textfiles/magazines/CURRENTCITIES/2000.11-3

                              _Current Cites_
    
                        Volume 11, no. 3, March 2000
                                      
                      Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
                                      
           The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
                             ISSN: 1060-2356 -
        http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.3.html
   
      Contributors: Terry Huwe, Michael Levy, Leslie Myrick,
    Margaret Phillips, Jim Ronningen, Lisa Rowlison, Roy Tennant 
   
   Arms, William Y. Digital Libraries MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 2000. -
   As the founder of D-Lib Magazine, Arms certainly has enough
   credentials to attempt this book. The problem is that it's clear that
   he hasn't ever had to keep the doors of a real library open. The book
   is a hodge-podge of history, technologies, and research projects, but
   by the end you may not be any clearer about how to build functional
   digital library collections and services, and you certainly won't have
   any idea about how to integrate digital library collections with
   existing print ones, or virtual services with actual ones. As an
   overview, it may be useful to have a brief explanation of a particular
   technology, but it would help if some criteria for decisionmaking were
   included. The index is overly selective. - RT
   
   Cliff, Peter. "The Oxford English Dictionary Online"
   (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/oed-review/) and New, Juliet.
   "'The World's Greatest Dictionary' Goes Online,"
   (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/oed-online/) Ariadne Issue 23
   (March 23, 2000). See also free tour of the online OED at
   http://oed.com/tour/. - The UKOLN-based journal Ariadne features two
   informative articles covering the March 14th release of the OED Online
   Edition, one an announcement from a member of the OED team, and the
   other a user survey by a member of UKOLN staff. The venerable Oxford
   English Dictionary now exists in three recensions: the original
   fascicles spanning the period from 1884 to 1928; a 1989 second
   edition, which consolidated further supplemental entries, but without
   revising extant materials; and now an online version, the fruit of a
   core group of about 300 OED staff, with technical support from
   Stanford-based High Wire Press. The OED Online will benefit from a
   20-year, 55-million-dollar program of revision, which will take into
   account recent advances in research, for instance, in the field of
   etymology. It will also encompass the addition of some 9000 words
   researched over the last decade, an ambitious 3000 new words per
   quarter during the year 2000, and untold thousands more through to the
   end of the revision period, in 2010. Planned additions could actually
   double the dictionary's present length. Whereas dictionary thumbers
   might well bewail the curtailment of browsability and of the joys of
   serendipitous discovery (only one word can be accessed on screen at a
   time), the online OED promises to compensate with wildly increased
   accessibility and searching through hyperlinks, full-text search with
   wildcard features, and synonym finders. Some solace to dictionary
   browsers may be found in the 25 side-barred links provided to entries
   in direct proximity to the queried word, according to how they were
   sorted: alphabetically, chronologically, and so on. Another nice
   feature, of interest to historical lexicographers and others, is the
   ability to compare the treatment of any given lexeme amongst the three
   different editions. The major downside seems to be that the licensing
   costs for such a gargantuan undertaking are bound to be, in a word,
   prohibitive, starting at $550/individual, $795/institutional. - LM
   
   Coyle, Karen. "The Virtual Union Catalog: A Comparative Study"
   D-Lib Magazine 6(3) (March 2000) 
   (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march00/coyle/03coyle.html) and Dovey, Matthew 
   J. "So You Want to Build a Union Catalogue?" Ariadne 23 (March 2000)
   (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue23/dovey/). - These two articles both
   look at how libraries can create union catalogs -- either virtually
   (simultaneous searching of multiple catalog systems) or physically.
   Dovey covers differences between the two models, and identifies where
   each is relatively good or bad. Coyle's piece is the outcome of a
   recent effort to decide how best to replace the aging MELVYL
   catalog, the crowning achievement of the University of California
   libraries. In testing a possible virtual union catalog replacement for
   MELVYL, Coyle identified four areas that would require more testing
   and analysis before determining if a virtual union catalog could
   replace MELVYL: 1) database consistency and search accuracy (searches
   of different catalog systems must retrieve comparable items), 2)
   system availability (individual systems must be available 24x7), 3)
   capacity planning for campus OPACs and the network (a virtual union
   catalog would place a heavier load on campus network infrastructure),
   and 4) sorting, merging, and duplicate removal. - RT
   
   Gladney, Henry M. "Are Intellectual Property Rights a Digital
   Dilemma? Controversial Topics and International Aspects" iMP:
   Information Impacts Magazine (February 2000)
   (http://www.cisp.org/imp/february_2000/02_00gladney.htm) - As one of
   the Committee members who authored the report "The Digital
   Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age" (see:
   http://books.nap.edu/html/digital_dilemma/) published by the Computer
   Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), Gladney's article touches
   on topical aspects of the Report which did not reach Committee
   consensus. In an intellectually biting tone Gladney brings to light
   some of the controversial issues surrounding intellectual property
   rights, and takes a non-partisan role in exposing some of the rhetoric
   of both copyright maximalists as well as copyright minimalists.
   Sections on the ideological meanings of copyright, the limits of fair
   use, distinctions between private use and piracy, and viewing
   copyrighted materials in light of the 1997 No Electronic Theft (NET)
   Act make for engaging reading. For example, as Gladney points out,
   loading a copyrighted work into RAM for viewing via the web
   constitutes a "copy" of copyrighted material and as such, users may
   unwittingly be in violation of section 506(a)(2) of the Act -- which
   calls for fines and imprisonment. However, examples such as this
   explify the reasoning behind the Committee's conclusion that
   legislative remedies ought to hold off in favor of accumulating
   further experience with both digital IP issues and technological
   solutions/developments. Gladney's examples of copyright conundrums and
   his articulate explication of their surrounding legal environment
   makes this a valuable and easy to read article. Additionally, the
   international treatment of the subject creates a broader context in
   which to view the U.S. stance. A significant bibliography points users
   to most of the key articles, papers, and reports on the subject. - LR
   
   Morrison, Alan, Michael Popham, and Karen Wikander. "Creating and
   Documenting Electronic Texts: A Guide to Good Practice" AHDS Guides to
   Good Practice. London: Arts and Humanities Data Service, 2000
   (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/documents/creating/). - Every publication I've
   seen to come out of the Arts and Humanities Data Service has been
   top-notch. This one is no different, and in fact should stand as one
   of the best explications of digitizing textual material for some time
   to come. The completely online publication takes you from initial
   considerations (analysing the text) through digitization and markup to
   documentation and metadata. The staff of the Oxford Text Archive
   have been doing this since well before the web, and their experience
   shows. If you're digitizing textual material, run, don't walk to the
   one resource that will help you more than any other. - RT
   
   Museums and the Web 2000. International Conference by Archives and
   Museum Informatics, Pittsburgh, PA.
   (http://www.archimuse.com/mw2000/). - This web site epitomizes one of
   the great things about the web. Here is a conference, which at the
   time of this writing hasn't happened yet, and meanwhile most of the
   papers of the presenters (over 45 of them) are available online. Those
   of us who can't make it to the conference can nonetheless attend
   "virtually," albeit without the hallway chats and in-person networking
   over drinks. If you have anything to do with a Museum web site, the
   papers here will be interesting and informative. If you have anything
   to do with a web site at all, there may still be something of use here
   as well. If you are interested in past papers presented at this
   conference, see http://www.archimuse.com/mw.html. - RT
   
   Peterson, Ivars. "Beyond Hits and Page Views" JEP: THe Journal
   of Electronic Publishing 5 (3) (March 2000)
   (http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-03/peterson.html) - Most articles
   about web log analysis portray it as a powerful tool in the hands of
   e-commerce marketers, but Peterson has shown how it can also be
   fruitfully wielded in the hands of scholarly journal editors. This
   article is a particularly good read for any scholarly publisher whose
   interest in log analysis might stop short at a tally of hits and page
   views to add pleasing statistics to a grant report. Peterson, the
   online editor of Science News Online
   (http://www.sciencenews.org/), has demonstrated here how careful
   analysis of daily traffic logs has helped him to tailor the content of
   his site to provide timely delivery of relevant information to his
   audience and thereby ensure repeat visitors. For instance, the perusal
   of log analysis reports can give a picture of the amount of time spent
   during a visit, in order to ascertain which articles are being most
   carefully read, or perhaps whether users are reading onscreen or
   printing pages to read later. On a different level, they can also be
   used to track a visitor's trails through a site, or from a referring
   site to one's own. In the former case, analyses can be made of site
   architecture; in the latter, one can get a sense of who is linking to
   one's site. This sort of exercise can produce amusing results, e.g.
   the discovery that a perfume company was providing a busy link to a
   Science News article on pheromones. - LM
   
   Rosenzweig, Roy. "The Riches of Hypertext for Scholarly Journals"
   The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 17, 2000
   (http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i28/28b00401.htm) - Rosenzweig,
   Director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George
   Mason University (http://chnm.gmu.edu/), a collaboration between GMU
   and the American Social History Project at the CUNY Center for Media
   and Learning, uses experiences gained from various CHNM projects to
   map the face and the direction of the new digital media. Because of
   the extended and comfy-chair-seeking readerly shelf-life of humanities
   scholarship (over against, say, physics or medicine), coupled with the
   uncomfortable experience of onscreen reading, Rosenzweig does not
   foresee cyberjournals replacing their print analogues anytime soon,
   but rather, standing as a "digital supplement." With reference to
   Janet H. Murray's formulation, in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future
   of Narrative in Cyberspace, of hypertext's potential for additive and
   expressive form, Rosenzweig explores what, exactly, cyberjournals
   allow us to do differently from print journals, culling examples from
   CHNM-sponsored projects. It has been clear from the beginning that
   online scholarship can offer more -- more material behind every
   hyperlink, and a far wider field of dissemination. This primarily
   additive aspect is well demonstrated by the Interpretation of the
   Declaration of Independence Through Translation project
   (http://chnm.gmu.edu/declaration/), which serves as a prime model of
   Rosenzweig's conception of hypermedia as archival "digital
   supplement." Whether online journals can achieve something radically
   different has been explored in an American Quarterly project
   (http://chnm.gmu.edu/aq/) featuring four experimental hyper-essays
   ("Dreaming Arnold Schwarzeneggar" especially stands out) which all, in
   their own way, press the envelope of scholarly form. In the end, as
   Rosenzweig suggests, it would seem that at some level, more =
   different. The images he conjures to describe how cyberjournals will
   look and function -- clone, hybrid, digital supplement -- foreground
   the potent marginality of media which promise, as he claims, to
   rewrite the scholarly social contract between readers and writers. -
   LM
   
   Wurman, Richard Saul. Understanding USA
   (http://www.understandingusa.com/) Newport, RI: TED Conferences, 1999.
   - This work, as complete on the web as it is in print, manages to
   embody some of what's best and worst about the latest uses of
   information technology. Wurman, who refers to himself as an
   information architect, envisioned a project which would address a
   perceived overabundance of data about the United States and come up
   with graphical ways to clarify the information, leading to a greater
   understanding. Picture a standard reference title such as The
   Statistical Abstract of the United States
   (http://www.census.gov/statab/www/) worked over by a group of
   creative, cutting-edge designers, skilled in information display
   through computer graphics and typography. Visually stimulating it is,
   with a wide variety of pictorial representations for statistics in
   demographics, government spending, crime, etc. Desktop computing power
   has vastly increased the realm of possibilities for designers, and
   here that's clearly a double-edged sword: it's become very easy to use
   this wide array of tools to promote subjective interpretation and
   selective emphasis, which are common in this work and take away from
   its credibility. Statistics taken out of their original context and
   given visual prominence take on an aura of being 'more true.' For
   example, on a page about information anxiety, close to a picture of a
   woman holding her head, is the debatable assertion that "75% to 90% of
   all visits to physicians are stress-related," accompanied by the
   skimpy citation "National Mental Health Association, 1997." It's there
   in boldface, in something which claims to be a reference work,
   encouraging the reader to take it at face value. But if you have some
   doubts (like maybe this notion is predicated upon some hypothetical,
   impossibly stress-free world of no hunger, war, debt, divorce or
   traffic jams) there's no context here to help you -- you'll have to
   dig elsewhere. In a brief, laudatory article titled "Information
   as if Understanding Mattered"
   (http://www.fastcompany.com/online/32/benchmark.html) in the March
   2000 issue of Fast Company (http://www.fastcompany.com/homepage/)
   magazine, one of the designers, Nancye Green, is quoted thus: "People
   don't care about cold facts. They care about pictures or stories that
   are connected to themselves in some way. That's what learning is all
   about. That's what leads to understanding." The phrase 'dumbing down'
   comes to mind here, but maybe that's a little harsh. Those of us who
   help people find information know that they do indeed want cold facts,
   including numbers, and they want them complete, accurate and
   verifiable. For people doing such research, the fact that a dataset
   can be rendered now as a graphic resembling some multicolored mutant
   eggplant may be amusing, but not highly useful. So take a look at this
   collision of information technology, statistics and graphics, but
   don't expect a reputable scholarly resource. Treat it as
   great-looking, browsable infotainment. - JR
     _________________________________________________________________
   
            Current Cites 11(2) (February 2000) ISSN: 1060-2356
    Copyright <20> 2000 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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