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Current Cities Volume 07 Number 09
_Current Cites_
Volume 7, no. 9
September 1996
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1996/cc96.7.9.html
Contributors:
Campbell Crabtree, Terry Huwe, John Ober,
Margaret Phillips, David Rez, Richard Rinehart,
Teri Rinne, Roy Tennant
Editor's Note: I am very pleased to announce the availability of a new
service for Current Cites readers, thanks to our web master Roy
Tennant. With just a couple easy steps you can now create your own
"Virtual Issue" of Current Cites based upon your own search words.
Your virtual issue is constructed of all the citations in the
500-entry Current Cites database that match your search and is
displayed to you in one Web document. You may try it at:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/virtualcc
With the creation of this new service, it is also now possible to make
a link that will automatically create a virtual Current Cites issue on
a particular topic. To see how this works, go to
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Copyright/ and click on the "Quick
Bibliography" message. If you wish to do something like this yourself,
go to the Virtual Issue page, enter the title and search that you
wish, view the results and verify that it is what you want, and then
simply copy the link information from your Web browser's "location" or
"go to" box and paste it into a link tag in your Web document. Then,
when someone clicks on that link the search will be done automatically
at that moment for them.
SWISH search software and Perl were used to create this service. If
you wish to see the Perl script that accesses the SWISH database and
that creates the Web pages on the fly, it can be viewed at
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/virtual. Questions about
the service should be directed to Roy Tennant at
rtennant@library.berkeley.edu.
ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
Allen, Mike. "Testing Whether Internet Readers Will Pay" The New York
Times (September 16, 1996): C2. -- Using the experiences of the Wall
Street Journal Interactive Edition (http://www.wsj.com/) as a model,
this article poses the question as to whether Internet users are
willing to pay for access to Web sites and other electronic journals.
Although 650,000 people registered as readers of the Wall Street
Journal Interactive Edition during its trial period, only about 10 to
30 percent stated a willingness to pay for the service. Other online
news sites such as those from CNN (http://www.cnn.com/), USA Today
(http://www.usatoday.com/) and the Los Angeles Times
(http://www.latimes.com/) remain free; charging users for access to
their services seems to be a goal but users' willingness to pay is
still being studied. In an interesting twist, Microsoft
(http://www.microsoft.com/) found one way to finance their electronic
publication Slate (http://www.slate.com/) was by selling paper
versions of it for $29.95 which is $10 more than what the online
version will cost when it starts charging in November. -- MP
Hawkins, Donald T., "Information Metering: Paving the Way for
Pay-Per-View Information" ONLINE 20(4) (July/August 1996): 36-41. --
Information metering will allow publishers and information providers
to increase revenue from their intellectual property in a manner that
is convenient yet affordable for users. Two companies' similar
approaches to implementing an information 'pay-per-view' model are
introduced. Encrypted information is provided at a minimal cost, and
the user pays for selective decryption. Wave Systems, Inc. relies on
an information-metering chip, while CD-MAX, Inc.'s metering capability
comes with the content itself, in the form of software. -- CC
Peek, Robin, editor, "Special Topic Issue: Electronic Publishing"
Journal of the American Society for Information Science 47(9) (1996)
-- This special topic issue of JASIS covers many aspects of electronic
publishing, including the redefinition of the basic concept of
'document' to include multimedia, multi-use collections of information
which is demanding information professionals to become
'cyberliterate.' Other articles include a study of how scholars
determine the value of digital library collections, a report of the
trials and successes of the implementation of an electronic journal,
and articles addressing the special concerns of electronically
surveying the readership of electronic journals, and the
organizational and practical design concerns of creating a guide to
Internet resources. -- CC
Pemberton, Jeff. "An ONLINE Interview with Jeff Crigler at IBM
infoMarket" ONLINE 20(4) (July/August 1996): 28-34. -- An interview
with Jeff Crigler discussing IBM's infoMarket plan for metering the
use of electronic information. The infoMarket scheme creates a
third-party relationship between publisher and user, facilitating (and
billing for) the use of material using a non-proprietary, but
IBM-developed 'cryptolope' technology. A cryptolope is a secure data
container with prices and usage restrictions built in. The user will
have the option to buy a digital unlock key or, for a lower price, a
view-only key. -- CC
Tally, Bill. "History Goes Digital" D-Lib Magazine (September 1996)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september96/09tally.html) -- An interesting
and anecdotal description of how some teachers are using digital
library resources in the classroom. Using a couple of teachers as
examples, Tally describes both the challenges and opportunities that
digital collections provide teachers to bring history alive. Embedded
in the article are some tips for digital library developers on how to
better serve the instructional needs of teachers like those in the
article. -- RT
Willett, Perry. "The Victorian Women Writers Project: The Library as a
Creator and Publisher of Electronic Texts" The Public-Access Computer
Systems Review, 7(6) (1996).
(http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v7/n6/will7n6.html) -- A brief description
of a project to digitize poetry into formats suitable for network
delivery and long-term storage. The issues faced and the decisions
made by the Victorian Women Writers Project may be useful to others
considering similar projects. -- RT
NETWORKS AND NETWORKING
Berton, John Carlo, Charles R. McClure and Douglas L. Zweizig. The
1996 National Survey of Public Libraries and the Internet: Progress
and Issues. Washington, DC: U.S. National Commission on Libraries and
Information Science, July 1996.
(http://istweb.syr.edu/Project/Faculty/McClure-NSPL96/NSPL96_T.html)
-- This report updates the 1994 report on Public Libraries and the
Internet cited in the July 1994 issue of Current Cites. This report
asserts that since that time there has been a 113% increase in public
library Internet connectivity and a 119% increase in public libraries
offering public access to Internet services. On the other hand, nearly
40% of the public libraries without Internet connections have no plans
to connect in the next 12 months. For more statistics as well as
insights into how well or ill public libraries are integrating the
Internet to their services, check out this report in either its online
or print form. -- RT
"Internet Resources for the 1996 Election" College & Research
Libraries News 57(8) (September 1996): 481-486. -- Prepared by the
ACRL Law and Political Science Section Library Instruction Committee,
this month's C&RL News article on Internet sources focuses on the 1996
election. On the national front it appears that only those candidates
with a "realistic chance of winning" will be allowed to participate in
the televised presidential debates; this article, however, takes a
much more inclusive approach and lists Internet sites for many
political parties including the Communist Party USA
(http://www.hartford-hwp.com/cp-usa/), the Green Party
(http://www.greens.org/), the Reform Party
(http://www.reformparty.org/) along with, of course, official web
sites for the Democrats (http://www.democrats.org/) and the
Republicans (http://www.rnc.org/). Already out of date, references
to individual candidates, the primaries and the two big conventions
seem anachronistic but the annotations for everything on the list are
thoughtful and include important information such as the site's
sponsor and a brief summary of content. Particularly useful in this
article are references with detailed annotations to news and
non-partisan voter education sites on the Web such as the Countdown
'96 Home Page (http://www.comeback.com/countdown/), AllPolitics
(http://allpolitics.com/), Vote Smart Web (http://www.vote-smart.org/)
and Voter Information Services (http://world.std.com/~voteinfo/). --
MP
Jerram, Peter. "Forms Follow Function" Byte 21(9) (September 1996) :
153-158. -- The promised "paperless office" remains an unrealized
dream of the information age. However, new software products are
making it much easier to manage electronic forms, both locally and on
the World Wide Web. By coupling a crafty administrator with the right
e-forms software package a company might easily find itself with far
fewer paper forms to deal with. This article explores three of these
software products from Paperless Performance
(http://www.paperless.com/), Symantec's Delrina Group
(http://www.delrina.com/) and JetForm Corp. (http://www.jetform.com/),
and optimistically looks at the future of e-forms and the Web. -- DR
"State of the State Reports: Statewide Library Automation,
Connectivity, and Resource Access Initiatives" Library Hi Tech 14(2-3)
(1996): 1-348 -- This special double issue of Library Hi-Tech contains
reports from representatives of 46 states outlining core library
information technology and electronic library projects developed or
developing in their states. The states not included are Arkansas,
Hawaii, Massachusetts and South Carolina. There are two "Featured
State Examples": "GALILEO: Georgia's Electronic Library"
(http://www.galileo.peachnet.edu/) and "The Electronic Doorway
Library Initiative" in New York. This issue also serves as a
directory, with contact information for each of the contributors. The
sheer size of the issue and the outline format of the reports make
this issue more of a reference work than anything else. Although for
many of us it is interesting to see how other states and institutions
are grappling with the issues facing all of us; but be aware that
these articles contain the quick summaries rather than the detailed
answers. -- DR
"The Total Librarian" Review of Books and Multimedia Supplement, The
Economist 340 (7983) (September 14, 1996): 12. -- The Economist rates
Internet search engines to evaluate whether it is possible to
successfully index the Internet. The authors provide humorous
critiques (on Yahoo!: "...bringing order to all human knowledge is a
long-standing Sysyphean folly, but Yahoo! comes close") and also
evaluate the programming strategies employed by the more successful
search engines. A new strategy in development would utilize PC-based
"softbots" that learn about user interests and perform more complex
textual parsing. What's missing? Any mention whatsoever of the
authority control, structured fields, and other enhancements one
expects to find in the information professions. What's the message?
Lifetime employment for librarians who can sell themselves to Internet
service providers. -- TH
OPTICAL DISC TECHNOLOGY
Halfhill, Tom R. "CDs for the Gigabyte Era" Byte 21(10) (October
1996): 139-144. -- Digital Versatile Disc or Digital VideoDisc (DVD)
has the potential to revolutionize mass storage for small systems.
This new format type would take CD-ROM way beyond 650MB to as much as
17GB per CD-sized disc. This informative article explains the plethora
of physical formats and the problems that such variety can cause
(which has apparently pushed back the likelihood of seeing available
products into 1997), but luckily this variety is limited to how the
data is physically stored on the disc. There is only one logical
format, called the Universal Disk Format (UDF), that all forms of DVD
will support. One possible use of this technology would be to put a
full-length feature movie on a disc along with a computer game or
education software based on it on the same disc. Definitely a
technology to watch, as many in the music and movie industry are
already doing. -- RT
GENERAL
"Focus Interview" The Electronic Library 14(3) (June 1996): 225-229.
-- In this brief but informative interview five librarians
representing Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada and Mexico
answer questions about library automation. The format is a simple
question and answer mostly about topics that involve moving to
automation in a library. For instance, procedures to define specs and
functionality, the overall cost and staff training are all covered
during the course of the interview. For anyone that might be looking
at starting the process toward library automation this interview
furnishes some good systems information that may save a step or two,
at the very least it will provide an idea about what is involved. --
DR
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Current Cites 7(9) (September 1996) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright (C) 1996 by the Library, University of
California, Berkeley. All rights reserved.
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