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Current Cities Volume 11 Number 03
_Current Cites_
Volume 11, no. 3, March 2000
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.3.html
Contributors: Terry Huwe, Michael Levy, Leslie Myrick,
Margaret Phillips, Jim Ronningen, Lisa Rowlison, Roy Tennant
Arms, William Y. Digital Libraries MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 2000. -
As the founder of D-Lib Magazine, Arms certainly has enough
credentials to attempt this book. The problem is that it's clear that
he hasn't ever had to keep the doors of a real library open. The book
is a hodge-podge of history, technologies, and research projects, but
by the end you may not be any clearer about how to build functional
digital library collections and services, and you certainly won't have
any idea about how to integrate digital library collections with
existing print ones, or virtual services with actual ones. As an
overview, it may be useful to have a brief explanation of a particular
technology, but it would help if some criteria for decisionmaking were
included. The index is overly selective. - RT
Cliff, Peter. "The Oxford English Dictionary Online"
(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/oed-review/) and New, Juliet.
"'The World's Greatest Dictionary' Goes Online,"
(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/oed-online/) Ariadne Issue 23
(March 23, 2000). See also free tour of the online OED at
http://oed.com/tour/. - The UKOLN-based journal Ariadne features two
informative articles covering the March 14th release of the OED Online
Edition, one an announcement from a member of the OED team, and the
other a user survey by a member of UKOLN staff. The venerable Oxford
English Dictionary now exists in three recensions: the original
fascicles spanning the period from 1884 to 1928; a 1989 second
edition, which consolidated further supplemental entries, but without
revising extant materials; and now an online version, the fruit of a
core group of about 300 OED staff, with technical support from
Stanford-based High Wire Press. The OED Online will benefit from a
20-year, 55-million-dollar program of revision, which will take into
account recent advances in research, for instance, in the field of
etymology. It will also encompass the addition of some 9000 words
researched over the last decade, an ambitious 3000 new words per
quarter during the year 2000, and untold thousands more through to the
end of the revision period, in 2010. Planned additions could actually
double the dictionary's present length. Whereas dictionary thumbers
might well bewail the curtailment of browsability and of the joys of
serendipitous discovery (only one word can be accessed on screen at a
time), the online OED promises to compensate with wildly increased
accessibility and searching through hyperlinks, full-text search with
wildcard features, and synonym finders. Some solace to dictionary
browsers may be found in the 25 side-barred links provided to entries
in direct proximity to the queried word, according to how they were
sorted: alphabetically, chronologically, and so on. Another nice
feature, of interest to historical lexicographers and others, is the
ability to compare the treatment of any given lexeme amongst the three
different editions. The major downside seems to be that the licensing
costs for such a gargantuan undertaking are bound to be, in a word,
prohibitive, starting at $550/individual, $795/institutional. - LM
Coyle, Karen. "The Virtual Union Catalog: A Comparative Study"
D-Lib Magazine 6(3) (March 2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march00/coyle/03coyle.html) and Dovey, Matthew
J. "So You Want to Build a Union Catalogue?" Ariadne 23 (March 2000)
(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/dovey/). - These two articles both
look at how libraries can create union catalogs -- either virtually
(simultaneous searching of multiple catalog systems) or physically.
Dovey covers differences between the two models, and identifies where
each is relatively good or bad. Coyle's piece is the outcome of a
recent effort to decide how best to replace the aging MELVYL
catalog, the crowning achievement of the University of California
libraries. In testing a possible virtual union catalog replacement for
MELVYL, Coyle identified four areas that would require more testing
and analysis before determining if a virtual union catalog could
replace MELVYL: 1) database consistency and search accuracy (searches
of different catalog systems must retrieve comparable items), 2)
system availability (individual systems must be available 24x7), 3)
capacity planning for campus OPACs and the network (a virtual union
catalog would place a heavier load on campus network infrastructure),
and 4) sorting, merging, and duplicate removal. - RT
Gladney, Henry M. "Are Intellectual Property Rights a Digital
Dilemma? Controversial Topics and International Aspects" iMP:
Information Impacts Magazine (February 2000)
(http://www.cisp.org/imp/february_2000/02_00gladney.htm) - As one of
the Committee members who authored the report "The Digital
Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age" (see:
http://books.nap.edu/html/digital_dilemma/) published by the Computer
Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Gladney's article touches
on topical aspects of the Report which did not reach Committee
consensus. In an intellectually biting tone Gladney brings to light
some of the controversial issues surrounding intellectual property
rights, and takes a non-partisan role in exposing some of the rhetoric
of both copyright maximalists as well as copyright minimalists.
Sections on the ideological meanings of copyright, the limits of fair
use, distinctions between private use and piracy, and viewing
copyrighted materials in light of the 1997 No Electronic Theft (NET)
Act make for engaging reading. For example, as Gladney points out,
loading a copyrighted work into RAM for viewing via the web
constitutes a "copy" of copyrighted material and as such, users may
unwittingly be in violation of section 506(a)(2) of the Act -- which
calls for fines and imprisonment. However, examples such as this
explify the reasoning behind the Committee's conclusion that
legislative remedies ought to hold off in favor of accumulating
further experience with both digital IP issues and technological
solutions/developments. Gladney's examples of copyright conundrums and
his articulate explication of their surrounding legal environment
makes this a valuable and easy to read article. Additionally, the
international treatment of the subject creates a broader context in
which to view the U.S. stance. A significant bibliography points users
to most of the key articles, papers, and reports on the subject. - LR
Morrison, Alan, Michael Popham, and Karen Wikander. "Creating and
Documenting Electronic Texts: A Guide to Good Practice" AHDS Guides to
Good Practice. London: Arts and Humanities Data Service, 2000
(http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/documents/creating/). - Every publication I've
seen to come out of the Arts and Humanities Data Service has been
top-notch. This one is no different, and in fact should stand as one
of the best explications of digitizing textual material for some time
to come. The completely online publication takes you from initial
considerations (analysing the text) through digitization and markup to
documentation and metadata. The staff of the Oxford Text Archive
have been doing this since well before the web, and their experience
shows. If you're digitizing textual material, run, don't walk to the
one resource that will help you more than any other. - RT
Museums and the Web 2000. International Conference by Archives and
Museum Informatics, Pittsburgh, PA.
(http://www.archimuse.com/mw2000/). - This web site epitomizes one of
the great things about the web. Here is a conference, which at the
time of this writing hasn't happened yet, and meanwhile most of the
papers of the presenters (over 45 of them) are available online. Those
of us who can't make it to the conference can nonetheless attend
"virtually," albeit without the hallway chats and in-person networking
over drinks. If you have anything to do with a Museum web site, the
papers here will be interesting and informative. If you have anything
to do with a web site at all, there may still be something of use here
as well. If you are interested in past papers presented at this
conference, see http://www.archimuse.com/mw.html. - RT
Peterson, Ivars. "Beyond Hits and Page Views" JEP: THe Journal
of Electronic Publishing 5 (3) (March 2000)
(http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-03/peterson.html) - Most articles
about web log analysis portray it as a powerful tool in the hands of
e-commerce marketers, but Peterson has shown how it can also be
fruitfully wielded in the hands of scholarly journal editors. This
article is a particularly good read for any scholarly publisher whose
interest in log analysis might stop short at a tally of hits and page
views to add pleasing statistics to a grant report. Peterson, the
online editor of Science News Online
(http://www.sciencenews.org/), has demonstrated here how careful
analysis of daily traffic logs has helped him to tailor the content of
his site to provide timely delivery of relevant information to his
audience and thereby ensure repeat visitors. For instance, the perusal
of log analysis reports can give a picture of the amount of time spent
during a visit, in order to ascertain which articles are being most
carefully read, or perhaps whether users are reading onscreen or
printing pages to read later. On a different level, they can also be
used to track a visitor's trails through a site, or from a referring
site to one's own. In the former case, analyses can be made of site
architecture; in the latter, one can get a sense of who is linking to
one's site. This sort of exercise can produce amusing results, e.g.
the discovery that a perfume company was providing a busy link to a
Science News article on pheromones. - LM
Rosenzweig, Roy. "The Riches of Hypertext for Scholarly Journals"
The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 17, 2000
(http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i28/28b00401.htm) - Rosenzweig,
Director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George
Mason University (http://chnm.gmu.edu/), a collaboration between GMU
and the American Social History Project at the CUNY Center for Media
and Learning, uses experiences gained from various CHNM projects to
map the face and the direction of the new digital media. Because of
the extended and comfy-chair-seeking readerly shelf-life of humanities
scholarship (over against, say, physics or medicine), coupled with the
uncomfortable experience of onscreen reading, Rosenzweig does not
foresee cyberjournals replacing their print analogues anytime soon,
but rather, standing as a "digital supplement." With reference to
Janet H. Murray's formulation, in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future
of Narrative in Cyberspace, of hypertext's potential for additive and
expressive form, Rosenzweig explores what, exactly, cyberjournals
allow us to do differently from print journals, culling examples from
CHNM-sponsored projects. It has been clear from the beginning that
online scholarship can offer more -- more material behind every
hyperlink, and a far wider field of dissemination. This primarily
additive aspect is well demonstrated by the Interpretation of the
Declaration of Independence Through Translation project
(http://chnm.gmu.edu/declaration/), which serves as a prime model of
Rosenzweig's conception of hypermedia as archival "digital
supplement." Whether online journals can achieve something radically
different has been explored in an American Quarterly project
(http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/) featuring four experimental hyper-essays
("Dreaming Arnold Schwarzeneggar" especially stands out) which all, in
their own way, press the envelope of scholarly form. In the end, as
Rosenzweig suggests, it would seem that at some level, more =
different. The images he conjures to describe how cyberjournals will
look and function -- clone, hybrid, digital supplement -- foreground
the potent marginality of media which promise, as he claims, to
rewrite the scholarly social contract between readers and writers. -
LM
Wurman, Richard Saul. Understanding USA
(http://www.understandingusa.com/) Newport, RI: TED Conferences, 1999.
- This work, as complete on the web as it is in print, manages to
embody some of what's best and worst about the latest uses of
information technology. Wurman, who refers to himself as an
information architect, envisioned a project which would address a
perceived overabundance of data about the United States and come up
with graphical ways to clarify the information, leading to a greater
understanding. Picture a standard reference title such as The
Statistical Abstract of the United States
(http://www.census.gov/statab/www/) worked over by a group of
creative, cutting-edge designers, skilled in information display
through computer graphics and typography. Visually stimulating it is,
with a wide variety of pictorial representations for statistics in
demographics, government spending, crime, etc. Desktop computing power
has vastly increased the realm of possibilities for designers, and
here that's clearly a double-edged sword: it's become very easy to use
this wide array of tools to promote subjective interpretation and
selective emphasis, which are common in this work and take away from
its credibility. Statistics taken out of their original context and
given visual prominence take on an aura of being 'more true.' For
example, on a page about information anxiety, close to a picture of a
woman holding her head, is the debatable assertion that "75% to 90% of
all visits to physicians are stress-related," accompanied by the
skimpy citation "National Mental Health Association, 1997." It's there
in boldface, in something which claims to be a reference work,
encouraging the reader to take it at face value. But if you have some
doubts (like maybe this notion is predicated upon some hypothetical,
impossibly stress-free world of no hunger, war, debt, divorce or
traffic jams) there's no context here to help you -- you'll have to
dig elsewhere. In a brief, laudatory article titled "Information
as if Understanding Mattered"
(http://www.fastcompany.com/online/32/benchmark.html) in the March
2000 issue of Fast Company (http://www.fastcompany.com/homepage/)
magazine, one of the designers, Nancye Green, is quoted thus: "People
don't care about cold facts. They care about pictures or stories that
are connected to themselves in some way. That's what learning is all
about. That's what leads to understanding." The phrase 'dumbing down'
comes to mind here, but maybe that's a little harsh. Those of us who
help people find information know that they do indeed want cold facts,
including numbers, and they want them complete, accurate and
verifiable. For people doing such research, the fact that a dataset
can be rendered now as a graphic resembling some multicolored mutant
eggplant may be amusing, but not highly useful. So take a look at this
collision of information technology, statistics and graphics, but
don't expect a reputable scholarly resource. Treat it as
great-looking, browsable infotainment. - JR
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 11(2) (February 2000) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright © 2000 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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