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Current Cities Volume 11 Number 11
[1]Current Cites (Digital Library SunSITE)
Volume 11, no. 11, November 2000
Edited by [2]Roy Tennant
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.11.html
Contributors: [3]Terry Huwe, [4]Michael Levy, [5]Leslie Myrick , Jim
Ronningen, Lisa Rowlison, [6]Roy Tennant
Cisler, Steve. [7]"Letter from Cambridge: Digital Nations and
eDevelopment Meetings." [8]First Monday 5(11) (November 5, 2000)
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_11/cisler/). - The author
reports on a new initiative known as "Digital Nations", which was
launched by MIT's Media Lab on October 18, 2000. The project seeks to
assess the impact of digital convergence on the traditional concept of
the nation-state, particularly among nations with minimal information
infrastructures. The participants clearly hope to influence the
international dialogue about developing nations as well as
industrialized nations, and they argue that technology planning should
benefit both ends of the spectrum. - [9]TH
Fichter, Darlene and Frank Cervone. "Documents, Data, Information
Retrieval and XML." [10]Online 24(6) (November 2000): 30-36. - For
those to whom XML is still new territory, this article may serve as a
useful introduction. For those who understand the meaning of
"well-formed" this piece will be too basic. After an introduction to
XML and XHTML, Fichter and Cervone highlight a couple of applications
for XML - Rich Site Summary (RSS) for describing the contents of web
sites, and the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) for data codebooks.
Appropriate web site addresses accompany the piece. - [11]RT
Flecker, Dale. [12]"Harvard's Library Digital Initiative" [13]D-Lib
Magazine 6(11) (November 2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november00/flecker/11flecker.html). -
Harvard University granted its library $12 million over five years to
"build a first generation production infrastructure to support digital
library collections." This article is to some degree an update on
their progress, some halfway through the grant. Flecker outlines the
Harvard Library's technical, collections, and access infrastructure
and the common services which they share. He touches on the variety of
projects they have funded to provide digital content, and ends up with
a current assessment and outline of further developments. Anyone
interested in how Harvard is addressing the opportunities and
challenges of digital libraries will find this to be a good overview
of the variety of infrastructure and content development projects in
which they are engaged. - [14]RT
Forbes, Judith L. [15]"Perspectives on Lifelong Learning: The View
from a Distance." [16]First Monday 5(11), November 5, 2000
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_11/forbes/). - Forbes uses
engineering continuing education as an example to explore distance
learning for professionals in knowledge related fields. The format is
brief and to the point, with evaluations of college programs and
accreditation. She also addresses the practical ways in which distance
learning can mesh with the career-spanning necessity for knowledge
workers to receive training and earn credentials that reflect
knowledge gains. - [17]TH
Lipinski, Tomas A. "Legal Issues in Accessing and Managing the
Metadata of Digital Objects." Technicalities 20(3) (May/June 2000) :1.
- In this article Lipinski discusses the implications of providing
links to websites from library catalog records, including the issue of
using frames to accomplish this goal. The author outlines potential
areas of legal concern: trespass, trademarks, copyright, and
defamation. Citing current cases in each of these areas Lipinski
clearly delineates situations in which libraries may encounter
problems. These include linking to a publishers web site but bypassing
introductory material and advertisements; using trademarked symbols in
a library catalog thereby interfering with its distinctiveness;
posting or framing that involves unauthorized reproduction and the
infringing on the exclusive rights of copyright owners to display or
distribute their work; and finally whether a library becomes liable
for any defamatory material as a "publisher" of content. This is an
excellent introduction to these major areas of concern for libraries.
- [18]ML
Marcum, Deanna. "Digital Archiving: Whose Responsibility Is It?"
[19]College & Research Libraries News 61(9) (October 2000):
794-797;807. - Few questions are as perplexing to librarians as how to
preserve digital material, and few among our number are as qualified
to consider this question as the president of the Council on Library
and Information Resources. The bulk of the piece focuses on the the
CLIR/Digital Library Federation-produced document [20]"Minimum
criteria for an archival repository of digital scholarly journals"
(http://www.clir.org/diglib/preserve/criteria.htm), which identifies
seven specific criteria for setting up a trusted digital archive. On
the "who's responsible?" question, Marcum advocates that both
publishers and libraries (which occasionally are the same
organization) both have responsibilities. Publishers must be explicit
about their preservation policies, and librarians must respond
appropriately given the relative strength or weakness of such
policies, or the amount of trust that can be placed in the
organization behind the policy. - [21]RT
O'Leary, Mick. [22]"Grading the Library Portals" [23]Online 24(6)
(November/December 2000):38-44
(http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL2000/oleary11.html). - I spotted
this article just after attending a meeting about improving our campus
library's portal to collections and services. It's not what I'd hoped;
the portals which O'Leary rates are really librarianship portals.
After the initial disappointment wore off, I began to see that the
best among these Web sites for librarians would lead to lots of great
ideas for grappling with my particular problem, as well as issues in
every other aspect of librarianship: administration, collection
development, interlibrary loan, etc. After a brief description of what
he means by a "library portal" (in which he broadly compliments all
visitors to these sites as already being electronic information
experts, thanks very much), O'Leary divides his group of sites into
vendor, commercial and library developed portals. The distinction
between the first two is a little blurred. The grading and comments
are useful in weeding out portals which are incomplete, innacurate,
incomprehensible or oriented toward selling a particular product. In
the interest of complete disclosure, we point out that one of the two
"A" grades was given to our Sunsite-hosted [24]LibraryLand
[http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/LibraryLand]/. - JR
Raitt, David. [25]"Digital Initiatives Across Europe" [26]Computers in
Libraries 20(10) (November/December 2000): 26-34
(http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/nov00/raitt.htm). - This overview of
European digital library projects briefly outlines initiatives in
France, Germany, Russia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Spain, the
Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Given the broad geographic range
of this overview, it is by no means comprehensive, but it can
nonetheless serve as a good introduction to the breadth and depth of
digital library developments in Europe -- any one of which is worthy
of an article on it alone. A sidebar lists all the project URLs in a
handy list that signifies hours of happy browsing by anyone interested
in such projects. - [27]RT
Sherman, Chris. "Napster: Copyright Killer or Distribution Hero?"
[28]Online 24(6) (November 2000): 18-28. - Faithful Current Cites
readers already know that we think peer-to-peer networking is well
worth our attention (see the [29]October 2000 issue if you don't
recall). For those of you who missed that issue, or found yourselves
on another planet for the past year and missed all the press about
Napster, your ignorance will not go unrewarded. Rather than reading a
pile of articles on Napster, Gnutella, and their peer-to-peer cousins
that are cropping up like rabbits, this one article will go a long way
toward bringing you up-to-speed. Sherman craftily introduces the topic
by referring to a music copyright controversy from a century ago that
has chilling parallels (as well as significant differences) to
today's. Explanations of Napster and Gnutella follow, as well as
vignettes on FreeNet, MojoNation, and [30]Dan Chudnov's Docster
concept. Altogether an excellent read about a topic that librarians
(and those in many other professions) can ignore at their peril. -
[31]RT
Varian, Hal R and Lyman, Peter. [32]How Much Information? Berkeley,
CA: University of California, 2000
(http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/). - In this 200 page
report produced by faculty and students at the [33]School of
Information Management and Systems at the University of California at
Berkeley the authors attempt to measure how much information is
produced in the world each year. They look at several media and
estimate yearly production, accumulated stock, rates of growth, and
other variables of interest. Taking advantage of the web environment
the document indicates where they make "questionable" assumptions and
they intend to update the document based on contributions by readers.
The authors identify production of content in four physical media --
paper, film, optical (CDs and DVDs), and magnetic -- then translate
the volume of original content into a common standard (terabytes),
determine how much storage each type takes and calculate total
estimates. They outline 3 major findings: printed material only makes
up .003% of the total storage of information; a vast majority of
information is created and stored by individuals rather than
institutions; and finally digital information is the largest in total
and the fastest growing. The not suprising conclusion is that "we are
all drowning in a sea of information" with information production at
about 250 megabytes for each man, woman, and child in the world. -
[34]ML
Withers, Rob, et. al. [35]"Information Architecture: Tools for
Cutting-Edge Web Developers" [36]College & Research Libraries News
61(9) (October 2000): (http://www.ala.org/acrl/resoct00.html). - For
the budding information architect, or the experienced web manager,
this piece covers some essential web sites, electronic discussions,
and other information resources on IA and methods for creating dynamic
web content. Under the misleading heading "dynamic scripting
languages", they list resources on that topic as well as databases,
web application servers, and an open source integrated library system
project (it appears as if the main criteria for inclusion was that the
project be free, open source, or both, since only one commercial web
application server is mentioned -- Cold Fusion -- when most people are
more likely to have Microsoft's Active Server Pages at their
disposal). Despite the lack of comprehensitivity, the resources cited
here are clearly central to any full-bore web manager or information
architect. Those who aren't quite ready to tackle Perl or PHP can
stick to the first part of the piece, which focuses on resources of
more general interest. - [37]RT
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 11(11 (November 2000) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright © 2000 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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[39]Copyright © 2000 UC Regents. All rights reserved.
Document maintained at
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.11.html by
[40]Roy Tennant.
Last update November 29, 2000. SunSITE Manager:
[41]manager@sunsite.berkeley.edu
References
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22. http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL2000/oleary11.html
23. http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/
24. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/LibraryLand
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38. mailto:listserv@library.berkeley.edu
39. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Admin/copyright.html
40. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/
41. mailto:manager@sunsite.berkeley.edu
