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_Current Cites_
Volume 7, no. 5
May 1996
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1996/cc96.7.5.html
Contributors:
Campbell Crabtree, John Ober, Margaret Phillips,
David Rez, Richard Rinehart, Teri Rinne, Roy Tennant
Networks and Networking
James-Catalano, Cynthia N. "The Virtual Wordsmith"
Internet World 7(6) (June 1996):30-31. -- A descriptive,
narrative list of more than 25 URL's (mostly Web sites)
that provides an interesting variety of dictionaries,
encyclopedias and thesauri. -- DR
Kalfatovic, Martin R. "Internet Resources in the Visual
Arts" College & Research Libraries News 57(5) (May 1996):
289-293. -- The Web's ability to display images means
that it has attracted many artists, museums and galleries
to its realm. Among the sites listed in this article are
indexes and general resources, sites devoted to artists
and artistic movements (check out !Surrealisme!), online
exhibitions, museums (the Smithsonian, the Met, the Andy
Warhol Museum, etc.), and commercial galleries and auction
houses (find out just how much those fake Jackie-O pearls
went for at the Sotheby's web site). Also listed are
definitive e-journals in the art world as well as
discussion lists, newsgroups, and usenet groups. The list
is very selective but offers a good representative sample
of international resources. -- MP
Maddox, Kate. "Masters of the Web" Information Week
[http://techweb.cmp.com/iw] 577 (April 29, 1996): 46-54.
-- This article is not about technology per se, but about
technology managers - especially WebMasters. The article
explains some of the difficulty in integrating newly formed
"WebMaster" positions into the larger enterprise and how
some companies are doing it. Although written from the
corporate point of view, many of the same issues overlap
with educational institutions. -- RR
Pack, Thomas. "Electronic Words: A Word Lover's Guide to
Digital Dictionaries, Thesauri, and Other Cyberplaces"
Database 19(2) (April/May 1996): 25-31. -- Yet another
offering for logophiles. Pack describes the variety of
electronic resources available on consumer online
systems, the Internet, and CD-ROM. -- TR
Steinberg, Steve G. "Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe)"
Wired 4(5) (May 1996): 108-114, 172-182. -- To ponder
the question of how to organize the rapidly growing and
ever-chaotic Web, is really to explore age-old attempts
to organize human knowledge. But efforts to classify the
Web have been developed anyway in the form of search
engines. An exploration of Yahoo!, Inktomi and Excite
and a still-under development project at Oracle called
ConText, illustrated for Steinberg the essential
conundrum of classification: a catalog (which some may
consider Yahoo! to be) in which a human being analyzes
an object of human knowledge (such as a book or, in
Yahoo!'s case, a Web site), then categorizes it under a
prescribed classification scheme will always be
subjective; automated indexing systems (found in various
forms in Inktomi, Excite and ConText) lack the ability
to provide context (something that, so far, only humans
can provide). While Steinberg didn't find an answer to
the question of how to classify human knowledge (or at
least how to better organize the Web) he did discover
that while humans, (i.e. librarians and information
scientists) may not have figured out how to organize human
knowledge, neither have the computer scientists. -- MP
Young, Jeffrey R. "'Indecency' on the Internet: Court
Hearing Stirs Fears of Censorship of Student and College
Web Pages" Chronicle of Higher Education XLII(33)
(April 26, 1996): A21, A25-A26 -- Surely among the first
of many articles on how the "Decency in Communications"
rider to the 1996 Telecommunications Act will affect the
sharing of scholarly and cultural knowledge, both in the
academic sphere itself, and with the outside world. Among
the cases cited are a university art museum identified as
showing potentially "indecent" images of nude greek statues
in their WWW site. Of course more contemporary art and
discourse will be seen as even more dangerous. Though the
Internet started largely as a way to freely share scholarly
information, this component of law poses a serious
reconsideration of just that use. -- RR
Query Based on Image Content [http://wwwqbic.almaden.ibm.com]
-- This WWW site is a demonstration of a new tool for
content-based retrieval (searching the images themselves,
rather than textual meta-data). These tools are almost
ready for commercial use, and are being demo'd on the
vendors' WWW sites: Query by Image Content, from IBM
[http://wwwqbic.almaden.ibm.com] and Visual Information
Retrieval System, from Virage Inc. [http://www.virage.com].
Even the old demo of QBIC (for HTML 2.0 browsers) works
with a surprising degree of accuracy, searching from one
image for similar images based on color percentage or
layout. These types of tools have profound implications
for content provision and research in visual disciplines,
from Art History and Architecture to Archaeology and
Paleontology. The fact that they are integrated with the
Web increases their potential usefulness. -- RR
Optical Disc Technology
Guenette, David R. "Document Imaging, CD-ROM, and CD-R: A
Starting Point" CD-ROM Professional 9(4) (April 1996): 32-
44. -- Guenette begins with the dream of the paperless
office and the concurrent irony of contemporary office
culture: as more documents are digitally generated, we
continue to produce and handle more paper-based documents
each year. The answer to this irony may be CD-Recordable
technology with increasingly affordable scanner devices,
document imaging systems and OCR technologies combined with
cheap, networkable high-storage media devices such as CD-ROM
and CD-R. This article provides a comprehensive overview of
the document imaging process as well as the important
questions you need to ask before designing a system. -- TR
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Current Cites 7(5) (May 1996) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright (C) 1996 by the Library, University of
California, Berkeley. All rights reserved.
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publication does not necessarily imply endorsement of the
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[URL:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/]
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must appear on copied material. All commercial use requires
permission from the editor, who may be reached in the following
ways:
trinne@library.berkeley.edu // (510)642-8173
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