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Current Cities Volume 11 Number 02
Current Cites
Volume 11, no. 2, February 2000
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.2.html
Contributors: Terry Huwe, Michael Levy, Leslie Myrick , Margaret
Phillips, Jim Ronningen, Lisa Rowlison, Roy Tennant
Atkins, Helen, _et. al._ "Reference Linking with DOIs: A Case Study
D-Lib Magazine 6(2) (February 2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/02risher.html) - Digital Object
Identifiers (DOIs, see http://www.doi.org/) were developed in 1997 by
the Association of American Publishers as a persistent identifier for
digital objects. DOIs can be considered roughly analogous to ISBNs in
that it is a unique ID for a specific work, but also more complicated
than an ISBN since it can identify article-level objects. To make DOIs
work in a web environment, there must be a way to take the unique
identifier and resolve it into a pointer to that item wherever it may
exist. Therefore, a key piece of the infrastructure to support DOIs is
some sort of resolution service, which this article outlines. The
present DOI resolution service is a prototype metadata database system
dubbed DOI-X. It is based on XML and the CNRI Handle System (see
http://www.handle.net/ for more information). For anyone interested
in persistent linking to digital objects, this work is well worth
watching. - RT
Bambrick, Jane. "Dreams of the Perfect Database" EContent 23(1)
(February 2000): p. 21-24. How could I resist citing an article that
begins: "Last night I dreamt of the 'perfect database' again"? This
essay offers, in the form of a dream vision, a primer of good database
and interface design. As someone who entertains plenty of dreams about
right-on databases and nightmares about recalcitrant or ill-designed
ones, I was happily drawn into Bambrick's vision of precisely what
features might add up to the perfect database to accommodate the needs
of students, faculty and librarians, and even those outside of
academia. Needless to say, the Ur-database she envisions may be "the
stuff of dreams," but any combination of her desiderata would make for
a solid start. EContent is soliciting your dreams, too. - LM
"The Digital Divide" Intellectual Capital 5(6) ( February 10-17, 2000)
(http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue345/main345.asp) This
special issue of Intellectual Capital addresses The Digital Divide,
recently designated by Al Gore as "the number one civil and economic issue."
In the wake of the catastrophic picture painted by the Commerce Department's
report "Falling Through the Net," Clinton's budgetary reaction has
been to earmark some 2 billion for the development of community- and
educational-based technology training in low-income rural and
inner-city areas. This being Intellectual Capital, the concern is
primarily centered on e-commerce and e-business (as well as e-labor),
and most of the articles explore what the balance should be between
depending on government subsidies to overcome the divide and letting
the market offer its own solutions, with heavy emphasis on the latter.
Keith Fulton, in "On the Road to Fat Pipes," examines how business
strategists are beginning to make a connection between fat pipes for
data and fat pipes for human capital development. Citing Ford
Corporation's recent move to provide its labor force with home
computers and training, he lauds the vision of some corporate leaders
to find a solution to the labor divide from within. Maureen Sinhal, in
"A New War on Poverty," examines the dangers inherent in trusting
government subsidies alone to redress the problem. Wary of the
statistical analyses of reports such as "Falling Through the Net,"
she, too, points to a market-based solution and calls for an
assessment of what, precisely, the outcome of lack of computer and web
access meanswill those on the wrong side of the divide be merely
inconvenienced? or left behind? Lee Hubbard, in "A Disingenuous
Divide," offers plenty of statistical studies that show how middle
class African Americans are availing themselves of the web in
ever-increasing numbers. He cites the efforts of Jesse Jackson and
websites such as OneNetNow to make relevant content available for a
burgeoning African American market, suggesting that measuring the
digital divide along strictly racial (vs. economic) lines is
disingenuous. - LM
Durrance, Joan C. and Karen E. Pettigrew. "Community Information: the
Technological Touch" Library Journal (http://www.ljdigital.com/)
125(2) (February 1, 2000): 44-46. - The public library role as a
center for community information has grown with the advent of
electronic access. The authors are currently conducting a study of the
ways in which this function is being performed, and describe their
findings to date. (The URL for their project site is
http://www.si.umich.edu/helpseek/). In the first phase of their
research, hundreds of libraries were surveyed, and the 227 which were
identified as heavily involved in community information were sent
follup surveys; 136 responded. The authors are currently conducting
intensive case studies of three public library systems. Their
narrative here highlights notable development histories and outreach
efforts, with the emphasis on the use of information technology, and
links are given wherever relevant. The article and associated links
comprise a wonderful gateway to resources on the subject. - JR
Guernsey, Lisa. "Suddenly, Everybody's an Expert" New York Times
(February 3, 2000): Section G, p.1. - Guernsey describes the
phenomenon of online experts and web sites, often called expert sites
or knowledge networks. In a twist on traditional library reference
service, Internet users are using real people to answer information
requests - but for a fee. Such expert advice can either be seen as the
"democratization of expertise" or "psuedoresearch." Some sites
generate income by charging fees for their experts, while others make
commissions off goods purchased as a result of expert recommendations.
This opens up a number of issues crucial to information professionals,
including the authenticity and accuracy of information, the
credentials and background of the expert and their objectivity given
potential relationships with commercial enterprises. In particular
these issues assume critical proportions when the advice being sought
is medical. One expert on nutrition described her credentials in the
following way: "It's not my experience that you care about. It's your
problem." Some sites have disclaimers about their responsibility for
harmful advice, others have rating systems similar to online auction
sites in order to build credibility. - ML
Junion-Metz, Gail. Coaching Kids for the Internet: A Guide for
Librarians, Teachers, and Parents. Internet Workshop Series Number 9.
Berkeley, California: Library Solutions Press, 2000. ISBN
1-882208-29-3 (http://www.library-solutions.com/coaching.html). - As a
newly-christened children's librarian (and parent), who works with
teachers on a daily basis, I can wholeheartedly endorse this book on
behalf of each of its intended audiences. Designed as a sequel to K-12
Resources on the Internet, Junion-Metz focuses on the adult as
Internet coach guiding the child. Not only are basic instructional
information and practice exercises included, but also administrative
guidance in planning and acquiring Internet access in schools and
libraries. An accompanying disk includes links to Internet resources
for kids (grouped by subject matter and age ranges), and reference and
instructional resources for teachers, librarians, and parents. An
added bonus is that these links are kept up to date on the author's
web site, which the user has access to via a link on the disk. - TR
Kenney, Anne R. and Oya Y. Rieger. Moving Theory into Practice:
Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives. Mountain View, CA:
Research Libraries Group, 2000
(http://www.rlg.org/preserv/mtip2000.html). - One of the difficulties
of digital library work has been the dearth of solid, practical
information on what to do and how to do it. Lately some very useful
papers, articles, and guidelines have appeared, but so far few books
of any practical use. One of the few that has been useful to digital
library developers was Kenney's earlier work with Stephen Chapman,
Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives. Now Kenney has teamed up
with Oya Rieger to produce this latest workiithat moves what was
largely theory into production, with all of the lessons such a move
entails. In doing so, Kenney and Rieger highlight the knowledge and
experience of dozens of the most experienced and authoritative digital
imaging practitioners. Here you will find down-to-earth practical
advice and proven strategies. The people who have contributed chapters
or sidebars to this book have been through it, and are telling you
what they learned so that you can share their success or avoid their
failure. Don't let the rather steep price put you off -- this book is
worth every penny and should be in the hands of any librarian or
archivist tackling a digital imaging project. - RT
Pace, Andrew L. "Digital Preservation: Everything New is Old Again"
Computers in Libraries (February 2000):p. 55-58.
(http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/feb00/pace.htm) - The February issue
of CIL focuses on "Archiving Considerations for a Digital Age," from
which I will single out Andrew Pace's maiden article in the Coming
Full Circle column as more or less paradigmatic of the discussion that
may be found there. As a sidenote, this issue also contains an
interesting and well-illustrated article by the principle
investigators of the Digital Atheneum project, for which I cited a
different article last month. To paraphrase the callouts for Pace's
Coming Full Circle article, at issue is the preservation of digital
materials as material artifacts. The rhetorical question of the day
has to be: "Are digital materials to be seen as artifacts or simply
intellectual content?" Pace postulates that the vision of the digital
library has so favored a self-concept as a "accessible repository"
that the longevity of the digital object (not to mention any interface
to it) often seems to have taken a back seat to issues of
accessibility. In the end, paradoxically, our capacity to store
digital data is increasing in inverse proportion to the longevity of
the media at hand. He outlines a handful of digital preservation
strategies: 1) Refreshing the physical medium (e.g. from floppy to CD
to DVD); 2) Migration to new software formats; 3) Preservation of
Outdated Technology (e.g. keeping an old Commodore 64 handy, perhaps
down in Special Collections). 4) Digital Archaeology; 5) Emulation
retaining information about the process of digital creation and
access, so that future generations can recreate it using their archaic
Pentium III PCs; and 6) Preservation through Redundancy letting
surrogates stand for the originals. - LM
Pritcher, Lynn. "Ad*Access: Seeking Copyright Permissions for a
Digital Age" D-Lib Magazine 6(2) (February 2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/pritcher/02pritcher.html). - Fear
of copyright infringement and the possibility of lawsuit must be one
of the most common companions of library digitization projects. Unless
a project is focused solely on public domain material, permission to
digitize must often be obtained from the rights holder before work
begins. In this interesting piece, Pritcher describes how the Digital
Scriptorium at Duke University went about receiving permission to
digitize more than 7,000 advertisements from newspapers and magazines
published mainly in the U.S. between 1911 and 1955. Their decisions,
and the reasons for them, are quite interesting and may be useful to
others wishing to do similar projects. The result of their effort can
be seen at the Ad*Access site
(http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess/). - RT
Silberman, Steve. "The Quest for Meaning" Wired (February 2000):
p.173-179. (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.02/autonomy.html) - A
British startup company called Autonomy is using the mathematical
theories of 18th century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes as a basis
for creating sophisticated information retrieval tools. Bayes helped
shape modern probability theory with his method of statistitical
inference - using mathematics to predict the outcome of events.
Basically Bayes theorem takes into account previously held knowledge
as well as new observations to infer the probable occurrence of an
event. In the modern era this Bayesian model allows a computer to
incorporate prior knowledge of millions of events and then build a
base of prior probabilities which can be factored into current
decision-making. In the article Silberman gives the example of the
word penguin that might refer to the bird or the hockey team. If the
word is clustered near words such as ice and South Pole then the
system will infer that it is talking about the bird. In fact, even if
the word penguin is not explicitly mentioned the software can still
recognize that the text is about a penguin given the clustering of
words. For retrieval tools prior knowledge of what most users are
trying to locate can be incorporated into retrieval strategies, with
the Bayesian system "teaching" the computer about relationships
between words. Various software programs are being developed that
would create custom-tailored pages based on past preferences and
searching, predicting how a user would react to a new information
source. The hope is that such sophisticated software will allow us to
navigate through the morass of information sources. - ML
Van de Sompel, Herbert and Carl Lagoze. "The Santa Fe Convention of
the Open Archives Initiative" D-Lib Magazine 6(2) (February 2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-oai/02vandesompel-oai
.html). - The Open Archives initiative is a collaboration among
several successful electronic preprint (e-print) archives to develop
an interoperable technical infrastructure to allow a user at any one
e-print archive to transparently query another e-print archive. The
Santa Fe Convention (http://www.openarchives.org/sfc/sfc_entry.htm)
defines a set of agreements that form the essential organizational and
technical infrastructure to achieve interoperability. Pieces of this
infrastructure include the Open Archives Metadata Set (OAMS, see
http://www.openarchives.org/sfc/sfc_oams.htm), a set of nine metadata
elements to assist in resource discovery, the O pen Archives Dienst
Subset (a subset of the full Dienst protocol developed by the NCSTRL
project, http://www.ncstrl.org/, see
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/dienst/protocols/OpenArchivesDienst.ht
m), and an organizational framework. The Open Archives initiative is
an important development, and one that bears watching. - RT
Van de Sompel, Herbert, _et. al._ "The UPS Prototype: An Experimental
End-User Service across E-Print Archives" D-Lib Magazine 6(2)
(February 2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-ups/02vandesompel-ups
.html). - The Universal Preprint Service Prototype (UPS, see
http://ups.cs.odu.edu/) was developed to demonstrate interoperability
between disparate archives of electronic preprints (e-prints),
specifically for a meeting of e-print archive developers in Santa Fe
in October 1999 (see the citation for the Santa Fe Convention in this
issue of Current Cites). The prototype gathered nearly 200,000 records
for e-prints from several different archives and made them available
for searching through the same interface. The experience gained from
this project was fed directly into the deliberations of the attendees
to the Santa Fe meeting, which no doubt contributed to a more useful
and realistic result from that meeting. - RT
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 11(2) (February 2000) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright (c) 2000 by the Library, University of California,
Berkeley. _All rights reserved._
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