New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2001), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918aab.005

New & Noteworthy

Library of CongressAnd Other US Libraries to Use Pinyin

Beginning October 1, American libraries have joined the international community in using Pinyin as the standard romanization scheme for Chinese characters. The Wade-Giles romanization system, followed in American libraries for the last century, will no longer be used. In Pinyin, for example, the former Chinese leader is called "Mao Zedong," as opposed to "Mao Tse-tung" under Wade-Giles; "Qing dynasty" (Pinyin) will be used, rather than "Ch'ing." Now, the Library of Congress (LC) and other United States libraries are synchronized with the romanization used by other US government agencies, including the Board of Geographic Names ­ the body that governs the form of geographic names used in Library of Congress cataloging.

In making the change to Pinyin, the Library collaborated with OCLC and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) to address the conversion of the millions of Chinese-language bibliographic records in their respective databases romanized according to Wade-Giles, including the headings established from Chinese works that exist in non-Chinese records (e.g. translations of works by Mao Zedong).

The Library of Congress's Associate Librarian for Library Services, Winston Tabb, hailed the move as "another excellent example of the longstanding cooperation among the Library, OCLC, and the Research Libraries Group that has benefited libraries and our users throughout the world."

According to an LC release, the move to Pinyin represents two years of planning and coordination among the Library, OCLC, and RLG. The three organizations hosted a series of open forums in conjunction with American Library Association conferences and meetings of other professional organizations to solicit input and to keep interested stakeholders informed of conversion plans. The Library took responsibility for mounting and maintaining the "Pinyin Project" Web site, where changes to the romanization rules, a coordinated timeline and other relevant information were shared with the library community in a timely fashion. Staff freely shared the specifications drafted at the Library and applied by OCLC and RLG for the conversion of authority records and bibliographic records, respectively. Representatives engaged in review and revisions until the specifications yielded acceptable test results.

OCLC completed the conversion of the affected authority records on time, enabling them to be loaded at the Library and subsequently distributed by its Cataloging Distribution Service during the first week of October.

RLG took on the task of converting Library of Congress bibliographic records, using the Library's specifications. By revising the specifications based on comments of RLG members on test conversions of samples of their own records, the same specifications could be used on all RLG libraries' records. The full set of converted records was sent to both the Library and OCLC to be loaded for their constituents. The implementors expect a transition period of one year, through October 1, 2001. By that date, catalog users will no longer have to be familiar with two different romanization schemes to access Chinese authors, titles, or subject headings.

Library of Congress: c/o Guy Lamolinara, (202) 707-9217, glam@loc.gov, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/pinyin.html

Questia MediaAnnounces Prominent Librarian Advisory Council

Questia Media has announced the formation of its Librarian Advisory Council, created to provide strategic insight in developing the collection which will grow to 250,000 scholarly books and journals by 2003. The news followed the October 30 announcement of the Questia Advisory Council, which includes Former First Lady Barbara Bush, Harvard University Library Director Sidney Verba, Xerox Corporation Chief Scientist John Seely Brown, and Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Director Clifford Lynch.

Inaugural members of the Librarian Advisory Council are all leaders in the field of library and information science. The distinguished members include Rhoda Channing, Director of Wake Forest University's Z. Smith Reynolds Library in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Barbara Doyle-Wilch, College Librarian with the Lucy Scribner Library at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York; Mari Miller, Librarian for Undergraduate Collection for the University of California ­ Berkeley; Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian at Yale University; John Lubans, Deputy University Librarian at Duke University; Sue Phillips, Associate Director for Technical and Networked Services for the Austin General Libraries, University of Texas; and Julie Todaro, Dean of Library Services at Austin Community College.

Questia's Librarian Advisory Council members will assist in the analysis of student research needs. Moreover, they will provide guidance in the development of the Questia online collection and composition tools that enhance writing skills among students. The group will also be instrumental in supporting and identifying current trends and issues in higher education and librarianship. Members serve two-year terms, with meetings twice a year.

According to a Questia release, Questia is building the first online research service for undergraduates. Launching in January 2001 with unlimited access to more than 50,000 books and journals, and growing to 250,000 by 2003, the subscription service will include a suite of composition tools, with powerful keyword searches and hyperlinks. The Questia service will also have the ability to automatically format text, and to create footnotes and bibliographies, in specified formats.

Questia Media: c/o Ann Brimberry, (713) 358-2704, abrimberry@questia.com

Swets BlackwellAcquires Munksgaard Direct

Swets Blackwell and Munksgaard have signed an agreement stating that Swets Blackwell has acquired Munksgaard Direct, the book and subscription service division of the Munksgaard Group. The agreement is effective from October 2000, and will result in Swets Blackwell becoming Denmark's leading agent within the business of subscription, database, and electronic information services.

Swets Blackwell currently maintains an office in Glostrup, Denmark, but will move their operations to Copenhagen. The turnover of Swets Blackwell Denmark will be 160 million Danish kroner (nearly 18 million US$). Integration of Munksgaard Direct's activities into Swets Blackwell Denmark will take place over a period of seven to eight months. All current employees of Munksgaard Direct will transition into the new company, bringing the total number of staff to 40.

The manager of Swets Blackwell's Glostrup office, Peter Munksgaard (no relation), will remain the manager of the new, expanded operation.

Since its founding in 1917, Munksgaard has evolved from a traditional bookseller to an international supplier of books, journals, and electronic media. Their publishing division, Munksgaard International Publishers, will remain separate from Swets Blackwell. More information on Munksgaard Direct can be found by visiting http://www.munksgaard.dk.

Swets Blackwell handles two million subscriptions annually from a database containing nearly 250,000 titles from over 65,000 publishers. Swets Blackwell communicates in 25 languages with over 60,000 academic, research and development, medical, corporate and government library customers through their branches in 19 countries across five continents.

Swets Blackwell: c/o Sarah Kellman, Communication Executive, +31 252 435 584, fax +31 252 415 888, press@nl.swetsblackwell.com, http://www.swetsblackwell.com.

Association of Research LibrariesAnnounces 2000-2001 ARL Board

Shirley K. Baker, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Dean of University Libraries, Washington University in St Louis, began her one-year term as President of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) on October 19, 2000, during the ARL Fall Membership Meeting in Washington, DC. She succeeds Kenneth Frazier, Director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison General Library System, who continues to serve on the ARL Executive Committee as Past President. At the same meeting, Paula T. Kaufman, University Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was elected Vice President/President-elect.

Three new Board members were also elected by the membership to serve three-year terms: Nancy L. Baker, University Librarian, University of Iowa; Sarah Michalak, Library Director, University of Utah; and Ann J. Wolpert, Director of Libraries, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Continuing members of the Board are Meredith Butler, Dean of Library Faculty and Director of University Libraries, University at Albany, State University of New York; Fred Heath, Dean and Director of University Libraries, Texas A&M University; Joe A. Hewitt, Director of Academic Affairs Library and Associate Provost for University Libraries, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Paul Mosher, Vice Provost and Director of Libraries, University of Pennsylvania; Carolynne Presser, Director of Libraries, University of Manitoba; and Sarah E. Thomas, University Librarian, Cornell University.

The Board is the governing body and represents the interest of ARL member libraries in directing the business of the Association, including establishing operating policies, budgets, and fiscal control; modifying the ARL mission and objectives; and representing ARL to the community.

SPARCPartners with Project Euclid

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has announced its partnership with Project Euclid, a groundbreaking initiative led by the Cornell University Library and Duke University Press to advance effective and affordable scholarly communication in mathematics and statistics.

Project Euclid, which is being developed with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, provides an infrastructure for independent journals in theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics to publish on the Web using a shared infrastructure. The Euclid site will support the entire span of scholarly publishing from preprints to the distribution of published journals. It will also provide journal editors with a toolkit to streamline their editorial and peer review processes and publish in a timely and cost-effective manner.

SPARC, an alliance of libraries that supports economical alternatives to high-priced journals, will aid Project Euclid by providing library marketing support and introducing journals and editorial boards to Euclid's capabilities.

"Math is a field with a vibrant independent publishing tradition," said Sarah Thomas, University Librarian at Cornell University. "Some 60 percent of the core journals in the discipline are still published by small publishers such as university math departments at reasonable prices. But these could be an endangered species with the growing importance of the Web and of the market dominance of huge commercial aggregations of journals. We expect Project Euclid will help level the playing field and offer independent journals a way forward."

The Euclid editorial toolkit, with password-protected areas that streamline the peer review and editorial process for editors and reviewers, will enable editors to pick and choose different tools to meet their particular needs. They can maintain a database of their reviewers, post papers to a reviewer's password-protected pick-up and drop-off space, and easily alert reviewers via e-mail regarding review deadlines. Reviewers can submit their comments and/or the edited papers confidentially. Editors can link the revised version of a paper to its preprint version, if applicable.

After preparing articles with the Euclid editorial tools, editors will upload the articles that make up a journal issue to the Euclid site. Journal publishers and authors will benefit from the exposure gained through a large aggregated site, and their users will benefit from advanced user features that many individual publishers would be unable to provide on their own. Individual journals will each have distinct "front doors" into the system, which they can publicize to their subscribers, and journals will retain their URSs.

Euclid will be interoperable as part of the Open Archives Initiative, allowing articles in the preprint server to be accessed through searches that reach across widely dispersed digital repositories.

SPARC: c/o Alison Buckholtz, 202-296-2296 #115, alison@arl.org, http://euclid.library.cornell.edu/project/index.html (Project Euclid), http://www.arl.org/sparc SPARC), http://www.openarchives.org (Open Archives Initiative).

OCLCResearchers Measure the World Wide Web

In their annual review of the World Wide Web, researchers at OCLC have determined that the Web now contains about seven million unique sites; that the public Web sites ­ that offer content that is freely accessible by the general public ­ constitutes about 40 percent of the total Web; and that the Web continues to expand at a rapid pace, but its rate of growth is diminishing over time.

According to the group's latest estimates, there were 7.1 million unique Web sites, a 50 percent increase over the previous year's total of 4.7 million. Although the number of Web sites has nearly tripled in size in the last two years, year-to-year growth rates are declining, falling from almost 80 percent between 1998 and 1999, to only about 50 percent between 1999 and 2000.

Public Web sites constitute 41 percent of the Web, or about 2.9 million sites. Private sites ­ whose content is subject to explicit access restrictions (e.g. Internet Protocol filters or password authentication), or is not intended for public use (e.g. Web interfaces to privately owned hardware devices such as printers or routers) ­ comprise 21 percent of the Web, or 1.5 million sites. The remaining 2.7 million sites ­ or about 38 percent of the Web ­ are provisional sites: their content is in an unfinished or transitory state (e.g. server default pages or "Site under construction" notices).

Adult sites ­ those offering sexually explicit content ­ now constitute about 2 percent of the public Web, or 70,000 sites. The proportion of the public Web occupied by adult sites has remained unchanged since 1998.

"The Web continues to grow at a substantial rate", said Ed O'Neill, manager of the OCLC Web Characterization Project. "But a comparison of the year-to-year growth rates suggests that the Web's expansion is slowing. This trend is even more pronounced in the public Web, which grew by about 80 percent between 1997 and 1998 but only by about a third between 1999 and 2000. Even in absolute terms, growth seems to be slowing: the public Web increased by 713,000 sites in the past year, compared to 772,000 sites between 1998 and 1999."

Brian Lavoie, a research scientist working on the Web Characterization Project, notes the increasing incidence of non-public Web content. "For most people, the Web is the public Web ­ that's where most Web browsing takes place. But there's a lot of content out there that you would probably never encounter in the course of casual browsing; in other words, the private and provisional sites. Private sites in particular have exhibited steady growth relative to public sites in the past few years, accounting for about 12 percent of the Web two years ago, compared to over 20 percent today."

The Web Characterization Project, conducted by the OCLC Office of Research, has collected a random sample of Web sites annually since 1997. Current results are based on analysis of the June 2000 sample.

In other OCLC news, OCLC has acquired Library Technical Services (LTS), a library cataloging service based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. LTS provides original and copy cataloging as well as physical processing of materials to large and medium-sized academic libraries in Canada. LTS was established in 1994 as a business unit of ISM Information Systems Management Corporation, an IBM Company. LTS has 20 staff members, including 17 catalogers.

Also, OCLC Pacific and OCLC/WLN, the OCLC service centers that cover the western region of the USA, have merged into a single service provider: the OCLC Western Service Center. Pamela Bailey, director, OCLC Pacific, has been named director of the OCLC Western Service Center, and Karin Ford, director of Library Services at OCLC/WLN, is now director of Cooperative Library Services, OCLC Western Service Center. Scott P. Barringer, director of Information Services at OCLC/WLN, has been named director, OCLC Lacey Product Center, which will continue to develop authorities and collection development products and services.

OCLC: c/o Nita Dean, 6565 Frantz Road, Dublin, Ohio 43017-3395; (614) 764-6000, fax (614) 764-6096, nita_dean@oclc.org, http://www.oclc.org