[316] in Information Retrieval
DL98 Trip report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Fri Jul 10 21:08:45 1998
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 1998 21:08:38 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Cc: owens@endinfosys.com
To: saurons@MIT.EDU, elibdev@MIT.EDU, cstrdev@MIT.EDU
July 24, 25, and 16 Larry Stone and I attended Digital Libraries 98
Hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery.
Here are a few highlights and insights from the conference:
Fun people we met:
Doug Engelbart, elder statesman of interactive computing.
Michael Lesk, the same guy who co-wrote the original lex lexical
analyzer generator. Lesk has been a leader in digital librarianship for
some time. He's one of the readers for the NSF's DLI proposals.
David Levy, who gave the best talk, "Heroic Measures: Reflections on the
Possibility and Purpose of Digital Preservation".
Jim Davis, who wrote the Dienst protocol. (We'll be talking more with
him as we push Dienst into actual reliability.)
Ed Fox, who is working at Virginia Tech on an ambitious online Thesis project.
Ken Anderson, who is working on a very large scale hypertext system.
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Earth shattering insights:
From Englebart: Storage technology is at the point where it's possible
to save everything. The place to do the real reasearch now is in making
it easier to find stuff.
From Fox: Many of the questions MIT is asking itself about online
theses have also been asked at Virginia Tech. Their system is a good
place to look for one set of answers to the questions.
(http://www.ndltd.org/)
From Levy: ALL preservation, whether it be scanning pages, or using low
acid paper, is an approximation. You always have to keep in mind why
you are preserving something: what uses will be made of it, and by whom.
From a panel discussion, "(HOW) CAN DIGITAL LIBRARIES REALLY SERVE
EDUCATION?": People need to feel justified disrupting their
well-established ways of doing things to adopt new practices.
Resistance to acceptance of digital libraries, or any technology, or any
new practice must address this.
There is a new search engine, Northern Light, that works at generating
fewer irrelevant hits, and does a very nice job of offering results
sorted by subject category. This is an up and coming engine. I LIKE IT!
http://www.nlsearch.com/
Conference as a whole: There is STILL a horrendous amount of
duplication of effort and re-discovery of how to round one corner off to
make something that might evolve one day into a wheel.
----
I also have some long-form notes on the web at:
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/dl98.html
-wdc
