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_Current Cites_
Volume 8, no. 7
July 1997
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
Acting Editor: Roy Tennant
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1997/cc97.8.7.html
Contributors:
Campbell Crabtree, Christof Galli, Kirk Hastings, Terry Huwe,
Margaret Phillips, David Rez, Richard Rinehart,
Teri Rinne, Roy Tennant
Digital Libraries
Green, David. "Beyond Word and Image: Networking Moving Images: More
Than Just the "Movies"" D-Lib Magazine (July/August 1997)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july97/07green.html). - This is the first
part of a two part discussion of the issues and techniques involved in
digitizing media other than text and image, namely moving images and
sound. With the advent of streaming technologies on the Internet it
has suddenly become possible to deliver what were once prohibitively
large files to the user. It has happened none too soon, with the
disintegration of old film stock and audio tape now a near epidemic. I
found the author's discussion of film metadata/cataloging efforts
particularly interesting, although his point that the British are so
far ahead of us in this and other fields was somewhat depressing. This
half of the report closes with a detailed examination of a particular
genre of moving images, namely dance video. Apparently the dance
community has been producing huge numbers of videos for both
educational and documentary use for a number of years. Fortunately
they have been actively involved in the development of cataloging
standards all along and are actively pursuing methods of access for
these dance research resources. This is an excellent article, with a
number of resources and links for those considering the digitization
of a moving image collection. I look forward to the next installment.
- KH
Kirriemuir, John. "Clifford Lynch in Interview" Ariadne (10) (July
1997) (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/clifford/). - In this
interview with Lynch just before he joins the Coalition for Networked
Information as its Executive Director, Kirriemuir plies him with
questions about Z39.50, metadata, caching and mirroring. As usual,
Lynch is well worth listening to, even if you miss experiencing his
thoughtful way of delivery and his trademark leather jacket and black
jeans. - RT
Powell, Andy. "Dublin Core Management" Ariadne (10) (July 1997)
(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/dublin/). - Powell has written an
excellent guide to using Dublin Core metadata for a Web site, and
offers good advice and tools for those who are interested in doing the
same. Faithful readers of Current Cites have heard about the Dublin
Core here for over a year. There's a reason for that. It looks to be
our best hope for logically describing resources in a way that is both
powerful and flexible. The specification is still a long way from
completion, but as Powell describes in this article it is already a
useful tool. The organization of which Powell is a part, the United
Kingdom Office of Library Networking (UKOLN) has long been a leader in
using the latest information technologies to solve library problems.
It is thus no surprise that they have also been directly involved with
developing the Dublin Core and tools that make it easy to use. If
you've considered using the Dublin Core but you don't know how, this
article should make it crystal clear. - RT
Powell, Christina Kelleher, and Kerr, Nigel. "SGML Creation and
Delivery: The Humanities Text Initiative" D-Lib Magazine (July/August
1997) (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july97/humanities/07powell.html). -
The Humanities Text Initiative, at the University of Michigan, is one
of the largest SGML text creation projects in the country. In this
overview the authors give a very succinct description of what the
project has accomplished since 1994 and what they hope to achieve in
the future. The focus is on the project's two major corpuses: The
American Verse Project and Middle English Prose and Verse. It is
fascinating to read just how much is involved in the creation of
accurate texts that are also faithful to the format of the original. I
was less impressed, however, with the project's facilities for
searching this massive collection. The user is restricted to full text
searches and even then such conveniences as text highlighting are not
employed. The projects future goals are interesting but are somewhat
one-dimensional. The focus here seems to be on giving the user access
to the largest number of works possible, without giving much thought
to the level of searching sophistication necessary to allow the user
to navigate such a daunting sea of text. - KH
Shaw, Elizabeth, and Blumson, Sarr. "Making of America: Online
Searching and Page Presentation at the University of Michigan" D-Lib
Magazine (July/August 1997)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july97/america/07shaw.html). - Making of
America is one of the larger digital library projects on the horizon.
It is a joint Cornell/Michigan project focusing on American social
history and slated to digitize 5000 volumes dating from 1850-1877.
Making of America will both digitize images of the original document
page by page as well as OCR and markup in SGML each of those pages.
Searching is done both on the metadata collected about the document as
well as it's full text. Display, strangely enough, seems to be only of
the document image. This is fine for clearly printed works, but those
that are less legible would be more useful if the SGML version was
made available. The navigation of search results as well as image
display both seem to be particularly well thought out here. The user
is given sophisticated paging alternatives and a number of image size
choices.This is obviously a well-funded project that ought to help
establish a number of standards for digital libraries. - KH
Information Technology & Society
Browning, Graeme. "Electronic Democracy Online Update" Database 20:3
(June/July 1997): 47-54
(http://www.onlineinc.com/pempress/democracy/updates.html). - This
article traces the use that grassroots organizations, party
committees, and candidates made of the Internet as a campaigning tool
in the November 1996 elections. One of its findings is that
organizations and candidates with sites that allowed for interactive
communication in the form of e-mail or chat rooms, were more
successful than those with "static" sites. Although an exact
assessment of the impact of Web sites on individual races is
difficult, many political consultants are convinced that the presence
or absence on the Web definitely influenced some of the results.
Results of polls and studies conducted by various organizations also
show that American voters were influenced considerably by information
they found on the Web. The author predicts for the Internet as a
political communications tool a development that is similar to that of
television in the 1950's and 1960's. - CG
Shenk, David. Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. HarperEdge:
San Francisco, 1997. - Few people alive today would take exception to
the premise upon which this book is based -- that we are awash in
data. Data that may not result in useful information, knowledge or
wisdom. However, the conclusions Shenk draws from this situation may
not be as universally shared. The tenor of the book reminds me of
Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway by
Clifford Stoll (cited in the April 1995 issue of Current Cites, which
raised the act of discovering that there is more to life than
computers to the level of a religious experience. Shenk's "Laws of
Data Smog" at the beginning of the book range from glib to
incomprehensible, although they are at least explained inside. But the
strength of this book lies in getting us to think critically about the
"information revolution" and to consider carefully the possible
casualties. - RT
Networks & Networking
Coyle, Karen. Coyle's Information Highway Handbook: A Practical File
on the New Information Order. Chicago: American Library Association,
1997. - Karen Coyle has long been speaking at library and internet
conferences about social and political issues relating to network
access to information. Thus it should come as no surprise to those of
us who have heard her speak that this slim but pithy volume is a great
place to start investigating the topics she covers: economic models,
copyright and intellectual property, privacy and intellectual freedom,
censorship and filtering, and equitable access. She begins with
introductory material on the "new information society" which is
followed by a section on the "information highway." She focuses fairly
exclusively on the United States, so non-U.S. readers will need to
take this into account. Each section includes selected readings in
full as well as citations for additional resources. As is the case for
any book on a topic that changes as rapidly as the Internet, it is
already slightly dated as it hits the shelves. She of course realizes
this, and asserts in the introduction that even as it captures a
moment frozen in the past it is nonetheless useful as background
reading. She' s right. Coyle's assessment of the issues, as well as a
number of readings that are often seminal if not timeless, make this
book more valuable than as simply a snapshot of the state of networked
information policy in the waning years of the century. And if she has
done her job well enough, and the people who should pay attention do,
then it will have served its purpose to help place its audience -- the
library community -- actively in the debate over these important
issues. - RT
"Hands off the Internet" The Economist 344 (8024), July 5, 1997, p.
15. - You would think that The Economist's natural fondness of free
markets would yield an anti-regulation jeremiad against government
forces who would do damage to free speech, intellectual property and
fair use, and other features of the "self-regulating" culture of the
Net. In fact, the editors give a more cautious view, citing the perils
of both over- and under-regulation. Cultural difference lie at the
crux of their thesis: not every country in the world will wish to
support a virtual Dodge City, they argue; yet, a heavy government hand
would stifle, even destroy the value of the Net. Instead, they argue
for a careful approach which would recognize the radically different
nature of "public discourse" in cyberspace, as we learn how to manage
it (as well as ourselves). The summary of pro-regulation and
anti-regulation value systems is succinct and very clear -- the
article is worth reading just for this feature. - TH
Leiner, Barry M., Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn,
Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Lawrence G. Roberts,
and Stephen Wolff. "A Brief History of the Internet: Part 2"
OnTheInternet 3(4) (July/August 1997): 28-36. - In this continuation
of the Internet history begun in the May/June issue of OnTheInternet
(cited in the May issue of Current Cites), this group of network
pioneers brings us up to the present day and beyond (history of the
future? now _there's_ a concept! - RT
Needleman, Mark H. "Standards for the Global Information
Infrastructure (GII): A Review of Recent Developments, Ongoing
Efforts, Future Directions and Issues" Microcomputers for Information
Management: Global Internetworking for Libraries. 13(3-4, Special
Issue 1996): 217-236. - This article reports on recent developments in
electronic and network-based information. It details activities
surrounding the new version of Z39.50, a client/server-oriented
protocol defining communication capabilities between information
retrieval systems. Various user communities have developed profiles
for the use of Z39.50 in their specific domain of application. One of
them is GILS, the Government and Information Locator System, which
defines the use of the protocol for access to government data. Other
profiles are under development for accessing digital and museum
collections. The article also treats the Z39.56 Serial
Item/Contribution Identifier Standard which defines data elements used
to identify issues of serials and articles in them. Also under
devlopment is the ILL (Interlibrary Loan) protocol which is promoted
by ARL's North American Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery
(NAILDD) Project. In the field of character set standards, the author
mentions ISO 10646 and Unicode and from among the text formatting
standards, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) and PDF
(Portable Document Format). A standard used for commercial
interactions is Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). It is designed for
the electronic exchange of purchase orders, invoices, and other
business-oriented documents.Needleman also reviews the Internet
Engineering Task Force's (IETF) work on the definitions of HTTP, HTML,
URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), URN (Uniform Resource Names), and
URC (Uniform Resource Citation). In his conclusion, the author points
out that an appropriate infrastructure to support the technologies
defined in these standards is as important as the standards
themselves. The article includes a bibliography and list of relevant
URL's. - CG
Vileno, Luigina. "Geography Resources on the Internet" College &
Research Libraries News 58(7): 471-474
(http://www.ala.org/acrl/resjul97.html). - A good representative list
of web resources in geography. Especially strong in U.S. and Canadian
resources, the guide lists gazetteers, collections of maps, weather
and climate, sources for international regional information (like the
CIA Factbook), and electronic journals. - MP
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 8(7) (July 1997) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright © 1997
by the Library, University of California, Berkeley. _All rights
reserved._
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