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Current Cities Volume 08 Number 09
_Current Cites_
Volume 8, no. 9
September 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/cc97.8.9.html
Contributors:
Campbell Crabtree, Christof Galli, Kirk Hastings, Terry Huwe,
Margaret Phillips, David Rez, Richard Rinehart,
Teri Rinne, Roy Tennant
DIGITAL LIBRARIES
Fox, Edward A., et. al. Networked Digital Library of Theses and
Dissertations" D-Lib Magazine (September 1997)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september97/theses/09fox.html). - Fox and company
describe an interesting project to build a National Digital Library of
Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). The article cites a good deal of
interesting work, and yet I was also eager for more URLs than were provided.
Where, for example, can one find the "multimedia training materials
explaining how to use PDF tools"? But that is nitpicking with what is
overall a very interesting piece that highlights some very thorny issues
related to publishing information that has a very different (and entrenched)
paper publishing stream. Will we ever have the NDLTD that Fox envisions?
After reading this article, I have my doubts, but at the same time I also
want to go out and help him build it. - RT
Hildreth, Charles R. "The Use and Understanding of Keyword Searching in a
University Online Catalog" Information Technology and Libraries 16(2) (June
1997): 52-62. - If you're a reference librarian Hildreth's research findings
will not surprise you. After statistically analyzing searches performed
in a
university library catalog, Hildreth finds that users "search more often by
keyword than any other type of search, their keyword searches fail more
often than not, and a majority of these users do not understand how the
system processes their keyword searches." He suggests two possible solutions
to these problems: 1) educate the user, or 2) improve the design of our
catalog systems. As the second is more practical and attainable, especially
given the fact that increasingly users of our catalogs do not enter our
buildings, Hildreth asserts that "it is time to put end-user Boolean
retrieval systems...behind us." He points to probabalistic retrieval theory
and hypertextual systems as providing sources for improvements. - RT
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY
Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K-12
Education in the United States. President's Committee of Advisors on Science
and Technology, Panel on Educational Technology, March 1997
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/NSTC/PCAST/k-12ed.html). This report
to President Clinton culminates the two-year work of the Panel on
Educational Technology, which was formed to advise him on the application of
technology in K-12 education. The Executive Summary lists six main
recommendations: 1) Focus on learning with technology, not about technology,
2) Emphasize content and pedagogy, and not just hardware, 3) Give special
attention to professional development, 4) Engage in realistic budgeting, 5)
Ensure equitable, universal access, and 6) Initiate a major program of
experimental research. The report also includes a number of tactical
recommendations that target specific needs for improving the impact of
technology on K-12 education. In an introductory letter I received with the
report, the Panel on Educational Technology highlighted the sixth
recommendation as the most important. This recommendation specifies that the
ind of expenditure required to support the research needed must be provided
largely at the federal level. They acknowledge the difficulty of obtaining
such funding while simultaneously attempting to balance the federal budget,
but this only serves to underscore the importance they place on this
recommendation. This report is well worth reading for anyone interested in
K-12 education and the present and future of our children. - RT
MULTIMEDIA & HYPERMEDIA
Avgerakis, George and Becky Waring. "Industrial-Strength Streaming Video"
New Media 7(12) (Sept. 22, 1997): 46-58
(http://www.newmedia.com/NewMedia/97/12/feature/Streaming_Video.html). - The
state of the art of video for the web. Streaming video (playback in nearly
real time instead of download-and-watch-later) has come of age. This article
concentrates on reviewing 7 current video servers for the web, but it does
mention other server-less options such as plugins for QuickTime and MPEG
formatted video can take advantage of. Perhaps not surprisingly, the handy
list showing numbers of different video formats on the web to date reveals
the server-less formats far outrank the pricier server-based formats.
Another irony revealed is that QuickTime, until recently authored only on
Macintosh, is the most popular video type on the web, while none of the 7
web servers reviewed even run on Macs. Beyond the review, this article, with
discussions of background, formats, and tips, will be very useful to bring
you up to date on options for serving video from your website for distance
learning, putting film resources online, or just viewing that oh-so-cool
QuickTime panorama taken from the local university's bell-tower. - RR
NETWORKS & NETWORKING
Hegener, Michiel. "Internet Unwired" OnTheInternet 3(5) (September/October
1997): 23-31 (http://www.iicd.org/articles/sep97/hegene10.htm). In the world
of satellite connections to the Internet, it's GEOS v. LEOS. But don't let
the acronyms scare you off. This article is a well-written overview of the
state of Internet connectivity via satellite. Why would you want a satellite
connection to the Internet? If you're in Manhattan you may not want one. But
if you're in Niger it may be your only option. Internet satellites will soon
(finally) make the Internet a truly global network by bringing the
possibility of connection to every corner of the planet. I say possibility,
because as you well know, the pipe is only part of the system. Hegener
mentions some figures regarding estimated "station" costs, but for the most
part the question of affordability by individuals was left largely
unaddressed. Nonetheless, this piece is an excellent and highly readable
overview of the technology and where things stand. - RT
Karpinski, Richard. "A Tangled Web of Standards" InternetWeek 682 (Sept. 22,
1997):1, 75 (http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?INW19970922S0001). -
Focusing on the proposed DOM (Document Object Model) standard, this article
reveals the tensions between the marketplace and the world of standards. The
article cites how both Netscape and Microsoft have leapt ahead of the
standards process in attempting to be the first to bring DHTML (Dynamic
HTML) products to market and creating yet another browser-war and
compatibility issue for content providers. Standards groups like the W3C
(itself made up largely of vendors) are criticized for being too slow in
finalizing standards, and vendors for giving lip service to
"standards-based" solutions, yet ignoring the standards process for the push
to market. Content providers such as universities, libraries, and museums
are particularly hard hit since they often attempt to serve the broadest
possible public (and not one market niche) and so must keep keenly aware of
compatibility and access issues. - RR
Smith, Alastair G. "Testing the Surf: Criteria for Evaluating Internet
Information Resources" The Public-Access Computer Systems Review 8(3) (1997)
(http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v8/n3/smit8n3.html). - While many people have
written about how to evaluate the quality of Internet information resources,
Smith has done an excellent job of distilling the essential criteria for
evaluation. He first briefly considers evaluation criteria for print
materials, and then continues with a review of previous articles on Internet
resource evaluation. The core of the piece is the "toolbox" of evaluation
criteria, which cover the broad areas of scope, content, graphic and
multimedia design, purpose and audience, reviews, workability, and cost.
Smith then reviews internet evaluation sites to determine which of his
criteria they employ. It perhaps comes as no surprise that the sites with
the most criteria employed in evaluation have librarian involvement (for
example, the Argus Clearinghouse and the Internet Public Library). - RT
Radosevich, Lynda. "XML Initiatives Take Shape" InfoWorld, 37 (September 17,
1997):1,24
(http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayArchives.pl?97-t02-37.1.htm). - A
brief update on vendor progress in bringing XML compliant applications to
market. XML (Extensible Markup Language) bridges a gap between two important
standards for information management and sharing: the SGML standard
(Standard Generalized Markup Language) which can provide detailed structure
to documents, allowing them to be parsed, searched, and managed (but which
can be difficult to create programs for), and HTML which benefits from it's
own simplicity, but is not rich enough to allow documents to be searched or
managed in precise ways. XML allows one to use customized or standard tags
to manage data in forms from databases to webpages. Microsoft, Arbor,
Sybase, and several others are beginning to bring products which support XML
to the user. - RR
Wehmeyer, Lillian Biermann. "Evaluating Internet Research" Syllabus 11(2)
(September 1997):46-50. - Now that students are citing Internet-based
sources in their schoolwork, instructors must be knowledgeable about how to
evaluate the quality of the cited works. Being a former librarian, Wehmeyer
knows the criteria for evaluating print resources, and she makes effective
use of that background in this article. She points out both print and
electronic resources that can be used for evaluation, and provides URLs for
the latter. - RT
GENERAL
"Xerox won't duplicate past errors" Businessweek no. 3546 (September 29,
1997): 98-103. - The mistake they're referring to is Xerox's groud-breaking
creation of all the icons of modern computing -- graphical user interface,
the mouse, Ethernet technology -- which were popularized by Apple and are
now taken for granted. Some of these features were never even patented,
leaving Xerox completely out of the mammoth revenue stream these products
created. Now, under the leader of John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC (i.e., Palo
Alto Research Center) is researching new applications and planning to take
them to market. This article offers an overview of the products that might
be in your computing future. These include "hyperbolic trees" that reveal
more information as you move the cursor around a full circle of "links", new
approaches to machine processing of spoken human language, and other
paradigm-breakers. The common denominator to PARC's approach is a growing
realization that social scientists have a place in systems design. - TH
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 8(9) (September 1997) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright (c) 1997
by the Library, University of California, Berkeley. All rights
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