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Current Cities Volume 11 Number 06
_Current Cites_
Volume 11, no. 6, June 2000
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.6.html
Contributors: Terry Huwe, Michael Levy, Leslie Myrick , Jim
Ronningen, Lisa Rowlison, Roy Tennant
Adam, Nabil R., Vijayalakshmi Atluri, Igg Adiwijaya. "SI in Digital
Libraries" Communications of the ACM 43(6) (June 2000): 64-72
(http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/journals/cacm/2000-43-6/p64-adam/p64
-adam.pdf) . - Digital libraries today can be characterized as bundles
of multiple, heterogeneous information sources, with differing schema
for storage, organization and access. This article provides
conceptualizing strategies for planners who must achieve system
integration (SI) at the user interface. Specific issues addressed
include the nature of data structure and quantity of data, frequent
modification of data sources, multimedia and the variety of user
patterns and capabilities. Three popular integration methods are
described: Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA),
mediators and agents, with the caveat given that "these three
approaches are not orthogonal in the sense that a mediator may employ
CORBA and an agent may use mediators." The application of solution
schemes in the digital libraries of Stanford, University of Illinois
and University of Michigan is described, and the authors also detail
their own work on DigiTerra, an environmental digital library at
Rutgers. - JR
Arms, Caroline R. "Keeping Memory Alive: Practices for Preserving
Digital Content at the National Digital Library Program of the Library
of Congress" RLG DigiNews 4(3) (June 15, 2000)
(http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-3.html). - It is likely
that the Library of Congress is overseeing the single largest library
digitization effort on the planet (producing over 14GB of new digital
files per workday). And what luck for the rest of us -- they
frequently share what they learn, the processes they create, the best
practices they set, and even their Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to
digitization vendors (see http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftp
files.html). In this article Caroline Arms continues her tradition of
promulgating information vital to those attempting similar projects
(for example, see other articles of hers cited in Current Cites).
In this case she describes LC efforts at preserving the digital
material that LC is creating while building a National Digital
Library. Of particular use is a chart that briefly describes all the
current accepted digital preservation methods, all of which may be
logically employed in the course of preserving any particular item or
to recover an item that hasn't been properly preserved by using these
methods. - RT
Baker, Angee. "The Impact of Consortia on Database Licensing"
Computers in Libraries 20(6) (June 2000): 47-50. - The author is
the director of electronic information services at the Southeastern
Library Network (SOLINET), and as such has negotiated deals for
consortia and individual libraries in a ten-state region. Confronted
with the thicket of problems arising from difficult pricing models,
the growing need for cost-recovery by libraries, cost-allocation
between members and overlapping consortial interests, she still
(amazingly enough) has faith that coordination is always possible and
that consortia, libraries, publishers and aggregators can cooperate
and make progress with interests in common. Her observations and
strategies make worthwhile reading for anyone who is trying to keep up
with the collection development of electronic sources. That's the
theme of the June issue, so look for many valuable related articles as
well. - JR
Beebe, Linda and Barbara Myers. "Digital Workflow: Managing the
Process Electronically" JEP: The Journal of Electronic Publishing
5(4) (June 2000) (http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-05/sheridan.html).
- The digital revolution is altering publishing no less than it is
altering libraries. What publishers do every day to add value to
submitted content, package it, distribute it, market it, and archive
it, is undergoing massive change. This article, which was originally
written as a "white paper" for Sheridan Press, does an excellent job
of describing the new digital workflow. The narrative is interspersed
with boxes that define and describe each step in the digital
publication process. A glossary is included. - RT
Bolt, Nate. "The Binary Proletariat" First Monday 5(5) (May
2000) (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_5/bolt/). - Bolt
deconstructs the glittering promise of a "dot.com" lifestyle and finds
some familiar problems for the working class: longer hours, more
stress, and other dirty little secrets. Taking familiar paths to
analyze capitalism in the digital era, he has provided an interesting
perspective on the essentially unreformed capitalism of the "new
economy." Some of this material will be familiar to readers because of
the great deal of attention that the "new economy" is receiving, but
it's presented in readable and entertaining style. - TH
Burnard, Lou. "Text Encoding for Interchange: A New Consortium"
Ariadne 24 (June 2000) (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/tei/) -
In this article, Burnard gives a brief history of the TEI
Initiative and how it grew, specifically, how it has evolved into a
full-fledged consortium under the collective aegis of Oxford, UVA,
Brown University and the University of Bergen in Norway. To quote a
bit of the mission statement: "The goal of the new TEI Consortium is
to establish a permanent home for the TEI as a democratically
constituted, academically and economically independent,
self-sustaining, non-profit organization." The TEI standard has been
adopted by a host of American, British and EU institutions such as the
NEH, the MLA and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board, and has
established itself as the standard of choice for the production of
online scholarly texts, reference works, and editions in the
humanities. The materials and tools (e.g. the handy Pizza Chef DTD
generator), which have been served off the UIC website, will soon be
moved to a new location (http://www.tei-c.org). At the time of
writing he offered a preview at http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/ , but
the tei-c.org site is already well under way. - LM
"Content and Publishing" Webtechniques (July 2000)
(http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/07/). The feature topic of
the July 2000 issue of Webtechniques is Content and Publishing, from
which I am singling out two related articles on using XML to
facilitate content creation, management and delivery. In
"Separating Body from Soul: XML Makes Changing Easy"
(http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/07/floyd/), Michael Floyd
offers an excellent primer on how to set up an XML document delivery
system on an existing infrastructure that uses a web server as the
delivery system, a database for storing some information, XML
documents for storing other information, and seeks to serve up output
to any sort of browser. He gives an ingredient list of the basic
components: XML parser, XSL processor, document repository, a
collection of document schema, and a collection of XSL stylesheets. He
then launches into some detail in presenting three different gateways
for serving up dynamic XML pages, whether through CGI, Java Servlets
or ASP. As the title hints, by using ASP and the Rocket XML framework,
Floyd claims to do the Cartesian split one better, with the separation
of data from processing logic and HTML presentation. The article
concludes with a discussion of some packaged solutions, including
DataChannel, Vignette, StoryServer, and Poet's CMS (Content Management
Suite). Once you've transformed your infrastructure, Peter Fischer
explains how to convert all those HTML files into something that can
be served up in an XML environment in "Migrating from HTML to XML"
(http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/07/fischer/). Whether you
decide to take the intermediary step of cleaning up your HTML to
conform to the XHTML standard, or decide to take the leap right into
XML, tools are becoming more readily available to help in the
endeavor, from the freeware tools such as HTML Tidy or (the more
user-friendly) HTML-Kit for XHTML conversion, to XSpLit from
Percussion Software for XML. - LM
Elliott, Laura, "How the Oxford English Dictionary Went Online"
Ariadne 24 (June 2000)
(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/oed-tech/) - It seems I can't forego
citing yet another interesting article in Ariadne on the online
OED, this time: a technical look under the hood. Elliott shares a
few more details about the markup history of the dictionary in its
various avatars, and the java-enabled, Sybase-powered machinations of
their partner Highwire Press. This article appears to be in some
sense an apologia for the simplicity or economy of the final
interface: there are no plugins, special fonts, or browser-tweaking,
etc. required to render special characters; and behind the scenes lies
a rather simple DTD. For those who still weigh the feasibility of the
use of gifs for special characters over Unicode (and lean towards the
former), she has a short success story. And for those who are
wondering what the tab might have been for this glorious undertaking,
you'll find the skinny on the cost. - LM
Guernsey, Lisa. "The Library As the Latest Web Venture" New York
Times (June 15, 2000): Section G, p.1. - Focusing on
NetLibrary.com, Ebrary.com and Questia media this article
looks at electronic library projects. Unlike the budding electronic
book market which focuses on downloading to handheld devices these
players are concentrating on the scholarly market represented by
institutions such as libraries. At the moment there are a limited
number of titles available, a mixture of titles from the public domain
and those that are copyrighted. NetLibrary has around 18,000
copyrighted books while Ebrary.com claims to have 130,000 in its
demonstration database. The economic model for these vendors varies
somewhat. Users can sometimes search the database and then only
subscribers can view book's pages, or viewing online is free but the
users is charged for printing or downloading. As the article points
out this is mixing the traditional roles of libraries and bookstores.
It therefore brings up issues of access to lower income users and the
role of libraries in an increasingly commercialized information
universe. - ML
Hughes, Carol Ann. "Lessons Learned: Digitization of Special
Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries" D-Lib Magazine
6(6) (June 2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june00/hughes/06hughes.html"). - Creating
digital library collections is still at an early enough stage that
descriptions of projects and the lessons learned from them are
important and useful for anyone else considering such a project.
Hughes' description of a Library of Congress/Ameritech funded project
to digitize a variety of materials relating to the Chatauqua Movement
of the early 20th century is one such useful account. The
straightforward description of the project is peppered with "lessons
learned" that document the ups-and-downs of a project that, as is the
case with many first projects, entailed a good deal of learning as you
go. The more of these accounts we have, the less lessons the rest of
us will have to learn the hard way. - RT
Kresh, Diane Nester. "Offering High-Quality Reference Service on
the Web: The Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS)" D-Lib
Magazine 6(6) (June 2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june00/kresh/06kresh.html). - Online digital
reference service has been the topic of a lot of recent online
discussion, meetings at the American Library Association, and
proposals of various kinds -- regional, national, and transnational.
One of the projects with the most promise is being led and coordinated
by the Library of Congress, which this article outlines. The basic
idea is to coordinate a global digital reference network that would
allow libraries to provide 24x7 online reference service to their
clientele. The Library of Congress and a small group of collaborating
libraries began testing this model in March 2000. Countries
represented in this initial pilot included the United States,
Australia, and Canada. The types of libraries involved included public
libraries, academic libraries, national libraries, an art museum
library, and a regional library cooperative. The second pilot began
June 19 and will run for a month, with the third pilot beginning in
August. Following this pilot period, the project will officially
launch on October 1, 2000. Anyone interested in providing online
reference service would do well to follow this project closely. -
RT
Miller, Brent I. "Recent Lessons from the Courts: The Changing
Landscape of Copyright in a Digital Age" RLG DigiNews 4 (2) (April
15, 2000)
(http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-2.html#feature) -
Miller highlights and clearly explains two recent cases, The Bridgeman
Art Library LTD v. Corel Corp and Kelly v Arriba Soft that have
important implications for managing digital collections. In Bridgeman
the court considered whether color transparencies of public domain art
work has a sufficient level of originality to be copyrightable. The
court decided that they do not have the requisite degree of
originality and that the unauthorized use of the reproductions does
not violate copyright law. This obviously has implications for
libraries who have digital collections, but the Bridgeman decision
concerns two dimensional works as opposed to three dimensional
objects, which may involve greater "originality." In addition the
court did not address issues of copyright protection for compilations,
in other words an institution's copyright interest in the selection,
arrangement and coordination of a digital collection. In the Arriba
Soft case the issue revolved around whether a "visual search engine"
was fair use. The search engine allowed users to retrieve thumbnail
images as well as a full-size version of images by providing a link to
the site where the image resided. The court held that Arriba Soft's
actions constituted fair use of the images. For those managing digital
image collections it would seem to reinforce the presumption that
reproduction and distribution of images constitute fair use. On the
other hand it would "arguably insulate those who use the contents of
digital image collections for clearly 'commercial' purposes from
infringement liability." While this is still an unsettled area of
copyright law it is indicative of a gradual direction or trend. -
ML
Nardi, Bonnie A., Steve Whittaker, and Heinrich Schwarz. "It's Not
What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age"
First Monday 5 (5) (May, 2000)
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_5/nardi/). - The authors
describe their ethnographic research on personal social networks in
the workplace. They argue that traditional institutional resources are
being replaced by resources that workers mine from their own networks.
They conclude that while "lean" and "flexible" organizations bring
many benefits, there are unexpected influences at play -- namely,
throwing employees on their own to find the "real" way things get
done. Less institutional stability and fewer corporate resources have
made workers more self-reliant, and they are responding by cultivating
their own networks of contacts instead of consulting the
"organizational chart." - TH
Zick, Laura. "The Work of Information Mediators: A Comparison of
Librarians and Intelligent Software Agents" First Monday 5(5)
(May, 2000) (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_5/zick/). - The
author evaluates the characteristics of information agency, the work
of librarians and of intelligent agents as information mediators. Her
objective is to determine whether it is possible, or even advisable,
to replace the analytical role of information specialists with
automated routines. A particularly bright spot in this outstanding
analysis is the author's call for a reasoned, well-substantiated
debate over the relative merits of person-to-person interaction --
reference -- versus person-to-software interaction. She finds that all
too often, the discussion of new technologies and their impact on
library work disregards the fundamental value and vitality of the
culture of reference. - TH
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 11(6) (June 2000) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright © 2000 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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