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_Current Cites_
Volume 10, no. 6
June 1999
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1999/cc99.10.6.html
Contributors:
Terry Huwe, Margaret Phillips,
Roy Tennant, Jim Ronningen, Lisa Yesson
ALCTS Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access. Task Force on
Metadata Summary Report American Library Association, Association for
Library Collections and Technical Services, Chicago: June 1999.
(http://www.ala.org/alcts/organization/ccs/ccda/tf-meta3.html). - This
is the summary report of the American Library Association's ALCTS Task
Force on Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access relating to
four out of five of its charges (the fifth will be considered in light
of the findings of of the first four). The charges consist of: 1)
analyzing the resource description needs of libraries, 2) building a
conceptual map of the resource description landscape and developing
models for using metadata both inside and outside the library
community, 3) devising a definition of metadata and investigating the
interoperability of newly emerging metadata schemes with the
cataloging rules and MARC format, and 4) recommending ways in which
libraries may best incorporate the use of metadata schemes into
current library methods. The fifth charge not covered in this report
is "Recommending, as needed, rule revision to enable interoperability
of cataloging (with AACR2) with metadata schemes." - RT
Bosak, Jon. "XML Ubiquity and the Scholarly Community" Computers and
the Humanities 33 (1-2)(April 1999):199-206. - This special issue of
Computers and the Humanities provides selected papers from the 10th
Anniversary Conference of the Text Encoding Intiative (TEI), a widely
accepted standard interchange format for textual data. There's a
little something for everyone in this issue from the history of TEI
and the basics of XML, SGML and HTML, to current issues and trends for
the TEI research community. The volume concludes with Jon Bosak's
closing keynote address on the implications of XML for the scholarly
community. In his conversational remarks, Bosak asserts that the
promise of XML (extensible, human-readable, open, easy to use
standards for providing content) may finally be possible because the
goals of the scholarly community are becoming congruent with the
incipient requirements of industry and commerce. In other words, the
scholarly community will finally be able to deliver desired data, take
advantage of much cheaper tools, provide richer experiences with
scholarly publications, link databases and hire people who can be
easily trained to make this happen. But Bosak cautions that to reach
this promised land, the academic community must be ever vigilant about
standards, and "shove vendors forward" who begin to stray off the open
standards path. - LY
The Eighth International World Wide Web Conference Toronto (May 11-14,
1999) (http://www8.org/fullpaper.html). - For those unfamiliar with
it, the International World Wide Web Conference is for Web
researchers, mostly from universities and the private sector.
Therefore, this collection of papers consists mostly of research
findings regarding either cutting edge technologies (some of which may
never go into production), how people are using the Internet, or new
uses of existing capabilities. Although many of the papers will be too
narrowly focused or impractical for those using and maintaining web
sites on a daily basis, there are nonetheless some nuggets here for
virtually anyone interested in web issues. - RT
Pear, Robert. "NIH Plan For Journal On the Web Draws Fire" The New
York Times (June 8, 1999): D1. - Harold Varmus, director of the
National Institutes of Health, has proposed an electronic publishing
operation called E-biomed that would allow NIH-sponsored scientists to
disclose and disseminate the results of their research on the
Internet. Publishing online would accelerate the exchange of
biomedical research as well as increase the number of people with
access to this information. Despite the fact that electronic
publication of scientific research is already being done by many
established scientific journals and through the Los Alamos National
Labs which publishes physics and math pre-prints on its server
(http://xxx.lanl.gov/), there is opposition to the NIH plan.
Predictably, critics (mostly publishers and scientific societies) say
that electronic publishing would allow scientists to bypass print
journals thus circumventing the peer review process; it would also
endanger print journals, they say, because most journals have a policy
against publishing work that has been published elsewhere. The editor
of the New England Journal of Medicine fears that if subscribers could
get all their research free on the Internet, they would no longer
subscribe to the print journal. The NIH counters that, as a
publically-supported institution, they have an obligation to provide
access to their information as quickly and inexpensively as possible.
Furthermore, E-biomed would have a governing board of scientists,
editors and computer experts who would develop rules of operation for
the site. - MP
Petrazzini, Ben and Mugo Kibati. "The Internet in Developing
Countries" Communications of the ACM 42(6) (June 1999)
(http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/journals/cacm/1999-42-6/p31-petrazzi
ni/p31-petrazzini.pdf). - For most of the world, Internet access is a
rare and costly thing, and this article describes the current problems
and future challenges for Internet growth outside of North America and
Europe. Some topics addressed are the lack of low-cost regional IP
backbones (e.g. monthly charges for circuits between Asia-Pacific
countries are much higher than monthly charges between those countries
and the U.S.), the limited availability of local call rates for dialup
services, and of course the inescapable facts of poverty and
purchasing power (in Ghana, an account with Africa Online costs $50
per month, which is almost twice the monthly income of most Ghanians).
As is often the case with the CACM, our cited article is part of a
valuable special section; in this case the section is titled "Emerging
Internet Infrastructures Worldwide." In it are articles on making the
Internet less U.S.-centric, net development and control in China,
India and Haiti, deploying wireless data systems in Kenya and
Thailand, and commentary on the potential global impact of the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). - JR
Russell, Kelly and Derek Sergeant. The Cedars Project: Implementing a
Model for Distributed Digital Archives" RLG DigiNews 3(3) (June
15,1999) (http://www.rlg./org/preserve/diginews/diginews3.3html). -
The CEDARS Project (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/) was chartered by
the UK Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib)
(http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/ ) to investigate issues
regarding the long-term preservation of digital materials. Their work
has focused on trying to develop a model for a distributed archival
information system, based on the idea of "packages". They propose
three types of packages: submission, archival, and dissemination. A
digital object would be submitted to a repository as a submission
package, which would then be processed for inclusion in the archive as
an archival information package. For online delivery to users, a
dissemination information package may be required. For example, a
collection of images stored in TIFF format may need to have JPEG
versions for online use. The dissemination information package would
contain those delivery versions of the archival images. - RT
Stephenson, Neal. In the Beginning was the Command Line
(http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html). - This longish (207Kb,
59 page, freely downloadable in PC Zip or Mac Stuffit) essay can be
summarized as an exploration of how we relate to operating systems and
interfaces, but that doesn't do justice to the humor, tangential
comments and insights which make this a great summer read for anyone
interested in computers. The author is an experienced programmer whose
first novel, Snow Crash, is a computer geek fave and whose latest is
partially about cryptography. He's been intimate with Unix and Linux,
Windows and the Mac and Be operating systems; his metaphors for those
systems and the cultures that have grown up around them gave this
reader many little epiphanies. (The car metaphor: the Mac OS is a
sleek but untinkerably sealed European sedan, Windows is a hulking,
unreliable station wagon that everyone buys because everyone else is
buying it, Be is a Batmobile and Linux is a state-of-the-art tank
available at a "dealership" consisting of yurts, tepees and RVs with
salespeople who are giving it away and will come fix it for free). The
essay is not just a bunch of cleverness - it's didactic and
contentious. One of Stephenson's main arguments is that computer users
have become much too GUI'd away from a real understanding of how their
computers work. It's a convincing case made by a guy with a technical
background and the imagination to come up with a good analogy between
HTML and Ronald Reagan broadcasting a baseball game from a windowless
room. - JR
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 10(6) (June 1999) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright © 1999 by the Library, University of California,
Berkeley. _All rights reserved._
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1999/cc99.10.6.html
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Editor: Teri Andrews Rinne, trinne@library.berkeley.edu, (510)
642-8173