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Current Cites, March 2001, 12(3)
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Current Cites (Digital Library SunSITE)
Volume 12, no. 3, March 2001
Edited by Roy Tennant
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2001/cc01.12.3.html
Contributors: Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Jim Ronningen, Roy Tennant
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Editor's Note: It is my great pleasure to announce that Charles W. Bailey,
Jr., Margaret Gross, Shirl Kennedy, Leo Robert Klein, and Eric Lease
Morgan have joined the Current Cites team. All of them combine significant
writing experience with awareness of current information technology issues
and challenges. Welcome, all! Also, starting with this issue, only those
who have cites in any particular issue will be listed as a contributor. A
complete list of team members will continue to be available
(http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ CurrentCites/team.html).
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Adams, Katherine C. "The Web as a Database: New Extraction Technologies
and Content Management" Online 25(2) (March/April 2001) p. 27-32 (http://
www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL2001/adams3_01.html). - Introduction of
basic concepts is this article's strength. Working from the core concept
that information extraction is fact retrieval, as opposed to traditional
information retrieval's function as document gatherer, Adams describes
software which can discover, sift and organize content (including data
generated "on the fly") to a fine granularity. She focuses on two primary
methods: IE software which can analyze complexities and ambiguities in
language at the sentence level, and wrapper induction software which
relies upon shallower pattern matching techniques. The role that XML plays
is briefly explained. Occasionally, her description of the linguistic
tasks performed by IE software is unclear; e.g. it's easy to misconstrue
the sentence "For example, the phrase 'my mother's brother' and 'my
brother' express the same relationship, but the way in which the
information is expressed differs" to mean that both phrases point to the
same person, when her actual intention is to show the syntactic similarity
in the two phrases. But on the whole the article is a nice overview of the
subject, and citations are provided for readers who want to go further
into problems of technical implementation. - JR
CAMiLEON Project Papers: Holdsworth, David and Paul Wheatley, "Emulation,
Preservation, and Abstraction"; Holdsworth, David "Emulation: C-ing
Ahead"; Wheatley, Paul "Migration: A CAMiLEON Discussion Paper". - The
CAMiLEON Project (http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/) is a joint project of
the universities of Michigan (USA) and Leeds (UK) to "evaluate emulation
as a digital preservation strategy by developing emulation tools,
cost-benefit analysis and user evaluation." Although the project is
ostensibly focused on emulation as a tool for preserving digital content,
the project also studies migration as a strategy for preservation to
compare against it. These papers particularly the overviews of emulation
and migration can be useful to get a sense of these preservation
strategies. - RT
Chudnov, Daniel. "An Interview with Paul Everitt and Ken Manheimer of
Digital Creations, Publishers of Zope" oss4lib (March 2001)
(http://oss4lib.org/ readings/interview-everitt-manheimer-2001-03.php). -
I don't usually cite things that perhaps only a few hundred of our readers
will understand, but I'm making an exception for this. The reason is that
there should be more than a few hundred librarians who understand this, or
we're in big trouble. What they're talking about is nothing less than
organizing information. Librarians talk about cataloging and
classification, they talk about metadata, Content Management Framework,
and Wiki. Wiki? Yes, Wiki. Like I said, there's maybe a few hundred of you
out there who've even heard of it. The point is this. People like Paul
Everitt and Ken Manheimer are out there creating new information spaces
spaces that people will want to discover and use like other types of more
traditional information spaces (e.g., books, journals). Therefore, the
more "intelligence" (cataloging, metadata) that can be built into them
from scratch, the better off we'll be. Imagine what the world would be
like, for example, if the Web had been created with some easy method of
trapping keywords in META tags. Got the picture? A little bit of time
spent now can save us an untold amount of trouble later. Responding to
Chudnov's question "What more can librarians do to contribute our
experience and insight to the broader software community regarding
metadata issues?" Everitt said "Uhh, prevent knuckleheads like me from
repeating historical mistakes. It's doubtful that a disruptive technology
for metadata will come out of the ranks of librarians. However, if
librarians keep an open mind and don't fall prey to sacrificing the larger
victory by clinging to a narrow agenda, then they can spot a winner and
help guide it to adulthood." Sounds like good advice to me. - RT
Chudnov, Daniel, Cynthia Crooker, and Kimberly Parker. "jake: Overview and
Status Report." Serials Review 26 (4) (2000): 12-17. - Ever try to find
out what licensed databases index a journal or include its full text? It's
not a pretty picture, and you could spend a lot of time tediously digging
around in vendor Web sites to unearth this information. Or, you could use
jake. Back in 1999, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University
developed the Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment (jake) to solve
this problem. After much cooperative effort by librarians at Yale and
elsewhere, you can now go to the jake test server at the Simon Fraser
University Library, type a journal name in the Search Title box (or use
another search key), hit submit, and, presto, there's a list of all the
databases that include the journal, who the database providers are, and
what the dates of coverage for citations or full text are. If you are
feeling ambitious, you can start your own jake server. The software and
data are available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Read
the article to get a good overview of this laudable project, and visit the
project Web site for further information. - CB
Crawford, Diane, ed. "The Next 1,000 Years" Communications of the ACM
Special Issue 44(3) (March 2001). - A taste for the speculative is a
common trait among those of us who are interested in what computers can
do. "Speculative fiction," a fancy euphemism for science fiction, is
perennially popular with us, and I recommend this special issue as
pleasure reading because it brings the same "gee whiz" factor that good
science fiction does when the author has a firm grasp of how technologies
might bring about possible futures. These are the prognostications of
experts in many fields related to computing, from virtual reality to
economics, from artificial intelligence to politics (now that's a link
that's been pointed out before). Over 60 fearless authors contributed
short essays, which have been divided into four groups: Tools and
Technologies, Red Flags, Software Solutions, and Education. Of course, the
mere existence of this issue in print and digital form raises the
question: what types of archives will hold it through the centuries to
come, when our descendants may look back on it and laugh? - JR
Luce, Richard E. "E-prints Intersect the Digital Library: Inside the Los
Alamos arXiv" Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship 19 (Winter
2001) (http:// www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/01-winter/article3.html). - The
main strength of this piece is its overview of the arXiv e-print
repository, its history and impact on the physics community. Where it is
weakest is with identifying impacts on libraries. But if you pay enough
attention to what he says in this piece, and read a little bit between the
lines, you should be able to figure it out yourself. As the library at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory is doing, we (libraries) need to be
involved with collecting, managing, providing access to, and preserving
this important type of literature. And with a model for success like arXiv
and the recently developed ePrints (which is available for free at
http://www.eprints.org/), there are precious few reasons why not. - RT
OCLC/RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata. Preservation Metadata for
Digital Objects: A Review of the State of the Art A White Paper by the
OCLC/RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata, 2001
(http://www.oclc.org/ digitalpreservation/presmeta_wp.pdf). - The title
describes the goal of this white paper, and it does it quite well. Digital
preservation is a global issue, and the membership and findings of this
group reflect this global nature. Exemplars of metadata for the purpose of
preserving digital objects are reviewed, including the Open Archival
Information System (OAIS) reference model, and metadata element sets from
the Research Libraries Group (RLG), the National Library of Australia,
CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives (CEDARS), the Networked European
Deposit Library (NEDLIB), and Harvard University. The white paper ends by
identifying points of convergence between these metadata element sets, and
enumerating issues requiring further discussion. - RT
PRISM: Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata; Public
'Last Call' for Version 1.0 PRISM Working Group and IDEAlliance (March 5,
2001) (http://www.prismstandard.org/only/lastcall.asp; also available as a
zipped PDF at http://www.prismstandard.org/only/lastcalldraft.zip). - In
their own words, the PRISM specification "defines an XML metadata
vocabulary for syndicating, aggregating, post-processing and
multi-purposing magazine, news, catalog, book, and mainstream journal
content. PRISM provides a framework for the interchange and preservation
of content and metadata, a collection of elements to describe that
content, and a set of controlled vocabularies listing the values for those
elements." Written by a working group with representatives from
organizations like Sotheby's, Time, Cond Nast Publications, Adobe Systems,
and Getty Images, among others, this draft specification is aimed at
making syndicated content easier to provide and process. The specification
relies heavily on RDF and Dublin Core, as well as its own syntax for
describing controlled vocabularies. As with any specification or standard,
the proof is not in the document but in the usage. Only time will tell if
this is will become another TCP/IP (ubiquitous) or an ISO OSI (hardly ever
used and long forgotten). - RT
Proceedings of the Building the Virtual Reference Desk in a 24/7 World
Conference January 12, 2001, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (http://
www.loc.gov/rr/digiref/webcasts/). - It's fitting that a conference
looking at ways in which librarians can offer reference services over the
Internet has itself pushed the envelope in delivering conference content
over the Internet. This site is very successful in using video streaming
technology to not only deliver video of the speakers, but also coordinate
it with their slides. The result is amazing, as virtually the only thing
missing from the experience is the third dimension. And the content itself
also doesn't disappoint, although it isn't as easy to skim in this format.
Speakers include Jay Jordan, President and CEO of OCLC, Diane Nester
Kresh, the manager of the Collaborative Digital Reference Service project
of the Library of Congress, Paul Constantine of Cornell University, David
Lankes, a long-time practitioner of online (mostly email-based) reference,
and Susan McGlamery, perhaps the single most experienced person with
web-based reference systems in front-line use. Unlike many conferences,
here there isn't a weak speaker in the bunch. Anyone interested in digital
reference who wasn't there in person should spend a few hours at this
site. And if you were there, you can relive the experience. - RT
Proceedings of the Museums and the Web 2001 Conference Seattle, Washington
(March 14-17, 2001), sponsored by Archives & Museum Informatics (http://
www.archimuse.com/mw2001/speakers/). - Anyone interested in how museums
are using the web will almost surely find one or more presentations of
interest here. Topics range from the bleeding edge ("Enhancing Museum
Visitor Access Through Robotic Avatars Connected to the Web") to the more
mundane. Unfortunately, papers are listed by each individual speaker,
thereby leading to the same paper appearing multiple times in the list
when there are several co-speakers. Also, since exhibitors are apparently
considered "speakers", they appear in the list as well, thereby increasing
the number of listings that do not lead to an online presentation. But if
you can overlook these faults, you may just find an interesting or useful
presentation. - RT
Van de Sompel, Herbert and Oren Beit-Arie. "Open Linking in the Scholarly
Information Environment Using the OpenURL Framework" D-Lib Magazine
(http:// www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/vandesompel/03vandesompel.html). - One
of the toughest issues for libraries in providing robust and effective
access to web-based resources has been the problem of linking. The Web, as
useful as it is, is nonetheless quite primitive when it comes to links.
Except for quite limited situations, links are static (point to one
hard-coded location, whether it is the right one for your audience or not)
and singular (unable to point to multiple destinations). This is where the
OpenURL Framework comes in, and what products like SFX and CrossRef are
trying to solve. This article serves as a good overview of the issues and
technology "players", and should take the place of Van de Sompel's
previous three-part D-Lib Magazine series on SFX for all except the most
technically voracious people or masochists your call if either of those
categrories apply to you. - RT
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Current Cites 12(3) (March 2001) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of California All rights
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