New & noteworthy

Citation

(2003), "New & noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920fab.001

New & noteworthy

WebJunction Online CommunityProvides Access to Information Technology

WebJunction, a community of knowledge and learning developed by and for people committed to public access computing, was unveiled on May 12, 2003, at the Library of Congress. Supported by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, WebJunction is the work of five organizations, led by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). WebJunction's mission is to help promote public access computing and technology to libraries and related organizations throughout the USA and Canada.

WebJunction is designed as a community-centered online space for library staff to share knowledge through conversations, online classes, and instructional documents. Through its members' collective knowledge, WebJunction seeks to provide the best possible public access to information technology for patrons, clients and customers, and for library staff.

At launch, the main topic areas included:

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  Policies and practices. A comprehensive overview of appropriate library policies and practices; guidance on technology planning, acceptable use policies, accessibility issues, as well as fundraising and marketing.

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  Technology resources. Practical tips, tools and information to help with computer and Internet issues in a public access computing program.

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  Buying guide. Information about buying discounted hardware and software for libraries, as well as reviews of products.

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  Learning center. Online courses, downloadable lessons, training tips and other tools to enhance public access computing knowledge and skills.

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  Community center. Includes the WebJunction Community's message board system; "I'm curious, George", WebJunction's online reference librarian; members directory; and newsletter archive.

Registered members of the WebJunction community are encouraged to support and expand the community's knowledge base by contributing articles, handouts, worksheets, and suggested URLs of interest to add to each of the topic areas.

http://webjunction.org/

OCLCOCLC to Support OpenURL Registry Framework Test

OCLC staffers Jeff Young and Phil Norman worked with Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library's Herbert Van de Sompel to bring up the new OpenURL registry using OCLC's OAICat open-source software. The OpenURL Registry application was developed to support the Trial Use period of the NISO AX Standard Committee's registry specification. The OpenURL is a protocol for interoperability between an information resource and a service component that offers localized services in an open linking environment. It is in effect an actionable URL that transports metadata or keys to access metadata for the object for which the OpenURL is provided.

The OpenURL Registry application supports the generalization of OpenURL from a fixed framework for linking to Web-based scholarly information sources to an abstract framework for linking to the Web in general. The OpenURL Registry contains properties that are fundamental to creating concrete representations of OpenURL ContextObjects and methods to transport them.

Although there is no direct relationship or dependency between the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and OpenURLs, it was convenient to implement the registry specification using a novel application of OAI. OAI is generally thought of as a tool for automated harvesting of metadata, but this registry demonstrates that an OAI repository can be useful on its own, independent of the harvesting function.

www.oclc.org/research/projects/openurl/ OpenURL registry: http://openurl.info/registry OAICat open-source software: www.oclc.org/research/software/oai/cat.shtm

FinlandBecomes the first DCMI affiliate

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) and the National Library of Finland have announced that Finland has become DCMI's first National Affiliate. The DCMI Affiliate program is intended to provide a stronger link between local communities of practice and the Initiative. Affiliates will help promote the adoption of Dublin Core specifications, and provide a training and consulting foundation to help promulgate adoption of Dublin Core specifications. They will also maintain translations of base DCMI standards and documentation as appropriate for the locale. Affiliates will help support the infrastructure and management of DCMI, and in return, will assume a growing governance role in the Initiative.

Finland has adopted Dublin Core as a basic part of the government's information technology strategy, making DC a Finnish National Standard published by the Finnish Standards Association SFS, and maintained and supported by the National Library.

More information on DCMI Affiliates can be found at: http://dublincore.org/about/affiliates/ National Library of Finland: www.lib.helsinki.fi/english/

Dublin CoreMetadata Element Set Standard Approved

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Directorate reports that the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set standard has been approved. The final text of the ISO 15836 standard and the balloting report, including the response to comments, on the SC4 document log is on the ISO TC46/SC4 Web site: www.niso.org/international/SC4/sc4docs.html

This approval is a welcome culmination of an incremental process to bring the Dublin Core metadata element set to a broad worldwide constituency. This process has involved the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) in Europe and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) in the USA. As an international standard, it will be easier for many organizations to adopt and promote the use of Dublin Core to enhance resource discovery using the Internet.

Dublin Core is the only cross-domain resource discovery standard developed and standardized through an open standards process. More than 1,500 people from 50 countries subscribe to DCMI working groups, and translations of DCMI metadata products are available in more than 20 languages. Ratification as an ISO standard is important recognition of this international effort.

www.niso.org/international/SC4/sc4docs.html

First VendorsAnnounce Compliance with the COUNTER Code of Practice

Blackwell Publishing, ISI and Oxford University Press have announced that the online usage reports they supply to customers now comply with Release 1 of the COUNTER Code of Practice. All three companies have signed formal declarations of compliance and the list of usage reports covered by each publisher may be found on the COUNTER Web site.

A number of other leading vendors have declared their intention to become COUNTER compliant in the course of 2003 and are working towards this goal. They include:

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  American Institute of Physics.

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  BMJ Publishing Group.

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  CABI International.

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  EBSCO.

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  Elsevier Science.

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  Nature Publishing Group.

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  Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins.

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  Extenza.

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  HighWire Press.

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  Ingenta.

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  Institute of Physics Publishing.

From May 2003, a definitive list of COUNTER-compliant vendors will be maintained on the COUNTER Web site. Only vendors and usage reports included on this list should be regarded as being COUNTER compliant.

www.projectCounter.org

VivÍsimoIntroduces Automatic Categorization of FirstGov Search Results

Vivísimo, Inc., a global provider of advanced document clustering and content integration software, has announced a free service that automatically categorizes the search results from FirstGov.gov – the US Government's official Web portal. Vivísimo's new service, located at http://vivisimo.com/firstgov, helps citizens find government information quickly and easily by organizing FirstGov search results into meaningful subject categories.

FirstGov provides a comprehensive search of government information including over 51 million Web pages from federal and state governments and US territories. The problem lies in trying to sort through all of the relevant information. A FirstGov search can produce 1,000 or more search results in a long ranked list. Vivísimo's automatic document clustering technology improves the FirstGov search dramatically and helps users sort through the results. Vivísimo's service presents easy-to-browse categories that allow users to drill-down immediately into relevant topics, making it much easier to find desired information.

Vivísimo, Inc. provides intelligent software that helps enterprises to organize information from anywhere, any time, in any language. Its breakthrough clustering and meta-search products retrieve textual information from one or multiple sources and automatically organize the combined results on the fly into meaningful folders. This dynamic approach allows for rapid integration and categorization of content and significantly improves end-user access to relevant information. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, Vivísimo was founded by research computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University and has been primarily funded by grants from the National Science Foundation's Small Business Innovation Research program.

http://vivisimo.com

http://vivisimo.com

LITA2003 Award Winners Announced

Wendy Pradt Lougee, university librarian and McKnight presidential professor at the University of Minnesota, has been named the 2003 winner of the Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award. Named in honor of one of the pioneers of library automation, the Atkinson Award recognizes an academic librarian who has made significant contributions in the area of library automation or management, and has made notable improvements in library services or research. "Wendy Pradt Lougee embodies many of the essential characteristics most valued by librarians: a commitment to information access, preservation of collections, and service to users, combined with a talent for collaboration. But, it is her ability to migrate these principles into the digital arena that makes her such an ideal recipient of the Atkinson Award," said committee chair Janet Swan Hill. Four divisions of ALA, including the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), the Library Administration and Management Association (LAMA), and the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), jointly sponsor the Hugh C. Atkinson Award.

Dr Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos National Laboratories is the winner of the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology for 2003. OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., and the LITA sponsor the award. The award was established to honor the achievements of Frederick G. Kilgour, the founder of OCLC and a seminal figure in library automation. The award is given to a person who has amassed a significant body of "real world" research in the field of library and information technology that has had an impact in the way in which information is published, stored, retrieved, disseminated or managed. "The Kilgour Award Committee was delighted to acknowledge the significant work of Dr Van de Sompel, whose research has contributed significantly to not one, but two major current developments in our field: linking technologies and metadata harvesting," said Larry Woods, chair of the award committee.

Patricia J. Cutright has been named winner of the 2003 LITA/Gaylord Award for Achievement in Library and Information Technology. Ms Cutright is Library Director, Pierce Library, Eastern Oregon University. Sponsored by Gaylord Information Systems and the LITA, the award recognizes outstanding achievement in the creative use of information technology for improving or enhancing library services.

"Patricia Cutright's achievements in the planning and implementation of the Pioneer Library System, combining the holdings and unifying services of over 70 multi-type libraries in eastern Oregon, in an area of 38,430 square miles larger than 13 states is just one of her many accomplishments that led to her consideration for this award. Ms Cutright has truly been a 'pioneer' in the areas of distance learning and remote access," stated Diana Davis, LITA/Gaylord Committee Chair.

Roy Tennant has been named the winner of the 2003 LITA/Library Hi Tech award for Outstanding Communication in Library and Information Technology. The award is sponsored by Emerald and the LITA. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in communicating to educate practitioners within the library field of library and information technology. Roy Tennant has been involved in the training of people in library technologies, particularly the Internet, for many years. He is currently the manager for eScholarship Web and Services Design with the California Digital Library at the University of California, Oakland.

www.lita.org

Public Library of ScienceLaunches Open-Access Journal: PLoS Biology

The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit organization of scientists committed to making scientific and medical literature a public resource, has established a nonprofit scientific publishing venture and announced the publication of its first open-access journals. The first issue of PLoS Biology is planned for October 2003; a second journal, PLoS Medicine, will launch in mid-2004. Once these initial journals are established, PLoS Publications plans to expand into other fields (e.g. PLoS Chemistry and PLoS Computer Science) and launch field-specific journals that publish articles of a more specialized interest (e.g. PLoS Genetics or PLoS Oncology).

The PLoS journals will be governed and operated by scientists, and will retain all of the important features of scientific journals, including rigorous peer review and high editorial and production standards. The journals will employ a new publishing model that will allow PLoS to make all published works immediately available online, with no charges for access and no restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use. The PLoS editorial team began accepting manuscript submissions for PLoS Biology on May 1, 2003.

As open-access journals, the online versions of PLoS publications will be provided free of charge to anyone with Internet access. Paper versions will also be available through paid subscription.

Additional information about the Public Library of Science, subscription information, and manuscript submission guidelines can be found at: www.plos.org/

ePrints UK Project Underway

ePrints UK is a two-year project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme. Due for completion in July 2004, the ePrints UK project is developing a series of national, discipline-focused services through which the higher and further education community can access the collective output of e-print papers available from compliant Open Archive repositories, particularly those provided by UK universities and colleges.

Discipline-focused views of available eprints will be provided through the use of an automatic subject-classification Web service offered by OCLC. Furthermore, the project will use "name authority" and "citation analysis" Web services (offered by OCLC and the University of Southampton respectively) to enhance the metadata harvested from available archives.

The project will build on the Resource Discovery Network (RDN)'s experience in implementing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to share metadata between the RDN partners to create the aggregated search facility, ResourceFinder. ePrints UK will benefit from the RDN partners' expertise in developing services tailored for particular subject audiences, the considerable existing user base visiting existing RDN services and the ongoing work of the JISC funded Subject Portals Project.

This project is the result of a proposal addressing areas (a) and (b) of JISC Circular 1/02, supporting institutions in the disclosure of their assets and harvesting institutional metadata using the OAI protocol into a national service that will be available to the community.

www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/

Mellon FoundationGrant Helps Create Digital Video Archive of World Music

A new world of music from around the globe will soon be available to students and scholars. A research team from Indiana University and the University of Michigan has received an $875,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create an online digital archive of video recordings and a searchable database for research and teaching.

The grant has been supplemented by additional support from both universities bringing the total to $1.4 million. The Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis (EVIA) Digital Archive project will focus on video recordings made by ethnomusicologists, who are scholars who study music for the purpose of cultural analysis.

For the past 25 years, scholars of ethnomusicology have increasingly used video as a means of capturing and preserving their field research. Driven by a belief that music is more than sound alone, ethnomusicologists' use of video captures the multitude of cultural practices – including costumes, ritual practices and dance – that are integral to fully understanding musical expression.

The EVIA Digital Archive currently is the only project of its kind that will collect, copy, annotate and preserve ethnomusicological video materials on the Web for use by educators, researchers and musicians on a global scale. The Smithsonian Institution is undertaking a similar project.

IU and the University of Michigan are uniquely positioned to lead the project. Both institutions are charter members of Internet2 – an advanced network that can deliver high-quality digital video to computers around the world. Both institutions also are home to resources such as the IU Archives of Traditional Music, the largest university-based ethnographic sound and video archive in the USA, and the University of Michigan Media Union, which will provide special equipment needed to facilitate the development of the digital archive. Technical development at IU will be led by IU's University Information Technology Services and the Digital Library Program. The project will benefit from IU's prior experience in multimedia digital library development with the Variations music library system.

The far-reaching scope of the EVIA project will provide a model for future projects. The unique and irreplaceable video materials placed in the digital archive ultimately will be made available to a global network of people, not only to those able to physically travel to archival institutions, as has been the case in the past.

More information: www.indiana.edu/~eviada

League of NationsPhoto Archive Unveiled

The Center for the Study of Global Change, the United Nations Library, and the Indiana University Libraries have announced the unveiling of the League of Nations Photo Archive Web site, a comprehensive overview and research tool which focuses on the League of Nations. IU librarians and IU School of Library and Information Science graduate students worked in Bloomington, Indiana and Geneva, Switzerland on the digital library project dedicated to digitizing a League of Nations Archives' photograph collection. The League of Nations Photo Archive Web site includes images of individuals, assemblies, councils, commissions and committees, delegations, buildings, miscellaneous events, and also photos of judges of the Permanent Court of International Justice and individuals who worked in the Secretariat, the International Labour Organization/Bureau du Travail, and special institutions associated with the league. The Web site also presents basic technical information regarding how this digital collection and Web site were created.

www.indiana.edu/~league

Digital Library of TransportationImages Launched

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries has announced the launch of Transportation Around the World: 1911-1993. This is a collection of 650 images selected from three separate photographic collections – the Harrison Forman Collection, Harold Mayer Collection, and American Geographical Society Library Print Collection – housed in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries' American Geographical Society (AGS) Library. Users can browse thumbnails of images illustrating modes of transportation, or can search by transportation type and mode as well as by geographic location.

www.uwm.edu/Library/digilib/transport/index.html

DLESE Developers' WorkshopReport Available

The National Science Foundation's Geosciences Directorate sponsored the first Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) Developers' Workshop in Boulder, Colorado at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) on February 19 and 20, 2003. A report of the workshop is now available as a draft white paper that contains a review of the workshop, provides a synopsis of the projects represented, and includes some understanding of the experiences to date of developing collections or services for DLESE. In addition, the paper highlights some issues and challenges with respect to the future development of the distributed library.

The workshop agenda had two main parts. First, a morning was devoted to the DLESE building process, which included an overview of DLESE, project introductions, a review of the current DLESE library versioning plan, DLESE v2.0 architecture, the ADN metadata framework, NSDL, and commentary on geo-referenced services. Second, the remaining workshop time was devoted to three thematic areas:

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   Bringing data into the library.

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   Building collections.

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   Building services and service integration.

The workshop brought together technical representatives from a number of projects developing library infrastructure, services, or resources for DLESE, or that include collaboration with DLESE as a part of their project goals. The workshop was organized in recognition that DLESE is now a broad-based effort with technical contributions coming from an array of projects and organizations. The goals of the workshop were to give participants a view of the breadth of development projects being undertaken under the DLESE umbrella, to share experiences from project developments, and to identify future needs and areas for development.

www.dlese.org/libdev/workshops/2003_Dev/Workshop_Report_Draft_4_dist.pdf