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Current Cities Volume 09 Number 04
_Current Cites_
Volume 9, no. 4
April 1998
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1998/cc98.9.4.html
Contributors:
Christof Galli, Kirk Hastings, Terry Huwe,
Margaret Phillips, Richard Rinehart, Roy Tennant
Jim Ronningen, Lisa Yesson
DIGITAL LIBRARIES
"Taking the Initiative for Digital Libraries" The Electronic Library
(16) 1 (February 1998): 24-27.
[http://info.learned.co.uk/li/publications/tel/contents.htm]
-- If you're still just a bit unclear what exactly is meant by "digital
library", you may be comforted by Electronic Library's interview
with Stephen Griffin of NSF's Digital Library Initiative. Griffin
acknowledges that the meaning of digital library continues to evolve
as technology advances, and believes that this is a good thing as a
more open definition enables a larger set of perspectives to influence
the discourse, research and practices. Griffin uses the concepts of
electronic access vs. intellectual access to help think about digital
libraries. He describes electronic access as access to the raw
electronic data, and intellectual access as access to deeper knowledge
and meaning contained in digital collections. Griffin believes that by
providing intellectual access through intelligent systems, that digital
libraries have the potential to give users "what they want, not merely
what they ask for." He proposes that digital libraries will lead to a
reconsideration of the library as an institution and, in the long term,
offer an entirely new model through which people can interact with
information, beginning, in the nearer term, with scholarly
communication. He also offers some suggestions to library managers
for this transitional period. -- LY
ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
Curle, David. "Filtered News Services: Solutions in Search of _Your_
Problem?" Online 22(2) March/April 1998.
[http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OLtocs/OLtocmar3.html]
-- You may remember Wired's big, blue, pushy hand from the March
1997 [www.wired.com/5.03/] issue, shoving yet another "radical
future" at you and announcing the arrival of push media - that is,
electronic information that can be delivered to the user without the
need to "pull" it by requesting it each time it's wanted. Curle's less
prophetic, more practical article deserves a big hand too, with an
index finger pointing to a long list of options for news delivery.
Making smart choices is not easily done in the growing flow of
media which can spew the world's events onto your screen, and
Curle emphasizes that information professionals will have to analyze
user needs in the context of organizational systems to come up with
viable solutions. He suggests several specific questions that are
useful for getting far beyond the obvious filtering issues like whether
to eliminate sports from the news stream. Traditionally, what's news
has been defined by the sender; now the receiver is getting more
power to redefine it, but the sources must still be well-understood.
When he changes his focus from the consumer to the provider, Curle
discusses the merits of various services, and how they (or parts of
them) can fit into appropriate profiles for pushed news. He assesses
the services by category and by product, from the custom pages offered
by many Web guides to the commercial giants like Dow Jones, noting
that most users should be able to get their facts for free in today's
environment. If our options continue to multiply, let's hope for many
more articles like this one, because this kind of advice is what we'll
need to help us get a grip. -- JR
"To Publish and Perish" Policy Perspectives 7(4) (March 1998)
(gain access to the article at
http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/pp-cat.pl after registering for free).
-- This thoughtful essay is on the problem academic libraries have of
maintaining access to information when both the volume and cost of this
information has increased dramatically over the last several decades. A
brief historical review precedes a set of strategies that libraries,
faculties, and university administrations can undertake to "regain the
initiative" in scholarly publishing. These strategies include: 1) end the
preoccupation with numbers (faculty tenure review should stress quality,
not quantity), 2) be smart shoppers (research libraries must select
wisely), 3) get a handle on property rights (faculty should be encouraged
to retain at least some portion of copyright), 4) invest in electronic
forms of scholarly communication, and 5) decouple publication and
faculty evaluation for the purposes of promotion and tenure. Before
allowing skepticism to persuade you of the futility of succeeding with
any of these strategies, you should know that this essay is based on a
national meeting of presidents, chief academic officers, and librarians
of major research universities across North America. They are in at
least shooting distance of being able to effect some local change if not
systemic change. -- RT
Wagner, Karen I. "Intellectual Property: Copyright Implications for
Higher Education" The Journal of Academic Librarianship 24 (1)
(January 1998): 11-19. -- The university consists of many different
constituencies all of which are serving the larger mission of the
institution which is to educate and promote research and scholarship.
These different constituencies, however, have differing perspectives
on intellectual property issues. As producers of intellectual property,
university presses and faculty are concerned with preserving copyright
protection; as consumers of intellectual property, university libraries
(and, again, faculty) are more concerned with issues of "fair use;"
there are also those constituencies, such as instructional design groups,
who are both producers and consumers. Wagner argues that discussion
among all of these groups will help in the development of a national
policy on intellectual property rights that will be in the best interests
of higher education. The emergence of a digital landscape also poses new
challenges and opportunities and university presses, libraries, university
bookstores and copy centers can take advantage of new technologies to
further enhance the ability of higher education to achieve its mission.
An extensive bibliography accompanies this article. -- MP
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
Giese, Mark. "Self Without Body: Textual Self-Representation in
an Electronic Community" First Monday 3 (6) (April 6, 1998).
[http://www.firstmonday.dk] -- Giese examines textual modes of
communication and how they combine with the new technologies
of computer-mediated communication (cmc) to produce new
opportunities for social interaction and presentation of self. He
studies these new modes of meta-communication, and how they
interact in ways that promote the liveliness of community in a
text-based electronic environment. He examines one Internet
newsgroup, alt.cyberpunk, which has developed a cooperative
narrative, in which participants make self-presentations that many
would consider "fictional". However, in the community of the list,
these presentations must be accepted at face value. He concludes
that this new form of self-expression is created by the "tightened
feedback loop" that cmc technologies bring to a textual mode of
communication--in other words, a text-based narrative becomes a
"real-time" interaction, with new, and often strange results. -- TH
Hilf, Bill. "Media Lullabies: The Reinvention of the World Wide
Web" First Monday 3 (6) (April 6, 1998) [http://www.firstmonday.dk]
-- Hilf explores the all-too-easy trap that media and cultural critics
fall into when they compare the Web and other Net-based delivery systems
to the mass media. He argues such comparative studies have led to
large-scale misinterpretations of the Internet. Worse yet, in the era of
sound-bite journalism, such misinterpretations rapidly become accepted
as meaningful descriptions (remember the Internet as a "library", only
the "books" haven't been organized yet?). As part of his analysis, he
provides a useful history of the new media. -- TH
NETWORKS AND NETWORKING
Arnold, Judith M. and Elaine Anderson Jayne. "Dangling by a Slender
Thread: The Lessons and Implications of Teaching the World Wide
Web to Freshmen" The Journal of Academic Librarianship 24 (1)
(January 1998): 43-52. -- Based on the authors' own experience of
teaching library skills to a freshmen writing class, this well-researched
article discusses the challenges, problems and implications of teaching
the Web. Their approach to teaching was to focus on resources that are
unique to the Web such as sites that offer current or government
information that is not available elsewhere. Furthermore, they argue that
the Web needs to be taught within an appropriate context of the
information seeking process and as just one of many information sources
along with books, journals and newspapers. Most importantly, the authors
wanted to provide an evaluative framework in their approach to teaching
the Web. Trying to teach students how to evaluate sources when doing
library research is one of the biggest challenges for instruction
librarians. In some ways, the nature of the Web with its largely
free-flowing content gives library instructors a unique opportunity to
introduce critical thinking skills and evaluative tools. -- MP
Payette, Sandra. "Persistent Identifiers on the Digital Terrain" RLG
DigiNews 2(2) 1997.
[http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews22.html#Identifiers]
-- In what has almost become a mythical pursuit similar to the search
for the Holy Grail, those involved with developing standards for the
Web have long sought a solution to the problem of broken URLs.
What is needed is some kind of persistent address that can be resolved
to the actual location of the desired information, even as it moves
from place to place. This overview piece serves as an excellent
introduction to the topic and an overview of current or near-term
solutions. The particular schemes profiled include Persistent URLs
or PURLs (please, no swine jokes), Handles, and Digital Object
Identifiers or DOIs. None of these schemes comes from the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF), which has been pondering this
conundrum since the dawn of time (ca. early 1990's on the Web
calendar). Payette includes a strategy for implementing persistent
identifiers for a given project, a brief discussion of implications, and
some pointers (yes, URLs) to further information. -- RT
OPTICAL DISC TECHNOLOGY
Ma, Wei. "The Near Future Trend: Combining Web Access and Local
CD Networks" The Electronic Library 16 (1) (February 1998): 49-54.
[http://info.learned.co.uk/publications/tel/contents.htm]. -- Should
libraries continue expanding and investing in CD-ROM networks?
This article asserts that librarians will continue to see a mix of
CD-ROM based and Internet-based resources in the near term. A mix
will be optimal because the two media have different strengths.
CD-ROM is best for specialized titles that are less used, and for large
amounts of static data. Internet versions are better for sources with
broader appeal, and for databases that require frequent and timely
updates. Drawing from Occidental College's experience, Ma concludes
that the optimal mix should consider the entire community environment,
not just the individual library. Ma also profiles selected equipment that
Occidental used in designing their architecture. -- LY
GENERAL
Ypsilanti, Dimitri, and Louisa Gosling. _Towards a Global Information
Society: Global Information Infrastructure, Global Information Society:
Policy Requirements_. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and Development, 1997. Content of this publication is available in pdf
format through the OECD's site for free documents on Information and
Communications Policy [http://www.oecd.org/dsti/sti/it/prod/online.htm]
in the "Information Economy" section. -- The OECD [www.oecd.org] is
the 29-nation organization which has grown from a core group of
Marshall Plan countries to encompass most of what we consider the
industrialized world. For information technology developments, it is
worth watching as a policy-recommending body which is wrestling with
the big issues: privacy, electronic commerce, media convergence,
infrastructure and the gap between the wired and the left behind.
Reading their publications is a refreshing change from those which
reflect only American views. For example, the membership voted down
the Clinton administration's proposed key escrow encryption system
two years ago, and has debated several alternatives, revealing a range of
attitudes about privacy and law enforcement (see the OECD Information
Security and Privacy page
[http://www.oecd.org/dsti/sti/it/secur/index.htm]). _Towards a Global
Information Society_ is recommended as a focal point for the study of
global information issues. Don't be put off by the rather inflated,
abstract tone of the introduction - after all, these are the real "big
picture" people, and the succeeding chapters do get down to specifics
about particular problems and trends and the agencies which can influence
them. I found the attention paid to media content to be particularly
interesting; one aspect was a discussion of consolidated ownership vs.
the preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity (the authors are of
the opinion that policies which encourage the development of a variety of
multimedia services also encourage the proliferation of sources of local
content). References throughout the text are well-documented in an extensive
bibliography; one citation in particular deserves mention here, the OECD's
own _Information Technology Outlook_
[http://www.oecd.org/dsti/sti/it/prod/itblurb.htm]
which is the source for many of the tables and graphs. -- JR
Current Cites 9(4) (April 1998) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright
1998 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley. _All rights
reserved._
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