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Current Cites
Volume 11, no. 8, August 2000
Edited by [2]Roy Tennant
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.8.html
Contributors: [3]Terry Huwe, [4]Michael Levy, [5]Leslie Myrick , Jim
Ronningen, Lisa Rowlison, [6]Roy Tennant
Editor's Note: WIth this issue, we lament the retirement from Current
Cites of our Editor of six years, Teri Andrews Rinne, and also
celebrate ten years of continuous monthly publication. Teri was one of
the original six contributors to Current Cites, and remained with the
publication since it's inception, except for maternity leave. She
guided us through a period of growth and solidification as a
thoughtful, critical, and down-to-earth review of the best that we
could find in information technology literature. She will be sorely
missed, but we wish her well in her new endeavors.
Over the past ten years we have strived to fulfill our vision of a
current awareness publication that helps busy professionals focus on
the best information technology literature. Our sources include
popular magazines, peer-reviewed journals, books, and web sites. We
don't guarantee complete coverage of everything that you may find
interesting, but what we do feature here are some of the best, most
current sources we have found. We do not shrink from being
opinionated, nor from comparing one source to another. Our database of
citations now numbers over 1,000, and is searchable at
[7]http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/bibondemand.cgi. We call
this service "Bibliography on Demand" because it can be easily used to
create printable or linkable bibliographies on information technology
topics. Another service we offer is full-text searching of all cited
articles that are freely available in full-text. To provide this
service, we "crawl" the remote articles and index them using Harvest.
You can try it out at
[8]http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/articlesearch.html. Please
do not hesitate to let us know how else we can improve Current Cites
so it can better serve your current awareness needs. Thanks! -- Roy,
for the Cites crew
-------------------------------------------------
Belkin, Nicholas J. [9]"Helping People Find What They Don't Know"
[10]Communications of the ACM 43(8) (August 2000):58-61
(http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/journals/cacm/2000-43-8/p58-belkin/p
58-belkin.pdf). - When we read about efforts to increase the
responsiveness of computer systems to their users, it's usually the
flashier stuff that gets put in bold face, like the MIT Media Lab's
efforts to sharpen the computer's senses through cameras for vision,
microphones for hearing, increased touch sensitivity, etc. But no
matter how 'sensory' systems may become, language is still going to be
the primary human/computer interface for information exchange.
Projects which attempt to refine the exchange so that a shared
vocabulary achieves optimum understanding are always of interest to
information providers. This article is about a Rutgers research group
which is developing recommendation systems which allow a program to
reply to a query with a helpful set of suggestions, focusing on the
choice of terms to be used to achieve the desired result. The author
describes their efforts to go beyond relevance feedback, which allows
the user to rank relevance but does not promote user understanding and
customization of the process itself. An alternative, term suggestion
devices, could promote greater precision, and also, as the title
suggests, help the user find out whatever he or she doesn't know which
is relevant to the query. The group appears to be paying as much
attention to human behavior as syntax and thesauri, as they have
examined the features of such systems which could sidetrack users and
cause them to ultimately lose confidence in the interaction, at which
point the system would have to be called a failure. - JR
Cooper, Jeffrey. [11]"The CyberFrontier and America at the turn of the
21st Century: Reopening Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier."
[12]First Monday 5(7) (July 3rd, 2000)
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_7/cooper/). - Like so many
other articles published by First Monday, this one draws on familiar
metaphors to describe the promises and pitfalls of our cyber-futures.
Excessive eloquence comes with the territory, but in this case the
analysis is first rate and provocative. In the describing the new
"boundlessness" of the Internet, the author identifies several
quintessentially "American" traits, like self-reliance and
risk-taking. He also argues that surging Internet stocks do not a
South Seas Bubble make. This sunny forecast can be found among stock
analysts and futurists in ample supply, but this article takes a
closer look at history as an indicator of what might evolve on the
Internet. - [13]TH
[14]"Developing a Digital Preservation Strategy for JSTOR, an
interview with Kevin Guthrie" [15]RLG DigiNews 4(4) (August 15, 2000)
(http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-4.html#feature1). -
[16]JSTOR is an innovative project to centrally archive journal
literature on behalf of libraries. In this interesting interview with
RLG DigiNews, the director explains the mission of JSTOR and the
strategy they are using to fulfill that mission. Guthrie details five
primary components: 1) Technological approach, 2) Preservation and
back-up plans, 3) Relationships with content providers, 4)
Relationships with users/libraries, and 5) An economic model with a
reasonable probability of reaching self-sufficiency. - [17]RT
Guterman, Lisa. [18]"As Expert Call for a Chemistry Preprint Server
Elsevier Unveils its Own" [19]Chronicle of Higher Education (August
22, 2000) (http://www.chronicle.com/free/2000/08/2000082201t.htm). -
This article explores recent developments in Web-based pre-prints of
chemistry articles, focussing on remarks made by librarians at a
meeting of the American Chemical Society. Elsevier Science has
unveiled a new Web site that posts preprint articles and enables
readers to form online discussion groups addressing the research
presented in each paper. Librarians argue that the American Chemical
Society's reticence in starting their own site places the scholarly
debate about the merits of new research in a commercial sphere. They
further argue that managing the discourse about new research is best
left in the hands of the society, since it may be difficult to
identify truly important new research among the vast offerings that
will like appear on pre-print servers of this nature. - [20]TH
Hafner, Katie. [21]"Saving the Nation's Digital Legacy" [22]New York
Times Technology Circuits
(July 26, 2000)
(http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/circuits/articles/27libr.ht
ml). - The Library of Congress' digital preparedness is at issue in a
260-page report released last month by the National Academy of
Sciences. Report Committee Chairman James O'Donnell cites inadequate
infrastructure and lack of strategic planning, coupled with the need
to work collaboratively with other large institutions, whether other
libraries or private funding institutions such as the National Digital
Library Program. With the help of the latter, the library's
[23]American Memory site (http://memory.loc.gov/) has mounted some 5
million of its 119 million items on the web. But the race to preserve
America's cultural heritage of the past decade or so, appears to have
come down to an either/or situation: between digitizing extant analog
material such as posters and baseball cards, and the archiving and
preservation of emerging digital artifacts, such as CD-ROMs, digital
images, and websites, themselves. - [24]LM
Leibovich, Lori. [25]"Choosing Quick Hits Over the Card Catalog"
[26]New York Times Technology Circuits (August 10, 2000).
(http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/circuits/articles/10thin.ht
ml). - Leibovich tracks a disturbing trend amongst students who are
increasingly avoiding traditional library research methods altogether
for the quick fix of web search engines. But inevitably, Leibovich
asserts, what they believe they will gain in reduced exertion is often
lost in bad search practices. UC Berkeley's own Ellen Meltzer
corroborates, adding that the problem extends to college-age searchers
who are often deficient in the finer points of boolean logic or
controlled vocabulary. Most of the librarians and educators quoted
cite a pressing need for teaching new research methodologies to
optimize the use of the web for research. The paradigm of a solitary
web surfer who does online research from his/her dorm room or bedroom
without availing him/herself of the guidance of educational
professionals is one worm in a whole can. Is the library slated to
become an internet hub, merely, where young minds will at least find
some guidance in the form of a librarian? In my mind, at least, the
question remains: how can we make the internet a research supplement
for young people rather than a perceived replacement? - [27]LM
Mann, Charles C. [28]"The Heavenly Jukebox" [29]The Atlantic Monthly
286(3) (September 2000) p.39-59 (http://www.theatlantic.com/jukebox/).
- Napster has been receiving a lot of press coverage lately, for
making it possible for millions of Internet users to ignore copyright
by trading digital music files. If this was only an issue of
importance to the music industry and music consumers, it would still
be an interesting and important one. But it is much, much bigger than
that. There is a great deal more at stake here, and Mann does a better
job than anyone I've seen at uncovering the issues, the players, and
even the historical context. If you want to know what all the fuss is
about (and we haven't seen anything yet), then this article will get
you up-to-speed faster and better than most. Mann asserts that the
music industry (and perhaps the movie and publishing industries to
follow) have only two possible courses of action in the face of
Napster, Gnutella, and other peer-to-peer applications: 1) "prepare
for a world in which copyright plays a much smaller role", or 2)
"change the Internet. The first alternative is problematic, to say the
least. The second could be much worse." If you don't think it's
possible that we could be on the verge of a post-copyright world, you
should check out [30]Gnutella. Unlike Napster, there are no
responsible organizations, no central servers, no people to sue. You
do the math. - [31]RT
"Napster's wake-up call" [32]The Economist Vol. 355 (No.8176) (Jun 24,
2000) p. 23-24 - Although it was written before current legal
developments, this article presents the best synopsis of the
technological, legal and cultural issues raised by Napster. In
addition to describing the technology, it analyzes the intellectual
property issues surrounding music file sharing, which pose a new
ideological challenge to other information industries. It also
recognizes the emerging cultural phenomenon of a file sharing
community. - [33]TH
Spooner, John G. [34]"Intel: The Future is Peer" [35]ZDNet
(http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2619470,00.html). -
It's clear Intel can't stand to be too far away from the Next Big
Thing, since in the wake of Napster's popularity it has put together
an industry peer-to-peer networking group of 18 companies, including
IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Peer-to-peer networking (also called "P2P";
see other cites on Napster in this issue of Current Cites) has
skyrocketed into the popular press as a method for the masses of
Internet users to share files (most notably illegal music cuts) with
one another. But Intel and other industry leaders are more likely to
see P2P as a method for corporate users to quickly and easily share
information from behind a firewall. - [36]RT
Wagner, Dirk Nicholas. [37]"Software agents take the Internet as a
shortcut to enter society: A survey of new actors to study for social
theory" [38]First Monday 5(7) (July 3rd, 2000)
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_7/wagner/). The author
argues that new perspectives on the social impact of technology are
now vital. It makes sense to recast the social science of men [sic]
and machines as men [sic] and agents. Agents operate as players in
society, with substantial impact, and when society is inhabited by
many different kinds of software agents, the effect is intensified.
However, a general theory of multi-agent environments -- complex
domains where people and software interact in new relationships -- is
absent. Such a theory would substantially improve perceptions of
person-machine interactions, and the power of the Internet to
influence society. - [39]TH
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 11(8) (August 2000) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright ? 2000 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley.
All rights reserved.
Copying is permitted for noncommercial use by computerized bulletin
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[41]Copyright ? 2000 UC Regents. All rights reserved.
Document maintained at
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.8.html by
[42]Roy Tennant.
Last update August 28, 2000. SunSITE Manager:
[43]manager@sunsite.berkeley.edu
References
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40. mailto:listserv@library.berkeley.edu
41. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Admin/copyright.html
42. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/
43. mailto:manager@sunsite.berkeley.edu