Review Office automation and associated hardware and software technologies are producing significant changes in traditional typing, printing, and publishing techniques and strategies. The long term impact of current developments is likely to be even more far reaching as reducing hardware costs, improved human-computer interfacing, uniformity through standardization, and sophisticated software facilities will all combine together to provide systems of power, capability and flexibility. The configuration of the system can be matched to the requirements of the user, whether typist, clerk, secretary, scientist, manager, director, or publisher. Enormous advances are currently being made in the areas of publication systems in the bringing together of text and pictures, and the aggregation of a greater variety of multi-media documents. Advances in technology and reductions in cost and size have produced many 'desk-top' publishing systems in the market place. More sophisticated systems are targeted at the high end of the market for newspaper production and quality color output. Outstanding issues in desk-top publishing systems include interactive editing of structured documents, integration of text and graphics, page description languages, standards, and the human-computer interface to documentation systems. The latter area is becoming increasingly important: usability by non-specialists and flexibility across application areas are two current concerns. One of the objectives of current work is to bring the production of high quality documents within the capability of naive users as well as experts.

"Best Collection of Essays", NCTE Awards for Excellence in Technical and Scientific Communication. Effective Documentation is a major sourcebook that offers technical writers, editors, teachers, and students of technical communication a wide variety of practical guidelines based on often hard to find research in the usability of printed and electronic media. The book's eighteen chapters provide a wealth of material on such topics of current interest as the writing of design manuals, research in cognitive psychology as applied to the design of user manuals, and the organizing of manuals for hierarchical software systems. Included are chapters by such well known scholars in the field as Philip Rubens, Robert Krull, Judith Ramey, and John Carroll. Effective Documentation reviews the advice offered by other "how to produce usable documentation" books, describing the different types of usability research and explaining the inherent biases of each type. It goes beyond the actual design of textual and/or electronic media to look at these designs in context, giving advice on effective management ("good management is a requisite of good writing"), on the relationship between document design and product design, and on how to find out who one's readers really are. Advances in the presentation of textual information are explained, with suggestions on how to improve the usability of individual sentences and the design of entire books. The concluding chapters discuss advances in the design and use of online information and offer valuable insights into the use of graphic information and the development and design of information communicated via electronic media. Stephen Doheny Farina is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Clarkson University. Effective Documentationis included in the Information Systems series, edited by Michael Lesk.