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Current Cities Volume 05 Number 08
_Current Cites_
Volume 5, no. 8
August 1994
Information Systems Instruction & Support
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
ISSN: 1060-2356
Contributors:
John Ober, Margaret Phillips, David Rez, Richard Rinehart,
Teri Rinne, Roy Tennant
Electronic Publishing
DeLoughry, Thomas J. "Colleges Urged to Re-Evaluate Copyright Policies" The
Chronicle of Higher Education 40(47) (July 27, 1994):A20.
[URL:gopher://arl.cni.org:70/11/scomm/aau] -- Under the auspices of the
Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Research
Libraries (ARL), a panel of professors, librarians and administrators has
called for greater use of technology in order to make material more widely
available and more affordable for universities. To accomplish this, the
panel urges universities to re-evaluate copyright policies for works
published in electronic formats and it recommends that higher education
consider creating "electronic publishing outlets" to compete with the
high-cost printed journals that strain library budgets. -- MP
DeLoughry, Thomas J. "Copyright Changes Proposed for Electronic Era" The
Chronicle of Higher Education 40(45) (July 13, 1994):A17-A18. -- A panel of
Clinton Administration officials, know as The Working Group on Intellectual
Property Rights, has produced a draft report outlining several amendments to
the Copyright Act which would protect the interests of creators and users of
electronically accessible materials. They did not, however, tackle the issue
of "fair use" for electronic materials but instead will convene a conference
on fair use by bringing together educators, librarians and other users of
copyrighted materials with the owners of such materials. The aim of this
meeting will be to produce fair-use guidelines of electronic materials.
-- MP
Zheng, Min and Roy Rada. "MUCH Electronic Publishing Environment: Principles
and Practices" Journal of the American Society for Information Science
45(5) (June 1994):300-309. -- An overview of the MUCH (Many Using and
Creating Hypermedia) system, a multi-author editing environment for
electronic publishing based upon the following premises: it should support
the whole life cycle of the publication; it should be a highly integrated
environment; it should have hypermedia publishing capabilities and it should
easily extend to deal with new media and support new publishing activities.
The MUCH environment was developed as a collaborative authoring tool which
addresses these support issues. The MUCH system uses industry standards
(such as SGML and the Dexter model) and freely available software for
continuity and flexibility. -- DR
Multimedia and Hypermedia
Reinhardt, Andy. "Managing the New Document" Byte 19(8) (August 1994):90.
-- This cover article reviews efforts currently under way to implement
software standards for the management of documents, especially those
containing multimedia elements. Standard operating environments generally
include cursory document management systems such as a file finding aid, and
various views for listing files. These systems are further oriented toward
textual (monomedia) documents, with features such as 'find file containing
text.....'. Managing multimedia documents, on the other hand, presents
special needs. Many tools and standards exist currently for multimedia
document creation, but document management users must often look to third
parties, or await the results of experimental projects, to see where the
true standards will come from. This article lists some potential standards
and interesting projects, from a joint effort between Xerox and Novell to
create a network-capable documentmanagement interface, to the
client/server-oriented document bridge, Open Document Management API. The
article is the latest pointer toward the trend of computing becoming less
application-centric and more document-centric in many ways. -- RR
Networks and Networking
Barry, Jeff. "The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and the World-Wide Web:
Raising ASCII Text to a New Level of Usability" The Public-Access Computer
Systems Review 5(5) (1994):5-62. To retrieve this file, send the following
e-mail message to listserv@uhupvml.uh.edu: GET BARRY PRV5N5 F=MAIL.
[URL:gopher://info.lib.uh.edu/00/articles/e-journals/uhlibrary/pacsreview/v5
/n5/barry.5n5] -- In his mis-titled article, Barry provides an introduction
and tutorial to HTML rather than a detailed description of its advantages
over other electronic text or an analysis of its future. The focus here is
on the HTML tags, or markup elements, themselves; 20 pages of the 55-page
document constitute an appendix listing tags with examples of their use. The
brief descriptions of HTML elements compare favorably with other such
material that is available, and PACS Review readers may profit from yet
another overview. However, the article is not very imaginative in its
descriptions of how the Web could be used in libraries, and it suffers from
attempts to DESCRIBE Web documents rather than SHOW them - an inherent
limitation of the Review's ascii distribution. To be fair, Barry does
provide the reader with locations of sample documents that do illustrate his
points. -- JLO
Burke, Edmund B. "And Makes Me Poor Indeed: The Law of Defamation in the Age
of Information Technology" Educom Review 29(4) (July/ August 1994):6-7. --
This timely piece clearly and methodically reviews defamation law in light
of recent suits based upon alleged defamatory statements "published" on
computer networks. Current and/or potential "Flamers" and suit-prone
"Flamees" take note. -- RT
Glazier, Loss Pequeno. "Internet Resources for English and American
Literature" College & Research Libraries News 55(7) (July/August
1994):417-422. -- Another in the regular series of articles in C&RL News
that lists essential Internet resources in specific academic disciplines,
this article provides a thorough yet selective list of resources in English
and American literature. In addition to a list of important listservs and
significant electronic journals in the field, the author describes some
important electronic text projects and archives. Also listed are relevant
gopher and Web sites. -- MP
Grycz, Czeslaw Jan and Christine Maxwell. _New Riders' Official Internet
Yellow Pages_ Indianapolis: New Riders Publishing, 1994. -- The second major
"yellow pages" currently available (see also Hahn and Stout, The Internet
Yellow Pages cited in Current Cites, May, 1994) these authors also undertake
the dubious mission of providing a comprehensive print resource to the
Internet. Various warnings and disclaimers serve to admit that the directory
is not, and cannot be, exhaustive nor 100% accurate, so the reader is left
to decide whether the range, format, and organization of the listings serve
a valuable purpose. In general these yellow pages are less playful than the
other volume but are more highly organized. The entries are given in three
formats - "standard," "major," and "turbo" - according to the authors'
judgments about the scope of the resource (though the reason for the
judgments is not clearly explained in the introductory material). With 877
pages, the volume looks valuable based on size alone. However, resources are
duplicated in entries under alphabetized name and several keyword
descriptors. This scheme has great potential but is unevenly applied, as
indicated by the absence of entries under the keywords ("pets" and "domestic
animals") which are used in the explanation of the indexing scheme itself.
Perhaps it is in part the "generous volunteerism" with which the book was
compiled that also contributes to uneven distribution of resources named.
For example, "Universities" as a listing has only one entry and there is no
explanation of the selection of 18 "universities" with separate alphabetical
entries. As with the volume by Hahn and Stout, readers should consider this
a good tool for introductory explorations of the Internet which will
undoubtedly quickly age and be supplanted by experience. -- JLO
Lewis, Peter H. "Doubts Are Raised on Actual Number of Internet's Users" The
New York Times (August 10, 1994):A1, C4. -- A front page article in the New
York Times wonders if the Internet has been over-hyped and suggests that the
actual number of active Internet users has been overstated. Citing Internet
demographer, John S. Quartermain, the article indicates that the commonly
quoted numbers of 20 million to 30 million users worldwide, is misleading
because more than a million ports, and the millions of people who use them,
are cut off from the Internet by electronic "firewalls" erected by
security-conscious corporations. While growth on the Internet is indeed
exponential, these findings suggest that the "information future" as
popularly described, may not quite be here yet. -- MP
Markoff, John. "Silicon Valley Concerns Offer Specialized News" The New York
Times (July 12, 1994):C4. -- New companies that offer specialized news
services are beginning to commercialize the Internet by providing
inexpensive information retrieval services. One such company, allows
subscribers to establish lists of topics or companies they wish to follow.
Using a program that monitors a range of news services, articles that match
a subscribers topic profile are then sent automatically to the subscriber as
e-mail messages. Another company allows its computer users who have a direct
connection to the Internet to search large commercial databases at prices
much lower that similar online databases such as Mead Data Central and
Dialog. -- MP
Nisenholtz, Martin. "The Digital Medium Meets The Advertising Message"
Educom Review 29(4) (July/August 1994):27-30. -- This article offers a
concise framing of the history of advertising's entry into digital media.
The author touches on the changing metaphors used to define new digital
forums. Network services, such as early Compuserve, were often based on the
point-to-point model of the existing telephone system; users knew
specifically how they wanted to use such a system and were willing to pay
for the service on a per use basis. In this model, the consumer is the
end-user of the service. However, many network services are beginning to
resemble the point-to-many broadcast model of television as much a the phone
model. In this model, advertisers are the true consumer, subsidizing the
cost of the service, and the audience is the 'good' delivered to them (to
their ads) by the agency (network service or television station). The nature
of media convergence reinforces the change in thinking (Have you also been
asked by your cable TV channel to logon to America Online later that night
to talk 'live with one of the shows actors? Or seen an ad asking you to
logon to Prodigy to read more on the football players playing in the game
you are watching right now?) As it concentrates on the How and not the Why,
though, this article offer an objective introduction to the heated debate on
advertising on the Internet and other digital forums (once) considered the
purview of the educational community. -- RR
The Scout Report. InterNIC Information Services. [URL:http://www.internic.
net/scout-report/] [URL:gopher://is.internic.net/11/infoguide/scout-report]
-- The Scout Report is a weekly publication offered by InterNIC Information
Services "to the U.S. research and education community and others who will
benefit from the listed resources. Included are selected new and
newly-discovered online resources, network news, and bits of net culture."
As such it serves a similar function to lists such as Net-Happenings, or the
NCSA "What's New" page for the Web. Some of the Scout Report's value lies in
its high selectivity, its compilation as a once-weekly publication, and its
availability via gopher and the World-Wide Web. This is an excellent
resource to use in answer to the daunting "how-to-keep-current" question.
-- JLO
Wiggins, Richard. "Building a Campus-Wide Information System," Campus-Wide
Information Systems (CWIS) 11(1-2) (Spring/Summer 1994):57-66. -- In this
extract from his book _The Internet for Everyone: A Guide for Users and
Providers_, Wiggins provides an overview of some basic issues that must be
considered in mounting a Campus-Wide Information System. After a brief
history of CWIS development, from CUINFO and PNN to Gopher and World-Wide
Web, he covers choosing a platform, the structure of the initial menu, the
types of information to offer, and the provision of information about the
information (date last updated, etc.). Although anyone charged with creating
a CWIS will need to do much more reading than this article, it could
nonetheless be useful to someone new to building systems of this type. -- RT
General
Brandt, D. Scott. "1994 Buyer's Guide and Consultant Directory" Computers in
Libraries 14(7) (July/August 1994):18-88. -- Brandt compiles this annual
guide designed to provide easy access to information-related computer
products, supplies and services. This 70-page reference tool is divided into
the following five categories: 1) products and services (further sub-divided
into hardware and supplies, software, and services) 2) vendor product and
service listing 3) product names 4) vendors, producers and distributors 5)
consultants. "This guide," writes Brandt, "can come in handy throughout the
year to answer questions related to finding out who sells a needed part,
which companies offer certain software, or where you can get a product whose
name you remember." -- TR
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Current Cites 5(8) (August 1994) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright (C) 1994
by the Library, University of California, Berkeley. All rights reserved.
All product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their
respective holders. Mention of a product in this publication does
not necessarily imply endorsement of the product.
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[URL:ftp://ftp.lib.berkeley.edu/pub/Current.Cites]. This message
must appear on copied material. All commercial use requires permission
from the editor, who may be reached in the following ways:
trinne@library.berkeley.edu // trinne@ucblibra // (510)642-8173
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