In the mid-2000s, receiving an author's kit (often labelled "Information for Authors" or "Author Kit") was the moment a researcher knew their paper had crossed the first hurdle. The kit was not a single document but a bundle—a ZIP file, a printed packet, or a set of emailed attachments—that contained everything needed to transform a raw manuscript into a camera-ready publication. For conferences like PRASA (Pattern Recognition Association of South Africa) and the Contacts workshop series, the author's kit was the final gate before the proceedings went to press.
What Was the Author's Kit?
The author's kit served as the official set of instructions and materials for preparing the final version of a conference paper. Unlike today's one-click submission portals, mid-2000s kits were carefully assembled by programme committees and often required manual steps: downloading templates, printing forms, signing copyright agreements, and sometimes mailing a physical copy. The kit ensured consistency across all papers in the proceedings—a critical concern when proceedings were printed in black-and-white offset or compiled as PDFs on CD-ROM.
For researchers working on low-resource languages or speech technology, the author's kit sometimes included special instructions for handling non-Latin scripts or phonetic transcriptions. The Contacts 3 workshop, for example, provided guidelines for embedding IPA characters in LaTeX, a detail that shaped how African language speech data were documented in published papers.
Typical Contents of a Mid-2000s Author's Kit
While every conference had its own flavour, most author's kits shared a common set of components. Below is a typical list, drawn from the archives of PRASA and similar mid-2000s conferences:
- Formatting template — usually a Word .dot file or a LaTeX style file (.sty) that defined page margins, font sizes, heading styles, and the two-column layout common to IEEE and Springer proceedings.
- Sample paper — a completed example showing the expected structure: title, authors, abstract, sections, references, and figure placement.
- Formatting instructions — a PDF or printed guide (often 4–8 pages) detailing font requirements (e.g., Times New Roman 10 pt), figure resolution (300 dpi minimum), and page limits (typically 6–8 pages).
- Copyright transfer form — a legally binding document that assigned rights to the conference publisher. Authors had to print, sign, and scan or mail it back.
- Submission checklist — a list of items to verify before final upload: page count, PDF embedding of fonts, no hyperlinks to external resources, correct author list.
- Electronic submission instructions — details on how to upload the final PDF or Word file to a conference FTP server or email address. Many kits included a deadline reminder and a contact email for technical support.
- Optional extras — a copyright form for the IEEE or Springer LNCS series, a request for author biographies, a LaTeX package for indexing, or a CD-ROM label template.
For conferences that published special issues of journals, the kit might also include a separate set of guidelines for journal submission, often with a longer page limit and different citation style.
From Postal Mail to Digital Download
The evolution of the author's kit mirrors the broader shift in academic publishing. In the early 2000s, many conferences still sent printed kits via postal mail—a folder containing a style guide, a sample paper, and a pre-addressed envelope for the copyright form. By 2005, the majority had moved to email attachments and website downloads. PRASA 2004, for instance, distributed its kit as a single ZIP file hosted on the conference server, with the instruction to "unzip and read README.txt first."
This transition brought new challenges. Email filters sometimes quarantined the ZIP files. Authors on slow dial-up connections struggled with large attachments containing embedded fonts. Programme committees began to provide mirrors on different continents and to recommend file compression tools like WinZip or gzip. The Inside the PRASA 2001 Digital Archive shows an early example of a kit that still included a printed form for postal return—a hybrid approach that persisted for a few more years.
The Role of the Author's Kit in Conference Quality
A well-prepared author's kit directly affected the quality of the published proceedings. Inconsistent formatting—mismatched margins, missing page numbers, corrupted PDFs—could delay printing or cause a paper to be omitted entirely. The kit also enforced ethical standards: the copyright form prevented duplicate publication, and the checklist reminded authors to anonymise their submissions during the review phase.
For conferences focused on applied pattern recognition and speech technology, the kit sometimes included domain-specific guidance. The Contacts workshop on low-resource languages, for example, provided a LaTeX class file that automatically handled hyphenation rules for isiXhosa and Setswana. These small touches made the proceedings more accessible to researchers from the communities the conference aimed to serve.
A Practical Example: PRASA 2005
Let us reconstruct what a typical author's kit looked like for PRASA 2005, a mid-sized pattern recognition symposium in South Africa. The kit was distributed as a 2 MB ZIP file named prasa2005-authorkit.zip. Inside, the folder structure was:
PRASA2005_template.dot— Microsoft Word 97–2003 template with two-column layout and predefined heading styles.PRASA2005_sample.pdf— a four-page sample paper with dummy text, demonstrating figure placement and reference format.PRASA2005_instructions.pdf— a six-page guide covering page limits (6 pages maximum), figure resolution (300 dpi, grayscale), font embedding, and the requirement to use the IEEE citation style.copyright_form.pdf— a fillable PDF form (or a separate Word document) with fields for author names, paper title, and signature.submission_ftp.txt— a plain-text file with the FTP server address, username, password, and the naming convention for the final PDF (e.g.,PRASA2005_123.pdfwhere 123 was the paper ID).readme.txt— a short note welcoming authors and listing the deadline as 15 March 2005.
Authors who followed the kit exactly produced papers that could be compiled into a uniform proceedings volume. Those who deviated—using a different template, ignoring the page limit—were asked to resubmit. In extreme cases, papers that did not conform were excluded from the final proceedings, a fate that the kit was designed to prevent.
Legacy and Lessons
The author's kit of the mid-2000s is a historical artefact that reveals much about the state of academic publishing before centralised platforms like EasyChair or Microsoft CMT took over. It was a manual, labour-intensive process that relied on trust, careful reading, and sometimes a bit of luck with file formats. Today's researchers might find it quaint, but the kit's core purpose—ensuring that every paper meets a consistent standard—remains as relevant as ever.
For anyone studying the history of pattern recognition conferences, the author's kit is a primary source. It documents not only formatting rules but also the expectations of the community: what was considered a complete submission, how copyright was handled, and how technical constraints (file size, font embedding, CD-ROM capacity) shaped the final product. A detailed look at the camera-ready submission guidelines from that era shows how these kits evolved from printed packets to digital downloads, and how they paved the way for the seamless online submission systems we use today.
If you ever need to reconstruct a mid-2000s submission—whether for a historical study, a retro-computing project, or simply to understand what your advisor went through—the author's kit is the Rosetta Stone. Unzip it, read the readme, and follow the instructions exactly. The proceedings will thank you.