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Current Cities Volume 11 Number 05
Current Cites
Volume 11, no. 5, May 2000
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.5.html
Contributors: Terry Huwe, Michael Levy, Leslie Myrick, Jim
Ronningen, Lisa Rowlison, Roy Tennant
Austen, Ian. "Study Reveals Web As Loosely Woven" New York Times (May
18, 2000) Section G, p.8. - In a review of a new study of the web, a
picture emerges -- one which has been clear to librarians for a while
-- of a phenomenon "less like an elaborately interwoven community and
more like the vast bureaucracy in Kafka's Castle: a mountain of
disconnected information, lost files and frustrating dead ends." The
study was presented at recent conferences in Amsterdam and Dallas and
focused on web links. The study concluded that when trying to reach a
specific destination if one only uses links this fails about 75% of
the time; only 28% of web sites are strongly connected to the web, i.e
have a substantial number of links to and from other sites. Another
interesting consequence of the "weakly linked sites" is that many web
crawlers determine the value of a site based on the number of links on
it. By graphing their results the researchers drew a map of the web
that looks less like a spiders web and more like a bow tie with pages
in the center knot linking to pages on the right side. More recent
sites (on the left side of the bow) link into the center but the
center does not generally link back out to them. In an interesting
comment, the author of the study under review, Raymie Stata, suggests
that the average user wouldn't find the web compelling if it didn't
have links because it would resemble a database such as Lexis-Nexis.
What is forgotten in this comment is that Lexis-Nexis is a highly
structured and well-organized collection of databases making it
actually much easier to find relevant information. - ML
Blume, Harvey. "Open Science Online" The American Prospect
11(10) (March 27-April 10, 2000):44-47.
(http://www.americanprospect.com/archives/V11-10/blume-h.html) - Blume
uses the example of PubMed Central to discuss the issue of
electronic scholarly publishing. PubMed Central was supposed to be an
electronic archive administered by the NIH to give free access to
biomedical research in the form of full text articles and research
reports even before they appeared in a final printed form. The project
came under fire from the New England Journal of Medicine as
threatening "the evaluation and orderly dissemination of new clinical
studies." In other words the dissemination of unreviewed research and
the ability of traditional publishing outlets to adapt to new
technological possibilities. Comparing this type of scholarly
electronic publishing with the open source movement, ie. Linux, Blume
suggests digital projects such as Pub Med Central will still allow
traditional journals to frame and interpret data, and that this
expertise will be the equivalent of an open source business making
profits from documentation and customer support as opposed to the sale
of sofware. - ML
Carvajal, Doreen. "Four Giants Set to Embrace Electronic
Publishing" The New York Times (online edition)
(http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/05/biztech/articles/23books.ht
ml) - With the digital publishing market predicted to reach critical
mass in two to three years, three major publishing houses and
Microsoft have decided to catch the wave that has already launched
hundreds of smaller dot.com ventures. Carvajal outlines the details of
an e-publishing partnership between Microsoft, Simon and Schuster, and
Random House that hopes to propel itself to the wave's crest with the
giveaway of an e-version of Crichton's popular time-traveling thriller
Timeline, followed by the publication of a series of Star Trek titles.
On a less than "tubular" note, these texts will be accessible only
through Microsoft's proprietary reader software. Meanwhile, with an
eye to tailoring its product to the quirks of modern-day reading and
readers, Time Warner's iPublish site is poised to capture the Palm-
and Rocket-book-wielding commuter-train market by proposing a series
of shorter works of fiction and non-fiction, condensed works, and
serialized pieces by known authors. Aiming primarily at an under-40
readership, iPublish's sister site, iWrite, will tap the burgeoning
"Who Wants to be a Writer?" crowd, accepting and vetting manuscripts
without a fee from undiscovered hopefuls. - LM
Coffman, Steve and Susan McGlamery. "The Librarian and Mr. Jeeves"
American Libraries 31(5) (May 2000): 66-69. - Coffman is
well-known for stirring the pot (see his previously cited
articles,
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/bibondemand.cgi?query=coffman
), and this piece is no exception. Coffman is ably joined by Susan
McGlamery, another forward-thinking librarian who shares Coffman's
(and others) vision of 24x7 reference service. In this piece they look
at existing commercial web reference services like Ask Jeeves and
Webhelp, and wonder why we should abandon the unsuspecting public
to companies with a commercial interest which have access to only
web-based information and that possess only the most superficial
understanding of how to go about helping people find what they need.
They assert, "if we hope to continue to serve as honest brokers and
offer a viable alternative to the Ask Jeeveses and Webhelps of the
world, then we must adopt the tools and strategies of our competitors
and join our patrons on the web." Coffman and McGlamery go on to
describe an innovative project they are managing in Southern
California, funded in part by grants, to do just that. The project is
using Webline (recently bought out by Cisco Systems) software, which
provides sophisticated tools well beyond "chat" to enable librarians
to interact with patrons. If you work in a library, this project is
clearly one to watch. - RT
Desmarais, Norman. The ABCs of XML: The Librarian's Guide to the
eXtensible Markup Language. New Technology Press, Houston: 2000. - -
Desmarais has written a clear, concise guide to XML that should be of
great use to not just librarians, but anyone interested in this
important standard. In fact, the only chapter focusing on potential
uses for XML is inexplicably given over to e-commerce -- a rather
strange choice for a book aimed at librarians. I would much rather
have seen "XML and its Potential for Libraries." But that is a minor
quibble, and even completely skipping the chapter does little to
diminish its substantial worth. What makes this book so good is not
how big it is, but how little. At around 150 pages of text (and less
than 130 if you don't count that useless chapter), Desmarais has done
you a serious favor. He has boiled down a complicated topic to its
essentials, and doesn't waste your time with the stuff and bother that
plague many XML books. This will not be your last book on XML, but it
would be hard to do better than this for your first. - RT
Goldman, Roy, Jason McHugh, and Jennifer Widom. "Lore: A Database
Management System for XML" Dr. Dobb's Journal (April 2000)
(http://www.ddj.com/articles/2000/0004/0004i/0004i.htm). - XML is
clearly taking the world of business by storm, if not the rest of us.
Microsoft is into it bigtime, and in Silicon Valley you couldn't chuck
a stone without hitting some dotcom that is betting the farm on it. So
given this stampede, wouldn't you think we would be awash in database
products optimized for structured text? Well, mostly what is available
tends to be legacy database systems such as Oracle and Sybase that are
being re-engineered in some way to accommodate XML. Lore, a research
project at Stanford, is unique (as far as I'm aware) in that it is
engineered from the ground up for XML. For example, you don't create a
structure into which to load the XML data -- a typical SQL thing to do
-- you don't create a structure at all. Lore does not assume any
particular structure -- the data defines the structure for you. Lore,
in other words, was constructed with XML in mind, not tweaked to
accommodate it. If you're working with XML, or hope to, you should
check this out. - RT
Hitch, Leslie P. "Aren't We Judging Virtual Universities by Outdated
Standards?" Journal of Academic Librarianship 26(1) (January 2000):
21. - An interesting look at the role of distance learning in the
context of traditional university values. What it means to be learner
centered and how we define the role of faculty in "teaching" or merely
"training" students in the online environment, the outmoded concept of
the credit hour as a means for defining and translating completed
student work among and between institutions, as well as a good chunk
of library issues - where the most significant appear to be not how
and when to provide distance learners with information, but how to
provide them with the necessary information literacy skills to help
them plow through the ever growing quantities of information available
to them online. Intriguing for the implications of library technology
in contributing to the developing definitions of library user services
in the increasingly online context of higher education. - LR
King, David, "Specialized Search Engines: Alternatives to the Big
Guys" Online 24 (3) (May 2000)
(http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL2000/king5.html) - The May
edition of Online Magazine, which regularly features Greg R. Notess'
excellent monthly column(s) on what's happening under the hood of
various search engines, offers a slew of articles on different aspects
of web searching. As a group they are sure to make riveting reading
for the wireless palm-wielding, train-commuting information
technologist, along with the rest of us. As a representative sampling,
I will single out David King's article on specialized search engines
which focus on a particular subject, file format, region, and so on.
Despite the touted filtering success of killer sorting algorithms on
the millions of pages being indexed by the Big Guys' robots and
crawlers, some searchers are increasingly availing themselves of
engines that are more tailored to their own needs, and that appear to
some extent at least to have benefited from human vetting and
annotation. As King puts it, why founder in the vast reaches of Super
Wal-Mart searching for that special item, when you can find it quickly
and painlessly in the specialty shop on the corner, and perhaps even
get some trusted product information from a knowledgeable clerk in the
bargain? King next outlines some of the features of nearly a score of
specialized engines in the fields of Health Care, Law, Science, and
Multimedia. In the library of Babel that the web is fast becoming, if
you wish to find a specialized search engine to suit your needs you
will have to leap into the mis-en-abyme, so to speak, of proliferating
search engines to locate search engines ... ad infinitum. A few are
listed in the article, e.g. Search Engine Guide at
http://searchengineguide.com; Search Engine Watch:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/links/; and Invisible Web:
http://invisibleweb.com/. - LM
Lynch, Clifford. "From Automation to Transformation" EDUCAUSE
Review (January/February 2000): 60-68
(http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm00/pp060068.pdf). - This piece
summarizes the recent transformation of academic libraries from
bastions of print to highly computerized bastions of print, with a
layer of digital on top. Anyone who has lived through these
interesting times will likely both recognize his descriptions and be
amazed at what we have accomplished. Those who haven't been a part of
it may be surprised to realize just how long and how thoroughly
libraries have been involved with computerization -- first to automate
existing procedures, then to create or use new ways of providing
collections and services. For example -- slowly, quietly, and
thoroughly, librarians around the world have created a monolithic
union catalog of library holdings using a computer standard created by
the library community in the 1960s -- long before most people had ever
come in contact with a computer. But far from resting on these
laurels, Lynch suggests that "[academic] libraries must now turn their
attention to defining their missions and activities in relationship to
their transforming context -- the information technology revolution in
teaching, learning, and research." - RT
Moen, William E. and John Carlo Bertot. "Interoperability for
Information Access: Technical Standards and Policy Considerations"
Journal of Academic Librarianship 26:2 (March 2000): 129. - Moen
provides a brief look at the role of standards in libraries, from MARC
to TCP/IP. Bemoaning the somewhat limited activity of the library
community on national and international standards making groups such
as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web
Consortium, Moen asks whether standards development (such as with XML)
is moving on a course which is compatible with future library
directions. A brief discussion of the common role of Z39.50 in system
interoperability is provided. However, larger and more interesting
questions of the role of system interoperability in the face of
unified user gateway interfaces such as those variously termed "My
Library" or "My Gateway," in addition to the policy and technical
questions surrounding interoperability in a environement of continued
proliferation of databases and other online tools, are not addressed.
- LR
Sherman, Chris. "The Future Revisited: What's New with Web Search"
Online 24 (3) (May 2000)
(http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL2000/sherman5.html) - As the
author himself is well-aware, to prognosticate about web futures is a
risky business. However, Sherman dares to look at the daily onslaught
of web developments and pick out some important signs of what's to
come: convergence (access with content, with that mix popping up in
new devices), massive search engines which can take bigger bites from
the smorgasbord of web pages, more sophisticated
human/machine-compiled directories, systems adaptable to personal
needs, browser-free searching, search input capability increasing from
phrases to large chunks of text, and a few AI gee-whizzes. Each idea
is clearly explained and related to real-world examples. Includes a
complete list of relevant URLs. - JR
Shneiderman, Ben. "Universal Usability" Communications of the ACM
(http://www.acm.org/cacm/) 43(5) (May 2000):84-91. - There's been a
lot written about achieving universal access, so computer technology
becomes as ubiquitous as TV, but "there it is, use it" doesn't work as
the final step in the process when a significant percentage of the
public can't take advantage of it. Shneiderman advocates a research
agenda for making universal usability the goal, and focuses on three
challenges for attaining it: adapting to technology variety, accepting
the fact of user diversity, and bridging gaps in user knowledge. With
a realistic attitude about the technology enthusiast's fear that
accomodating low-skilled users will result in a lowest common
denominator system, he cites cases which demonstrate success in
multi-level implementations, and the unexpected universal benefits of
innovations which originally targeted only those who needed a little
extra help. Though the primary audience for this article is software
designers, those of us who are information providers for a broad
spectrum of people will find this article thought-provoking and
encouraging. - JR
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 11(5) (May 2000) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright © 2000 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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