textfiles/magazines/CURRENTCITIES/2000.11-6

                              _Current Cites_
   
                        Volume 11, no. 6, June 2000
                                      
                      Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
                                      
           The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
                             ISSN: 1060-2356 -
        http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.6.html
   
    Contributors: Terry Huwe, Michael Levy, Leslie Myrick , Jim
                 Ronningen, Lisa Rowlison, Roy Tennant 
   
   Adam, Nabil R., Vijayalakshmi Atluri, Igg Adiwijaya. "SI in Digital
   Libraries" Communications of the ACM 43(6) (June 2000): 64-72
   (http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/journals/cacm/2000-43-6/p64-adam/p64
   -adam.pdf) . - Digital libraries today can be characterized as bundles
   of multiple, heterogeneous information sources, with differing schema
   for storage, organization and access. This article provides
   conceptualizing strategies for planners who must achieve system
   integration (SI) at the user interface. Specific issues addressed
   include the nature of data structure and quantity of data, frequent
   modification of data sources, multimedia and the variety of user
   patterns and capabilities. Three popular integration methods are
   described: Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA),
   mediators and agents, with the caveat given that "these three
   approaches are not orthogonal in the sense that a mediator may employ
   CORBA and an agent may use mediators." The application of solution
   schemes in the digital libraries of Stanford, University of Illinois
   and University of Michigan is described, and the authors also detail
   their own work on DigiTerra, an environmental digital library at
   Rutgers. - JR
   
   Arms, Caroline R. "Keeping Memory Alive: Practices for Preserving
   Digital Content at the National Digital Library Program of the Library
   of Congress" RLG DigiNews 4(3) (June 15, 2000)
   (http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-3.html). - It is likely
   that the Library of Congress is overseeing the single largest library
   digitization effort on the planet (producing over 14GB of new digital
   files per workday). And what luck for the rest of us -- they
   frequently share what they learn, the processes they create, the best
   practices they set, and even their Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to
   digitization vendors (see http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ftp
   files.html). In this article Caroline Arms continues her tradition of
   promulgating information vital to those attempting similar projects
   (for example, see other articles of hers cited in Current Cites).
   In this case she describes LC efforts at preserving the digital
   material that LC is creating while building a National Digital
   Library. Of particular use is a chart that briefly describes all the
   current accepted digital preservation methods, all of which may be
   logically employed in the course of preserving any particular item or
   to recover an item that hasn't been properly preserved by using these
   methods. - RT
   
   Baker, Angee. "The Impact of Consortia on Database Licensing"
   Computers in Libraries 20(6) (June 2000): 47-50. - The author is
   the director of electronic information services at the Southeastern
   Library Network (SOLINET), and as such has negotiated deals for
   consortia and individual libraries in a ten-state region. Confronted
   with the thicket of problems arising from difficult pricing models,
   the growing need for cost-recovery by libraries, cost-allocation
   between members and overlapping consortial interests, she still
   (amazingly enough) has faith that coordination is always possible and
   that consortia, libraries, publishers and aggregators can cooperate
   and make progress with interests in common. Her observations and
   strategies make worthwhile reading for anyone who is trying to keep up
   with the collection development of electronic sources. That's the
   theme of the June issue, so look for many valuable related articles as
   well. - JR
   
   Beebe, Linda and Barbara Myers. "Digital Workflow: Managing the
   Process Electronically" JEP: The Journal of Electronic Publishing
   5(4) (June 2000) (http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-05/sheridan.html).
   - The digital revolution is altering publishing no less than it is
   altering libraries. What publishers do every day to add value to
   submitted content, package it, distribute it, market it, and archive
   it, is undergoing massive change. This article, which was originally
   written as a "white paper" for Sheridan Press, does an excellent job
   of describing the new digital workflow. The narrative is interspersed
   with boxes that define and describe each step in the digital
   publication process. A glossary is included. - RT
   
   Bolt, Nate. "The Binary Proletariat" First Monday 5(5) (May
   2000) (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_5/bolt/). - Bolt
   deconstructs the glittering promise of a "dot.com" lifestyle and finds
   some familiar problems for the working class: longer hours, more
   stress, and other dirty little secrets. Taking familiar paths to
   analyze capitalism in the digital era, he has provided an interesting
   perspective on the essentially unreformed capitalism of the "new
   economy." Some of this material will be familiar to readers because of
   the great deal of attention that the "new economy" is receiving, but
   it's presented in readable and entertaining style. - TH
   
   Burnard, Lou. "Text Encoding for Interchange: A New Consortium"
   Ariadne 24 (June 2000) (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/tei/) -
   In this article, Burnard gives a brief history of the TEI
   Initiative and how it grew, specifically, how it has evolved into a
   full-fledged consortium under the collective aegis of Oxford, UVA,
   Brown University and the University of Bergen in Norway. To quote a
   bit of the mission statement: "The goal of the new TEI Consortium is
   to establish a permanent home for the TEI as a democratically
   constituted, academically and economically independent,
   self-sustaining, non-profit organization." The TEI standard has been
   adopted by a host of American, British and EU institutions such as the
   NEH, the MLA and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Board, and has
   established itself as the standard of choice for the production of
   online scholarly texts, reference works, and editions in the
   humanities. The materials and tools (e.g. the handy Pizza Chef DTD
   generator), which have been served off the UIC website, will soon be
   moved to a new location (http://www.tei-c.org). At the time of
   writing he offered a preview at http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/TEI/ , but
   the tei-c.org site is already well under way. - LM
   
   "Content and Publishing" Webtechniques (July 2000)
   (http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/07/). The feature topic of
   the July 2000 issue of Webtechniques is Content and Publishing, from
   which I am singling out two related articles on using XML to
   facilitate content creation, management and delivery. In
   "Separating Body from Soul: XML Makes Changing Easy"
   (http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/07/floyd/), Michael Floyd
   offers an excellent primer on how to set up an XML document delivery
   system on an existing infrastructure that uses a web server as the
   delivery system, a database for storing some information, XML
   documents for storing other information, and seeks to serve up output
   to any sort of browser. He gives an ingredient list of the basic
   components: XML parser, XSL processor, document repository, a
   collection of document schema, and a collection of XSL stylesheets. He
   then launches into some detail in presenting three different gateways
   for serving up dynamic XML pages, whether through CGI, Java Servlets
   or ASP. As the title hints, by using ASP and the Rocket XML framework,
   Floyd claims to do the Cartesian split one better, with the separation
   of data from processing logic and HTML presentation. The article
   concludes with a discussion of some packaged solutions, including
   DataChannel, Vignette, StoryServer, and Poet's CMS (Content Management
   Suite). Once you've transformed your infrastructure, Peter Fischer
   explains how to convert all those HTML files into something that can
   be served up in an XML environment in "Migrating from HTML to XML"
   (http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/07/fischer/). Whether you
   decide to take the intermediary step of cleaning up your HTML to
   conform to the XHTML standard, or decide to take the leap right into
   XML, tools are becoming more readily available to help in the
   endeavor, from the freeware tools such as HTML Tidy or (the more
   user-friendly) HTML-Kit for XHTML conversion, to XSpLit from
   Percussion Software for XML. - LM
   
   Elliott, Laura, "How the Oxford English Dictionary Went Online"
   Ariadne 24 (June 2000)
   (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue24/oed-tech/) - It seems I can't forego
   citing yet another interesting article in Ariadne on the online
   OED, this time: a technical look under the hood. Elliott shares a
   few more details about the markup history of the dictionary in its
   various avatars, and the java-enabled, Sybase-powered machinations of
   their partner Highwire Press. This article appears to be in some
   sense an apologia for the simplicity or economy of the final
   interface: there are no plugins, special fonts, or browser-tweaking,
   etc. required to render special characters; and behind the scenes lies
   a rather simple DTD. For those who still weigh the feasibility of the
   use of gifs for special characters over Unicode (and lean towards the
   former), she has a short success story. And for those who are
   wondering what the tab might have been for this glorious undertaking,
   you'll find the skinny on the cost. - LM
   
   Guernsey, Lisa. "The Library As the Latest Web Venture" New York
   Times (June 15, 2000): Section G, p.1. - Focusing on
   NetLibrary.com, Ebrary.com and Questia media this article
   looks at electronic library projects. Unlike the budding electronic
   book market which focuses on downloading to handheld devices these
   players are concentrating on the scholarly market represented by
   institutions such as libraries. At the moment there are a limited
   number of titles available, a mixture of titles from the public domain
   and those that are copyrighted. NetLibrary has around 18,000
   copyrighted books while Ebrary.com claims to have 130,000 in its
   demonstration database. The economic model for these vendors varies
   somewhat. Users can sometimes search the database and then only
   subscribers can view book's pages, or viewing online is free but the
   users is charged for printing or downloading. As the article points
   out this is mixing the traditional roles of libraries and bookstores.
   It therefore brings up issues of access to lower income users and the
   role of libraries in an increasingly commercialized information
   universe. - ML
   
   Hughes, Carol Ann. "Lessons Learned: Digitization of Special
   Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries" D-Lib Magazine
   6(6) (June 2000)
   (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june00/hughes/06hughes.html"). - Creating
   digital library collections is still at an early enough stage that
   descriptions of projects and the lessons learned from them are
   important and useful for anyone else considering such a project.
   Hughes' description of a Library of Congress/Ameritech funded project
   to digitize a variety of materials relating to the Chatauqua Movement
   of the early 20th century is one such useful account. The
   straightforward description of the project is peppered with "lessons
   learned" that document the ups-and-downs of a project that, as is the
   case with many first projects, entailed a good deal of learning as you
   go. The more of these accounts we have, the less lessons the rest of
   us will have to learn the hard way. - RT
   
   Kresh, Diane Nester. "Offering High-Quality Reference Service on
   the Web: The Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS)" D-Lib
   Magazine 6(6) (June 2000)
   (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june00/kresh/06kresh.html). - Online digital
   reference service has been the topic of a lot of recent online
   discussion, meetings at the American Library Association, and
   proposals of various kinds -- regional, national, and transnational.
   One of the projects with the most promise is being led and coordinated
   by the Library of Congress, which this article outlines. The basic
   idea is to coordinate a global digital reference network that would
   allow libraries to provide 24x7 online reference service to their
   clientele. The Library of Congress and a small group of collaborating
   libraries began testing this model in March 2000. Countries
   represented in this initial pilot included the United States,
   Australia, and Canada. The types of libraries involved included public
   libraries, academic libraries, national libraries, an art museum
   library, and a regional library cooperative. The second pilot began
   June 19 and will run for a month, with the third pilot beginning in
   August. Following this pilot period, the project will officially
   launch on October 1, 2000. Anyone interested in providing online
   reference service would do well to follow this project closely. -
   RT
   
   Miller, Brent I. "Recent Lessons from the Courts: The Changing
   Landscape of Copyright in a Digital Age" RLG DigiNews 4 (2) (April
   15, 2000)
   (http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-2.html#feature) -
   Miller highlights and clearly explains two recent cases, The Bridgeman
   Art Library LTD v. Corel Corp and Kelly v Arriba Soft that have
   important implications for managing digital collections. In Bridgeman
   the court considered whether color transparencies of public domain art
   work has a sufficient level of originality to be copyrightable. The
   court decided that they do not have the requisite degree of
   originality and that the unauthorized use of the reproductions does
   not violate copyright law. This obviously has implications for
   libraries who have digital collections, but the Bridgeman decision
   concerns two dimensional works as opposed to three dimensional
   objects, which may involve greater "originality." In addition the
   court did not address issues of copyright protection for compilations,
   in other words an institution's copyright interest in the selection,
   arrangement and coordination of a digital collection. In the Arriba
   Soft case the issue revolved around whether a "visual search engine"
   was fair use. The search engine allowed users to retrieve thumbnail
   images as well as a full-size version of images by providing a link to
   the site where the image resided. The court held that Arriba Soft's
   actions constituted fair use of the images. For those managing digital
   image collections it would seem to reinforce the presumption that
   reproduction and distribution of images constitute fair use. On the
   other hand it would "arguably insulate those who use the contents of
   digital image collections for clearly 'commercial' purposes from
   infringement liability." While this is still an unsettled area of
   copyright law it is indicative of a gradual direction or trend. -
   ML
   
   Nardi, Bonnie A., Steve Whittaker, and Heinrich Schwarz. "It's Not
   What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age"
   First Monday 5 (5) (May, 2000)
   (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_5/nardi/). - The authors
   describe their ethnographic research on personal social networks in
   the workplace. They argue that traditional institutional resources are
   being replaced by resources that workers mine from their own networks.
   They conclude that while "lean" and "flexible" organizations bring
   many benefits, there are unexpected influences at play -- namely,
   throwing employees on their own to find the "real" way things get
   done. Less institutional stability and fewer corporate resources have
   made workers more self-reliant, and they are responding by cultivating
   their own networks of contacts instead of consulting the
   "organizational chart." - TH
   
   Zick, Laura. "The Work of Information Mediators: A Comparison of
   Librarians and Intelligent Software Agents" First Monday 5(5)
   (May, 2000) (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_5/zick/). - The
   author evaluates the characteristics of information agency, the work
   of librarians and of intelligent agents as information mediators. Her
   objective is to determine whether it is possible, or even advisable,
   to replace the analytical role of information specialists with
   automated routines. A particularly bright spot in this outstanding
   analysis is the author's call for a reasoned, well-substantiated
   debate over the relative merits of person-to-person interaction --
   reference -- versus person-to-software interaction. She finds that all
   too often, the discussion of new technologies and their impact on
   library work disregards the fundamental value and vitality of the
   culture of reference. - TH
     _________________________________________________________________
   
              Current Cites 11(6) (June 2000) ISSN: 1060-2356
    Copyright <20> 2000 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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