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Current Cities Volume 07 Number 11
_Current Cites_
Volume 7, no. 11
November 1996
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1996/cc96.7.11.html
Contributors:
Campbell Crabtree, Terry Huwe,
Margaret Phillips, David Rez, Richard Rinehart,
Teri Rinne, Roy Tennant
ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
Butter, Karen, Robin Chandler and John Kunze. "The Cigarette Papers:
Issues in Publishing Materials in Multiple Formats" D-Lib Magazine
(November 1996) (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november96/11butter.html) --
A brief overview of several publishing projects relating to a
collection of tobacco company Brown and Williamson internal
documents that were leaked to, among others, the University of
California, San Francisco. The UCSF Library subsequently published
them in various forms in association with UC Press. A number of issues
relating to these efforts (not the least of which being litigation by
B&W to try to recover the documents) are briefly described. As an
overview piece it serves its purpose, particularly with the links to
pertinent resources online, but I couldn't help wishing for more
details on how they scanned, indexed and published the material (some
8,000 documents). -- RT
CONFU: The Conference on Fair Use
(http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/confu.htm) --
Spawned by the federal National Information Infrastructure project,
the working group on Intellectual Property Rights convened the
Conference on Fair Use: a meeting of stakeholders in copyright from
content developers and publishers to end-users, universities, and
libraries. This working group was charged with developing broadly
accepted guidelines for fair use (free, educational use) of electronic
resources, from databases to multimedia. Five areas were chosen to
focus on: Distance Learning, Multimedia, Electronic Reserves,
Interlibrary Loan, and Image Collections. The Multimedia and Images
groups lead in reaching tentative agreements (all of which can be read
online). The groups convened were not individuals, but rather
professional organizations such as the College Art Association, the
American Association of Museums, the Visual Resources Association,
Association of Research Libraries, Association of American
Publishers, and so on. This suite of documents deserves reading by
anyone involved in electronic media for education at any level and
anyone developing or distributing electronic resources. This is a very
large group; but then again, this project will have equally large
implications for these areas. -- RR
Gasaway, Laura N. "Libraries, Educational Institutions, and Copyright
Proprietors: The First Collision on the Information Highway" The
Journal of Academic Librarianship 22(5) (September 1996): 337-344. --
Focusing on the Clinton administration's White Paper on Intellectual
Property Rights in the National Information Infrastructure and the
impact that its recommendations will have on libraries and educational
institutions, here is yet another article that describes the
implications that passage of this legislation will have on access to
information. Libraries and educational institutions, in providing
copyrighted materials to the public whether they be students,
teachers, scholars or researchers, see themselves as advocates for
society at large. The recommendations put forth in the White Paper,
however, favor the copyright owners and will make it more difficult
for libraries to make electronic works available to the public in the
same way that printed materials are made available. -- MP
Stover, Mark. "The Librarian as Publisher: A World Wide Web Publishing
Project" Computers in Libraries 16(9)(October 1996) :40-43. -- This
article touches on many issues surrounding web journals: refereed vs.
nonrefereed publication, access, copyright, design, and includes a
sidebar underscoring the value of librarians as publishers on the web.
While it is yet to be seen how successful scholarly web journals will
be, arguments are made for making available full-text journals with
the added value of indexing and judicious hyperlinking. The author
makes his points using the experience of a scholarly journal published
by an independent graduate school, Progress
(http://www.phillips.org/progress.htm) -- CJC
MULTIMEDIA AND HYPERMEDIA
Hurtig, Brent. "A/V Streaming Brings the Web to Life....Almost" New
Media 6(14) (October 28, 1996):52-63. -- Libraries, archives, museums
and universities are quickly moving to the next stage in developing
their electronic resources: moving from text databases and static web
pages to making available their audio/visual resources online. If you
are considering making available your oral history archive, video
archive, or even just adding bits of sound and moving image to
existing text-based resources this article will be useful reading. It
is more practical in bent than theoretical. Although it does not
promote or discuss standards-based solutions which would be especially
useful for non-ephemeral collections, the article is very helpful as
an up-to-date overview of the tools and issues involved in putting
multimedia resources online now. Streaming is the means of making
multimedia content available to the end-user without making them
download a huge multimedia file before viewing/playing. One can
"stream" the content, or play it as it comes in. This makes it
feasible to deliver these resources in an acceptable manner. The
article covers most of the major tools and formats currently
available, and how they do, and don't, do the job. Again, this is a
discussion of mostly proprietary formats for streaming multimedia, but
even they can be useful as a temporary delivery mechanism, while the
master copy remains in a standards-based form, itself "archived",
waiting for tools to come along for its immediate delivery. -- RR
Pierce, Jeffrey. "The Image Makers: Finding A Scanner That's Right For
You" Adobe Magazine 8(1) (November 1996): 61-65. -- So what's there to
know about scanners? More than you may realize, and once you do you
will want an article like this to tell you about it. Learn about
optical resolution, dynamic range, bit depth, and a lot more that will
help make you an effective scanner shopper and user. Learn from those
who scan for a living. -- RT
NETWORKS AND NETWORKING
"The Economics of the Internet: Too Cheap to Meter?" The Economist
341(no. 7988) (October 19-25, 1996):23-27.
[http://www.economist.com/issue/19-10-96/sf0774.html] -- The editors
summarize the challenges of pricing the use of the Internet. The
non-commercial roots of the Internet, they argue, now work against its
effectiveness as a medium for digital commerce. Hence the meteoric
growth of corporate intranets, and "extranets"--wide area networks
that include business partners. "Internet II", the university-led
initiative to build a faster network is one manifestation of this
trend. However, Internet commerce in its current form has generated
"halo" effects; modem users are using telephony to get to the network,
which in some cases boosts telecommunications profits. Pricing models
pose further difficulties. "Use-based" pricing could dampen growth,
while flat fee pricing fails to address the fact that billing a
customer costs more than Internet connect time does. The basic
trade-off is between cheap (or free) flow of information at the
expense of speed, or lightning fast service--for a fee. -- TH
Maxwell, Bruce. How to Access the Federal Government on the Internet
1997 Washington, DC : Congressional Quarterly, 1996. -- An updated and
expanded edition of last year's publication of the same name, this
guide includes descriptions of more than 400 federal Internet sites,
more than 150 of which are new in this volume. The annotated entries
explain how to access each site and describe the site's focus and
coverage. With the Internet being such a changeable environment and
the nature of politics being what it is (the November election has
rendered the list of email addresses and web sites for Members of
Congress out-of-date even before 1997 has arrived), one is justified
in questioning the value of a printed directory to the Internet. Yet
this book is valuable despite these anachronisms because it gives more
than just the address of a particular site; it outlines how to conduct
a search for federal information and provides tips about where to
start a search and how to use some of the search tools. -- MP
Ridinger, Robert B. Marks. "Internet Resources in Gay and Lesbian
Studies" College & Research Libraries News 57(10) (November 1996):
658-660, 671. [http://www.ala.org/acrl/resnov.html] -- The emergence
of gay and lesbian studies as a legitimate area of academic inquiry is
evidenced by the steady increase in books and articles related to the
life, culture and issues of the gay and lesbian community in the
United States and worldwide. Along with the growth of print media,
there has been an explosion of resources on the Internet. This guide
to Internet resources provides references to gateway sources (like
Infoqueer http://www.3wnet.com/rainbow/gnl.html) and Web sites for
gay and lesbian organizations (see the homepage for the Lamda Legal
Defense and Education Fund -
http://www.gaysource.com/gs/ht/oct95/lambda.html). Also find
references to libraries and archives (June L. Mazer Lesbian Collection
- http://www.lesbian.org/mazer/index.html), academic departments and
discussion groups (QSTUDY-L) and news media (The Advocate -
http://www.advocate.com/). -- MP
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY
Ubois, Jeff. "Future Effect: Author and Futurist James Burke Waxes
Philosophic on the Way the Internet is Changing Society" Internet
World 7(12) (December 1996):76-82. -- If you want to know about the
effect of the Internet on society, placed within an historical and
intellectual context, who better to give it to you than James Burke?
Although the article lacks the visual power of his TV programs, Burke
does not disappoint. -- RT
GENERAL
Hallmark, Judy and C. Rebecca Garcia. "Training for Automated Systems
in Libraries" Information Technology and Libraries 15(3) (September
1996):157-166. -- This article on staff and user training for library
automated systems is a highly readable account of a series of
interviews with staff from 49 libraries of all types. The interviewees
describe the often painful training experiences and what they learned.
Rather than being a dry exposition of research findings, this
insightful and easy to read account is chock-full of useful advice.
I'll even forgive the fact that a quote was not attributed correctly
(apparently footnotes 7 and 8 were inadvertently switched). Anyone
faced with training or retraining staff or users on automated systems
would do well to study this article beforehand. -- RT
Wilson, David L. "New California State Campus has Ambitious Plans for
Technology" Chronicle of Higher Education XLIII(8) (October 18,
1996):23-24. -- With a focus on multi-disciplinary study and
information technology, CSU Monterey Bay has been touted as an
experiment in high technology learning. However, according to John C.
Ittelson, director of distance learning, "getting people to do things
differently is a process of seduction." Although it's early to draw
conclusions, Wilson interviews a variety of faculty and students and
finds at least some resistance to the plan: "too much email and
voicemail," says one professor. Yet top administrators, including
President Peter P. Smith, are committed to finding new ways to teach,
and show no sign of retreat from their vision. -- TH
Zastrow, Jan. "The Inner Workings of a Document Delivery Pilot
Project" Computers in Libraries 16(9)(October 1996):20-24.
[http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/oct/docdel.htm] -- The Emergency
Medical Services Document Delivery Pilot Project
(http://lama.kcc.hawaii.edu/ems/illdoc.html) is the third installment
of a three part project at Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu,
Hawaii, covering bibliographic instruction, remote access to CD-ROM
databases and document delivery. Paramount to the project's goals was
that research be free and available to eligible users. Patrons were
able to request documents they found citations for, and receive
photocopies. Because of the scope of this project, copyright violation
was not an issue. Operating on a very small budget, this project was
able to fill all document requests, though lack of funds made it
difficult, when documents were not locally available. Based on the
success of this project, the first integrated interlibrary loan system
for KCC will be partially funded and expanded next year. -- CJC
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 7(11) (November 1996) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright (C) 1996
by the Library, University of California, Berkeley. All rights
reserved.
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