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Report
Current Cities Volume 08 Number 05
_Current Cites_
Volume 8, no. 5
May 1997
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
Acting Editor: Roy Tennant
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1997/cc97.8.5.html
Contributors:
Campbell Crabtree, Christof Galli, Kirk Hastings, Terry Huwe,
Margaret Phillips, David Rez, Richard Rinehart,
Teri Rinne, Roy Tennant
DIGITAL LIBRARIES
Cameron, Robert D. "A Universal Citation Database As a Catalyst For
Reform in Scholarly Communication" First Monday 2 (4) (April 7, 1997)
[http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/cameron/]. Cameron lays out
a proposal for a universal, Internet-based, bibliographic and citation
database. It would link all scholarly work ever written, no matter
what the format. This seems a little ambitious, but it's an
interesting solution to information retrieval over networks, and very
much in line with digital library strategies that would blend together
primary materials and search protocols. Stepping back from the abyss
of the "big idea", the author names a more feasible initial goal: a
"semi-universal citation database. - TH
Dempsey, Lorcan and Rachel Heery. A Review of Metadata: A Survey of
Current Resource Description Formats Work Package 3 of Telematics for
Research project DESIRE (RE 1004) (19 March 1997)
[http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/DESIRE/overview/]. Stu Weibel of
OCLC, who has been laboring in the metadata orchard for years, calls
this report "the single most comprehensive survey of metadata
standards and issues that I am aware of." Such strong endorsement
should make all those interested in metadata issues on the Internet
run, not walk to the site where this report can be found (the
excellent site maintained by the UKOLN Metadata Group at
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/). - RT
McNab, Rodger J., Lloyd A. Smith, David Bainbridge and Ian H. Witten.
"The New Zealand Digital Library MELody inDEX" D-Lib Magazine (May
1997) [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may97/meldex/05witten.html]. - It is
every librarian's dream of a music retrieval system -- hum a few bars
of faintly remembered melody and up pops a list of tunes that match or
nearly match your imperfect performance. Unrealistic? Impossible? Not
really, says the New Zealand Digital Library
(http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~nzdl/). A group of researchers there
have a prototype music retrieval system called MELDEX
(http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~nzdl/meldex) that promises to do just
that. How they are doing it, the problems they face, and how they
(mostly) are overcoming them is what this article is about. The
technical details are for the most part understandable to someone new
to music retrieval, and some of the problems they face will sound
familiar to anyone with retrieval experience of any kind (does it come
as any surprise that users are often found to be inaccurate when
singing a few bars of their favorite tune?). By some stroke of luck,
it turns out that melodies are recognizable regardless of the key in
which they are sung. I guess there's hope for those of us who are
musically challenged after all. - RT
Peters, Carol and Picchi, Eugenio. "Across Languages, Across Cultures:
Issues in Multilinguality and Digital Libraries" D-Lib Magazine (May
1997) [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may97/peters/05peters.html]. Digital
Library research and development has, until recently, tended to avoid
the issues of multilingual presentation and access. However, we can no
longer assume that our audience is for the most part English speaking.
In this unusually clear article, Carol Peters and Eugenio Picchi
present the major issues involved in creating a multilingual interface
for your digital library environment and some of the approaches
presently under development. Having had, recently, to deal with a
number of non-English character sets for a large project, I especially
appreciated the authors coverage of multiple language recognition and
representation in HTTP and HTML. It is, by far, the best summary of
the direction standards are taking that I have read. Also covered here
are the approaches to multilingual retrieval now being experimented
with, including machine translation, knowledge-based techniques
(dictionaries and thesauri), and corpus-based techniques. Finally
Peters and Picchi present a practical example incorporating thesauri
and digital corpora which seems to have promise for large collections.
- KH
Price-Wilkin, John. "Just-in-Time Conversion, Just-in-Case
Collections" D-Lib Magazine (May 1997)
[http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may97/michigan/05pricewilkin.html]. - In
this article, Price-Wilkin builds a compelling case for storing
digital library resources (whether pages of text or images) in the
richest possible format (for example, SGML-encoded text or
high-resolution TIFF images) and converting them on-the-fly for
display. This enables the University of Michigan' Digital Library
Production Service (DLPS) to easily deliver the best possible format
given the user's capabilities. As the Web evolves, simple changes to
the conversion programs enables the delivery of a format that can take
advantage of new capabilities. The DLPS reports that conversion
happens fast enough to be undetected by the user -- an essential
characteristic of any just-in-time conversion scheme. Another benefit
of storing highly-structured versions of digital documents is the
ability to repurpose documents in various ways. Examples offered
include the ability to recombine portions of different documents into
new ones or to display only the hierarchical view desired (for
example, section headings). All digital library developers would do
well to consider the techniques Price-Wilkin and others have
pioneered. - RT
ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
Dougherty, Dale. "The XML Files: Multidimensional Files That Go Beyond
HTML" Web Review (May 16, 1997)
[http://webreview.com/97/05/16/feature/]. Murray Maloney, co-author of
"SGML and The Web," is quoted here as saying "HTML is the low-end
Volkswagen of markup languages and SGML is the high-end Rolls Royce."
The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is an attempt to create a
mid-range vehicle that does more than HTML but at less of an overhead
cost than SGML. This Web Review cover story is actually four pieces,
including a Real Audio interview with Steve Bray, who has been
instrumental in the development of the XML specification, a
transcribed interview with Murray Maloney (a member of the XML Working
Group), and a guide to XML resources. Take my word for it, XML has the
potential to be big. Real big. If you publish information on the
Internet you cannot afford to be ignorant of XML. - RT
Giussani , Bruno. "A New Media Tells Different Stories" First Monday
2(4) (April 7, 1997)
[http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/giussani/]. Giussani is a
Swiss writer who frequently contributes to the New York Times. In this
article, he tackles a subject that is very much on the minds of
newspaper publishers, namely, what papers will be like in five years?
He explores the many angles of this white-knuckle question with
considerable flair. Even when he declares the obvious ("The newspaper
is no longer a product. It becomes a place"), the surrounding
discourse is original and thought-provoking. He recognizes that online
readers behave differently from newspaper readers (some surf, some
search, some cherry-pick), and one hopes that his publishers are
listening to him in this regard. It's nice to see a journalist
assessing how to adapt the time-honored newsrag with the radically
different world of the Net. - TH
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY
Goldhaber, Michael. "The Attention Economy of the Net" First Monday
2(4) (April 7, 1997)
[http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_4/goldhaber/]. Goldhaber
writes in his abstract that "if the Web and the Net can be viewed as
spaces in which we will increasingly live our lives, the economic laws
we will live under have to be natural to this new space. These laws
turn out to be quite different from what the old economics teaches, or
what rubrics such as 'the information age' suggest." He goes on to
argue that value on the Net is defined by the attention span of
viewers, and this is quite different -- perhaps even incompatible --
with an industrial-money-market. Commercial success will come first to
those who understand how to measure attention spans, and to tailor
products and services to the varying styles of attention that internet
users possess. - TH
MULTIMEDIA & HYPERMEDIA
Bruce, Roger. "Digital Photography - Liquifier of Museums?" Image
39(3-4):10-17. This is an exploration of the relation between the
utility of an image of a thing and the thing itself; especially in the
case when the thing itself is not a utilitarian object (i.e. art).
Rather than purely theoretical however, the article also considers the
practical, political and economic aspects of marketing and educating
in the new networked environment (especially when one will be able to
search vast databases of images, rather than the images of just one
institution as is often now the case). Will the role (and thus need)
for the singular institution be diminished? Many museums (and other
repositories of visual material) approach the Internet cautiously;
unsure whether the proliferation and dissemination of images of
objects in their care will in effect replace all need to experience
the original in an era that seems perfectly satisfied with simulacra,
or whether they will take the significance of the original outside the
constraining walls of the museum and ignite curiosity on a broader
scale. The author is optimistic for museums and archives using the
Internet but considers the issues broadly. - RR
Tufte, Edward R. Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence
and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997, 151p. Tufte
describes his last book, Envisioning Information, as a book about the
visual depiction of nouns or static information, and this book is
about the visual depiction of verbs or dynamic information. The timing
couldn't better coincide with the evolution of the web toward more
multimedia/dynamic information, and Tufte's books provide a
non-technical guide to the intelligent and efficient display of all
types of information, from scientific and business statistics to
museum kiosks to weather analyzing videos, useful for print or
multimedia and online publishing. - RR
NETWORKS & NETWORKING
Hermans, Bjorn. "Intelligent Software Agents on the Internet" First
Monday 2(3) (March 3, 1997)
[http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue2_3/ch_123/]. This title is
actually comprised of seven chapters, which together make up almost
the entire March issue of First Monday. It will tell you all you will
ever want to know about the current state of intelligent agents
development, including the pros and cons. He covers both the
theoretical underpinnings of agents, and their practical use. To make
further research on this topic easier, he also includes a bibliography
-- posing for a moment as an intelligent agent of a more organic
nature. - TH
Hof, Robert D. "Internet Communities" Businessweek no. 3535 (May 5,
1997): 64-80. Special Report
[http://www.businessweek.com/1997/18/b35251.htm]. The author revisits
the world of Internet chat rooms and spins an interesting overview of
the changes underway in Net culture. He also provides a few good
reviews of communities (how about "Parent Soup", or "Agriculture
Online") that you might otherwise miss. The news: close to fifty
percent of Internet users are now women, and it's having an influence
on etiquette and style; and what's more, it looks like people actually
enjoy communing in chat rooms more than they like random surfing
around the Web. - TH
Lavagnino, Merri Beth. "Networking and the Role of the Academic
Systems Librarian: an Evolutionary Perspective." College & Research
Libraries 58(3) (May 1997): 217-231. The present article traces the
evolution of the academic systems librarian's role from manager of
function-specific automated library systems to coordinator of
integrated online library systems and collaborator in campus-wide
information infrastructure developments. Focusing on the dramatic
increase in both technological and administrative requirements of
these positions, the piece also provides an overview of the
development of local automated library systems on mainframe or
minicomputers with dumb terminal access methods into complex,
networked, distributed client-server environments serving the campus,
state or region. - CG Leiner, Barry M., Vinton G. Cerf, David D.
Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel,
Lawrence G. Roberts, and Stephen Wolff. "A Brief History of the
Internet: Part I" OnTheInternet (May/June 1997): 16-25. A group of
Internet architects has come together to pen as close to an official
history of the Internet as we are likely to see. It can be fascinating
to discover "what a long, strange trip it's been" and to find out how
TCP/IP took the world by storm (is there anyone out there who
remembers OSI?). This article is based on one that appeared in the
March 1997 issue of the Communications of the ACM, and is part one of
a two-part series. Unfortunately the references are in part two, so
you may need to wait until next month (or refer to the CACMversion) to
know who they're citing. - RT
McCollum, Kelly. "Magazine Ranks Colleges on How "Wired" They Are; MIT
Comes Out on Top." Chronicle of Higher Education 63 (no. 33), April
25, 1997, p. A24. The Ivy League is poorly represented in the top
twenty "most wired" campuses, according to a recent survey conducted
by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. The surveyors looked for examples of
online homework assignments, required coursework in Internet
resources, as well as non-academic characteristics, such as chat rooms
and usenet groups. Liberal arts colleges and land grant universities
are very well represented, along with Dartmouth and Princeton. - TH
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 8(5) (May 1997) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright (C) 1997 by
the Library, University of California, Berkeley. All rights reserved.
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