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_Current Cites_
Volume 7, no. 4
April 1996
The Library
University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1996/cc96.7.4.html
Contributors:
Campbell Crabtree, John Ober, Margaret Phillips,
David Rez, Richard Rinehart, Teri Rinne, Roy Tennant
Electronic Publishing
Arms, Caroline. "Historical Collections for the National
Digital Library: Lessons and Challenges at the Library of
Congress" D-Lib Magazine (April 1996)
[http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april96/loc/04c-arms.html] -- The
Library of Congress is embarked on a massive digitization
program to make much of the cultural heritage of the United
States available to its citizens through computer networks
(and thus to the world as well). Arms outlines the program
and provides background information, but the real meat of
this piece is the "lessons learned and challenges posed,"
of which this article is part one. Anyone involved with
digitizing projects, or who wishes to be, will find this
article fascinating and revealing reading. -- RT
Peek, Robin P. and Gregory B. Newby, editors. _Scholarly
Publishing: The Electronic Frontier_ Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1996. ISBN: 0-262-16157-5.
-- If academia is your major home or haunt and if you have
more than a passing interest in the issue of electronic
publishing, run -- don't walk -- to your nearest library
(or independent bookseller) and check out what is probably
THE definitive treatise on the topic. This is a collection
of 19 papers that deals specifically with the future of
electronic publishing and its impact on the academic world.
Editors Newby and Peek assert that as publishing moves from
a print-based paradigm to an electronic one, the very nature
of scholarly communication is being challenged in ways that
it has never been before. The book is divided into two parts.
The first part "The Impact of Electronic Publishing on
Scholarly Life" includes an article by Robert Silverman that
discusses the effects of electronic publishing on the producers
of academic knowledge and the need for academic performance
and evaluation procedures to respond to the changing nature of
scholarly communication. Also in the first part of this book,
Stevan Harnad writes about peer review and scientific quality
control in scholarly electronic journals. The second part of
the book "The New Challenges" introduces some of the issues
that are unique to the realm of electronic publishing (or at
least not as common in the print world). Lisa Freeman
discusses the role that university presses should continue to
play within electronic publishing; L.W. Hurtado argues for an
academically-based consortium that would create standards for
refereed electronic journals; Brian Kahin tackles perennial
legal issues associated with electronic publishing especially
copyright. Other biggies who have contributed chapters to this
book are such familiar names as Clifford Lynch, Ann Okerson,
David Rothman and Ira Fuchs. -- MP
SGML Open Staff. "SGML in Education: The TEI and ICADD
Initiatives" Computers in Libraries 16(3) (March 1996):
26-28. -- SGML Open [http://www.sgmlopen.org] is a
consortium dedicated to promoting the use of SGML, an
ISO standard for data encoding that enables value-added,
reusable, platform-independent documents. This article,
highlights two international efforts which are using SGML.
TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) provides guidelines for
encoding literary and historical texts. The TEI guidelines
are meant to be flexible and scalable, able to accommodate
any body of text and delimit salient features with markup,
adding intelligence and meaning. ICADD (International
Committee for Accessible Document Design) focuses on making
textbooks available in formats such as Braille, large print
and voice synthesis. SGML encoding not only provides
structured access to documents that could otherwise be
unavailable, but also makes that access more democratic.
-- CJC
Multimedia and Hypermedia
Glaser, Mark. "Video Crawls onto the Internet" New Media 6(5)
(April 1, 1996): 36-38 [http://www.hyperstand.com/]. -- The
most important topic of this article is not really the new
video software discussed, but rather another emerging standard
for delivering multimedia across the Internet: RTP (or Realtime
Transport Protocol). Several software vendors offer their wares
and agree to work together to use this industry-driven proposed
standard. Whether a standards-based approach in this arena will
work is unknown, but given the perceived market hunger for
real-time moving image content on the Internet and thus pressure
to be first, the effort is admirable as well as sensible. -- RR
Wilcox, Sue. "VRML 2.0 Takes Flight" New Media 6(5) (April 1,
1996): 19, 28 [http://www.hyperstand.com/]. -- VRML, or
Virtual Reality Markup Language, is an emerging standard for
describing 3-D spaces and objects that can be rendered by
VRML-capable software, including some WWW browsers. VRML, an
area of confluence between the twin rivers of 3-D multimedia
and the WWW, has naturally attracted a number of industry
players from SGI, Sony, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape, and Apple
to formalize the next incarnation of the standard, VRML 2.0.
Differences between 1.0 and 2.0 are improved texture-mapping,
dynamic object-behavior, links to outside scripts and
multimedia (sound, movies), and a greatly increased range of
software supporting VRML. Other differences include the
capability for end-user interaction in VRML worlds via
"avatars" (graphic equivalents of screen names), and storage
of worlds in small OpenFlight databases. This last improvement
requires storing the VRML info in a binary file instead of a
standard SGML text file, and thus veers away from being a true
hardware and software-independent standard. Therefore it may
be an accepted extension, but not part of the formal standard.
-- RR
Zimmermann, Kim Ann. "Imaging Helps Government Serve the
People" Imaging Magazine [issn: 1083-2912] 5(4) (April 1996):
72-82. -- This article not only gives justification for use
of imaging in government as a labor and capital-saving
technology, but also provides detailed examples from the EPA,
DOD, and two county and city government offices. The other
aspect is, of course, the implicit case for improved service
to the people; however, this cuts two ways, by improving
government surveillance as well as freedom of information
goals. Although this article is about the technology and does
not explicitly delve into the social implications, it is
useful in any case. -- RR
Karpinski, Richard. "Easy Audio on the World Wide Web"
Communications Week (Interactive Age supplement) [issn:
0746-8121] no. 606 (April 15, 1996): IA3, IA5. -- This is
a fairly detailed introduction to three software packages
available for authoring audio for use on the Web; most do
so in real time, and better yet, inexpensively. Some of
these solutions do not require a separate audio server
software component, just the authoring and converting
package and a WWW server. The sidebar gives a brief
introduction to audio file formats and other technical
details. A detail not mentioned in the article is that at
least one of the applications mentioned, ToolVox, will
probably use the proposed real-time transfer standard (RTP)
since it is from a vendor acquired by Netscape as part of
its LiveMedia solution, which uses RTP. -- RR
Networks and Networking
Balas, Janet. "Beyond Veronica and Yahoo!: More Internet
Search Tools" Computers in Libraries 16(3) (March 1996):
34-38. -- While no search tool can find everything, often,
the more of them you try, the more information you find.
This article mentions some useful tools for finding what you
need on the Internet. Resources include sites for finding
Internet Service Providers (The List - http://thelist.com),
email addresses (Four11 - http://www.Four11.com), newsgroups
(InterLink - http://www.nova.edu/Inter-Links/usenet.html) and
mailing lists (List of Lists - http://catalog.com/vivian/
interest-group-search.html, TILE.NET - http://www.tile.net/
listserv/, and Indiana University Search for Mailing Lists -
http://www.ucssc.indiana.edu/mlarchive). -- CJC
Banks, Julie, Linda Carter, Carl Pracht. "Library Luncheon and
Update: Teaching Faculty about New Technology" The Journal of
Academic Librarianship 22(2) (March 1996): 128-130. -- Through
a series of luncheons and formal update sessions sponsored by
the library at Southeast Missouri State University, faculty
learned about a variety of electronic resources available in
the library. As a result of the sessions, faculty began to
integrate what they'd learned into their instruction. -- MP
Conte, Ron Jr. "Guiding Lights" Internet World 7(5) (May
1996): 41-44. [URL for the links from this article, not the
article itself: http://www.iw.com/iw-online/May96/linkmap.html]
-- These days there are hundreds of search tools available for
free on the Web. From searching for someone's email address to
a finding a shareware software program, there are often several
tools to choose from. This article is chock-full of URLs for
different kinds of search tools, organized by broad category.
The categories include search engines, directories, what's new,
email addresses, gopher archives, software search, newsgroups,
and metasearches. The one glaring omission is a category for
the increasing number of commercial full-text search services
such as Electric Library [http://www.elibrary.com/] and NLightN
[http://www.nlightn.com/]. -- RT
Day, Pam A. "Internet Resources in Folklore and Folklife"
College & Research Libraries News 57(4) (April 1996): 204-207.
-- A selective list of Internet resources in folklore and
folklife, this list is strong in the areas of Southern culture
and Arthurian and medieval folklore with references to
association homepages, discussion groups and electronic
journals but seems to entirely omit any references to
resources on urban legends (alligators in sewers, etc.) or
contemporary folklife (personalized license plates, swear
words, etc.). -- MP
Phillips, Carl D. "Energy Resources on the Internet" College &
Research Libraries News 57(3) (March 1996): 142-146. -- Another
handy C & RL News guide to Internet resources, this month
focuses on energy resources. It contains the usual list
(conveniently annotated) of directories, government agency web
sites and newsgroups and discussion lists. -- MP
Pratt, Gregory F., Patrick Flannery and Cassandra L.D. Perkins.
"Guidelines for Internet Resource Selection" College & Research
Libraries News 57(3) (March 1996)): 134-135. -- A working group
of librarians at the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical
Center recognized the responsibility that libraries have to
evaluate and select resources regardless of media; at the same
time, they realized that unlike the traditional world of books
and journals, Internet resources lack the publishing industry's
filters. Therefore, the group developed a set of guidelines for
Internet resource evaluation and selection which they added to
their collection development policy and which they have
reprinted in this month's issue of C & RL News. The six points
of this concise list of criteria (which includes such items as
quality & content, relevancy, ease of use and more) along with
the discussion of unique challenges associated with collection
development on the Internet should prove to be an invaluable
resource for many information professionals. -- MP
Vander Meer, Patricia Fravel. "Enhancing University
Administrators' Awareness of the Web: A Library Perspective"
Computers in Libraries 16(3) (March 1996): 50-56. -- This
article makes a case for academic librarians to find Web
applications that are useful to the campus community and
present informational sessions to promote Web awareness
among campus administration. The author suggests that by
using and promoting this new technology, the library will
be seen as a strategic resource in times of shrinking
budgets. Resources given as examples include sites for
university admissions applications, access to grades and
class schedules and campus security information. -- CJC
Venditto, Gus. "Search Engine Showdown" Internet World 7(5)
(May 1996): 79-86. [URL for the links from this article, not the
article itself: http://www.iw.com/iw-online/May96/linkmap.html]
-- Finally. Someone who understands the difference between a
Yahoo and a Lycos. Venditto describes and rates the seven best
robot-built Web search tools. He includes a lot of good
background information in the tool descriptions as well as
searching tips. A table summarizes the features of each tool.
Although he either did not know about or chose not to discuss
Alta Vista's quite powerful search features, this article is
nonetheless one of the best summary articles on the key Web
search tools I've seen. -- RT
General
Ubois, Jeff. "Agents of Change: A New Agenda" Internet World 7(5)
(May 1996): 61-66. [URL for the links from this article, not the
article itself: http://www.iw.com/iw-online/May96/linkmap.html]
-- In this interview with Don Norman of _The Design of Everyday
Things_ and _Things That Make Us Smart_ fame, we discover all
over again things that we knew (intuitively perhaps) but had
forgotten amid the day-to-day necessity of dealing with our
computers. Norman, who is now VP of Advanced Technology at Apple
Computer is trying to make computers go away. He would prefer
that we spend our time focusing on the work we are doing and
stop futzing with the device we are using to do it. More power
to him. This is an interesting and thought-provoking interview
that is well worth the time of anyone who has ever used a
computer. And if you're reading this, that's you. -- RT
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Current Cites 7(4) (April 1996) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright (C) 1996 by the Library, University of
California, Berkeley. All rights reserved.
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