[98] in Information Retrieval
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daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ganderso@Athena.MIT.EDU)
Tue Jun 23 14:43:08 1992
From: ganderso@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: elibdev@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 92 14:41:25 EDT
To: Tulip Discussion Group at MIT *
From: Greg Anderson, Libraries
Date: Feb. 19, 1992
Subject: Report of the first meeting on Jan. 23, 1992
I apologize for getting this report memo out so late; I'll try to
do better next time.
I agreed to write up a summary of the points and discussion of
our meeting on Jan. 23. As background, the Libraries and
Information Services are interested in working with the Materials
Processing Center and the Center for Materials Science and
Engineering on the Tulip project, and experiment with Elsevier
Science Publishers to explore electronic access to journals.
Everyone has the Tulip Working Plan 1, October 10, 1991, issued
by Elsevier. This is a service project to learn first-hand about
the issues and requirements to delivery published journal
material online.
Summary of Jan. 23 meeting
Professor Eagar and Professor Wuensch are supportive of the
experiment in their respective Centers. From their perspective,
there are two primary benefits to electronic access to journals
in the center:
1. Time savings since trips to the library would then be
minimized or eliminated;
2. Elimination of the need to be in physical proximity to
the journals.
To accomplish fully these two goals, there are requirements which
the experiment should explore:
1. Access to the articles at the workstation is very
desirable. This constitutes the first level of scrutiny
for the information.
2. Low-cost print capability for journal articles is
critical. After scrutiny of the article at the
workstation, faculty and researchers then determine if
they wish to read the article, and they want a hard
copy to take with them.
3. There needs to be intermediate levels of access and
discrimination among articles. These levels could
include abstracts, browsing through the article to
determine if there are graphs, photographs, etc.
examination of citations, etc. All of these are
determinants for choosing the article.
4. Faculty and researchers need a customized, personal
manager online that can replicate searches over time;
e.g. construct a search in an area of investigation and
repeat this search at intervals to identify new
information on the topic. Desire was expressed for an
awareness service. A future capability described would
be to cut and paste citations or text from the article
to incorporate into text in another window on the
workstation.
5. High resolution (600 dpi) and gray scale are essential
to examination of graphical information.
We learned more about the characteristics and composition of the
two Centers and about Materials Science in general. We learned
that the Centers have a high percentage of saturation of
workstations in the labs. System requirements are being defined
in IS and the Libraries to deliver the article images to those
workstations since they exist on the MITnet but outside of the
Athena environment. We learned that there is a very high
percentage of macs and pcs on desks, and that these might be
appropriate for searching the article citation file to identify
articles of interest which could then be retrieved on the lab
workstations.
Next Steps
Among the initial steps we identified are:
1. Compilation of mailing addresses from this meeting (see
attached).
2. Exchange of mailing lists and consolidation of them between
the two centers (Eve and Susan).
3. Eve would send out a letter to the two centers asking for
volunteers to work with us on this experiment. Our hope is
to have a core group of 6-12 who are willing to provide
feedback and help us design the system. More broadly we
will publicize the existence of this prototype service in
the two centers and invite feedback.
4. IS will work with the two centers to gather information
about the hardware and connectivity base in the centers.
5. IS and the Libraries will work with their developer's group
to design the delivery system.
6. IS and the Libraries will complete the Elsevier proposal
outlining MIT's plans to participate in the Tulip Project.
The deadline for the proposal is now pushed back to April by
Elsevier.
We need to establish a bulletin board for posting of information
and to coordinate scheduling of future meetings. Marilyn and I
will work on this item.
Attendance List from Jan. 23, 1992.
Thomas Eagar tweagar@mit.edu
Bernhardt Wuensch bwuensch@eagle.mit.edu
Eve Downing edowning@mit.edu
Virginia Esau vesau@eagle.mit.edu
Susan Rosevear susang@eagle.mit.edu
Marilyn McMillan mcmillan@mit.edu
Tom Owens owens@athena.mit.edu
Greg Anderson ganderso@athena.mit.edu
