

Latest changes: 03Mar20 - note ability to distribute computer programs and the change from HTML to PDF format / 07Apr20 - add traffic chart /

Jump to: Conception | Management | Scope | Procedures | Startup, Launch, Growth

Return to ERPT Home Page

Conception 

At the August 1997 Conference on Chemical Engineering at Snowbird, Utah, (sponsored by the American Society for Engineering Education), one workshop addressed the problem of delivering training in particle technology to students at colleges that had no courses in this area and / or no staff trained in this area. The group concluded that a Web site could present and link educational resources that would help faculty and students learn more about the art and craft of particle technology. It would also serve as a resource for industrial practitioners who often have little training in particle technology. One person had already built an in-house site with such characteristics and volunteered to develop proposals and work up a public demonstration site.

An immediate concern was whether prospective authors would submit material for presentation on a Web site. At present most educational materials in particle technology are distributed in print, videotape, or CDROM form. The authors are not paid very much for producing them, and the universities that publish them typically charge only enough to pay for the production costs, so there is little financial incentive for producing the materials. People do it to gain recognition from the technical and academic communities -- resulting in a higher salary and a higher probability of having grant proposals funded.

Authors have been been reluctant to place educational papers on the Web because Web pages are regarded as
-- lacking in editorial oversight and the discipline of peer-review
-- too personal in tone
-- too often and too easily changed
-- hard to cite
-- not archived, so they are generally impossible to obtain once the page has been erased from the server.

The original proposal planned to overcome these objections by
-- soliciting contributions in an orderly fashion designed to cover the entire field with materials from active practitioners who have a deserved reputation for teaching the material well
-- putting the contributions through an editorial and peer review process
-- removing the material from the author's control once approved for publication
-- ensuring that the Web pages will be posted for a significant length of time (5 years)
-- publishing a print version of the material, so that it could be cited by journal name, volume, and page number.
-- distributing the print version so that it would be available long into the future. The print version would be given (free of charge) to the authors, the sponsoring institutions and to major centers of particle technology, with the understanding that they would make the printed version available in their libraries for at least ten years.

These attributes would help people recognize that publishing an article in ERPT is as significant as other currently-recognized forms of professional effort and thus help the authors receive full credit for the work from their salary review committees,


Management Structure 

      Sponsorship: In 1998 January the PTF agreed to sponsor this project.

      Management: The chair of the PTF names the Managing Editor, who facilitates the flow of articles to the Web site and coordinates the peer review and editing / formatting to a consistent style.  Officers of the PTF participate in the invitation, review, and editing processes.

      Web Service: For two years after startup in 1999 Jan the Engineering Research Center for Particle Technology at the Univ. of Florida in Gainesville provided Internet service. In 2001 Feb the PTF obtained its own domain name and moved ERPT to a commercial Internet service provider

Stability of Content: We plan to keep ERPT tutorials on-line for at least five years after their initial posting. Tutorials referenced by the ERPT site but posted on other sites are not under ERPT control and may not remain posted as long.


Scope 

An extended listing of the very diverse technical areas involved in particle technology is presented in the subject index for ERPT.

We expect eventually to have about ten tutorials in each of about ten areas of particle technology (about 100 modules). Each tutorial will be equivalent to 2-3 hours of a course. About once every five years each article will be updated. At 18 articles per year, it will take six years to complete our coverage of the field.

We expect eventually to have about 500 annotated links to supplementary Web sites that contain educational material related to particle technology. The links will be particularly helpful in covering areas of particle technology for which no ERPT tutorial has been written.

Server storage space required for tutorials averaging 1 MB in length (including graphics) would total 100 MB.

Audience = an average of ten people each from 200 different locations (100 universities plus 100 companies) requesting

Server Traffic At an average of 2 modules per year the audience requests 4,000 module downloads per year. With a 200-day year daily traffic will be 20 module downloads or 20 MB/day. At 28.8 kbaud (3,600 chars per sec) this can be transmited in 1.5 hours or 6% of available time on the server.


Publication Procedure 

The PTF advertizes for contributions within the scope of the publication. The managing editor has posted a set of guidelines for preparing articles.

A prospective author may submit prospective tutorials to the managing editor via computer file, print copy, or by reference to a posting on the Web.

The managing editor may assign the contribution to a reviewer to evaluate and suggest revisions to the submission.

The author revises the material as needed to satisfy the editorial board, signs an agreement to allow use of the material in ERPT, and delivers the final files to the managing editor.

The article is published by uploading to the ERC Web server.

Users (students, faculty, corporate technologists) are permitted to make a single print copy of the article for personal use.

Revisions: Modules will be considered for revision after five years; revision will be mandatory after ten years. This policy will help assure up-to-date educational resources.


Startup, Launch, and Growth 

A demonstration site was posted for developmental purposes in March 1998. Meanwhile the site will post links and publish articles that satisfy the editorial guidelines.

The intentions of the ASEE workshop group have now been extended, refined, explored, tested, and (for the most part) implemented. The final test of value will be whether people in need of information or help related to particle technology turn to this site repeatedly and whether authors continue to develop material and recommend links for ERPT. As these indicators of growth and value become available, they will be posted here.

HISTORY OF SITE STATISTICS

Item1999 Sep 012000 Nov 082001 Apr 26
# ERPT tutorials235
# non-ERPT tutorials202625
# other educ links06037
# non-Web materials101711

In 2001 February the Particle Technology Forum purchased a domain name and independent server space to allow ERPT more flexibility in maintaining the site and more resources to extend and expand our offerings.

Since the start we linked to several sites hosting video clips and ERPT posted its first video clips in the 2001 April issue. By mid-2000 interactive pages were in use on several pages to which we linked. To date we have not developed interactive capability.

In early 2002 ERPT acquired a computing package in TrueBASIC that allowed preparing and distributing computer programs in a compiled form that could be run on almost any personal computer platform using a free vendor-supplied program (Bronze TrueBASIC). The first program making use of this capability was posted with Vol. 3, No. 1.

In 2003 it was apparent that few authors could prepare material in HTML format but that PDF had become well-established, so the basic format of tutorials was changed from HTML to PDF, starting with Vol. 4, No.1.


Return to the ERPT home page
For information about this site, contact the Managing Editor, at erptmged@aol.com
URL: http://www.erpt.org/history.htm