[14434] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Current Cites, June 2002
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (CITES Moderator)
Thu Jun 27 19:12:53 2002
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 10:42:53 -0700
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Current Cites
Volume 13, no. 6, June 2002
Edited by [2]Roy Tennant
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2002/cc02.13.6.html
Contributors: [3]Charles W. Bailey, Jr., [4]Margaret Gross, [5]Shirl
Kennedy, [6]Leo Robert Klein, Jim Ronningen, [7]Roy Tennant
Cross, Rob and Laurence Prusak. "The People Who Make Organizations Go
-- or Stop". [8]Harvard Business Review 80(6) (June 2002): 104-112. -
As librarians and information specialists, we are all information
facilitators and knowledge integrators. Much of what we accomplish in
our respective organizations develops through our personal contacts
and social networks. We foster and hone these, and in so doing exhibit
certain attributes and characteristics. Cross and Prusak state that
managers can benefit enormously by understanding the dynamics of
informal networks, and by focusing on a few key players. In the
article, the authors identify and structure the roles played in
amorphous networks. Four categories are described: (Can we situate
ourselves?) 1. Central Connectors are those that link people with one
another, and know whom to turn to for the right expertise at the right
time; 2. Boundary Spanners connect their information networks with
other parts of the organization, or with similar networks in other
enterprises. These players may advise such disparate departments as
Marketing, Human Resources, Research & Development; 3. Information
Brokers connect subgroups in an informal cluster. They provide
cohesion to a group that would otherwise splinter into multiple
ineffective segments, or would not exist at all; 4. The last connector
type identified is the Peripheral Specialist. These individuals are
really not part of any informal cluster, but are periodically called
upon for their special expertise. As a conclusion to the article, the
authors suggest that by mapping and analyzing such informal networks,
fragile interpersonal networks can be modified and strengthened. -
[9]MG
[10]"Editors' Interview: The Internet Archive, an Interview with
Brewster Kahle" [11]RLG Diginews 6(3) (June 15, 2002)
(http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews6-3.html). - There've
been several interviews with Brewster Kahle, founder and director of
the [12]Internet Archive and its popular front-end the Way Back
Machine. What's special about this article is the library perspective
that the questions have. Indeed, at times it seems as if there's not
complete agreement on the notion of archives between interviewer and
interviewee. This is particularly true in the area of preservation and
standards. To the question of possible plans for format migration in a
collection now running over 100 terabytes for example, Kahle
impatiently replies: "Once archived, we never change a page. The Web
wasn't constructed to be archived. It's so interconnected. A book
exists outside of time. Archiving Web sites is like putting together a
bomb after it has exploded." - [13]LRK
Electronic Frontier Foundation. [14]Unintended Consequences: Three
Years Under the DMCA" (2002)
(http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20020503_dmca_consequences.html). - The
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) (see the [15]helpful summary
by the Library of Congress) is an egregious assault on the rights of a
free society to access and use intellectual property. This rather
damning review of the past three years of life under this federal
statute focuses on three threats: "chills free expression and
scientific research", "jeopardizes fair use", and "impedes competition
and innovation". A litany of arrests, legal actions, corporate
practices and policies, acts of censorship, and threats of litigation
suppport these allegations. Citations to relevant news and magazine
articles are included. This piece does an excellent job of presenting
a summary of current evidence that the DMCA has had a major
deleterious effect on a wide array of legitimate intellectual and
cultural activities. - [16]RT
Institute of Museum and Library Services. [17]Status of Technology and
Digitization in the Nation's Museums and Libraries: 2002 Report.
Washington, DC: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2002.
(http://www.imls.gov/Reports/TechReports/intro02.htm). - This report
examines the information technology use patterns and digitization
activities of 701 academic libraries, museums, public libraries, and
State Library Administrative Agencies (SLAAs). A key finding of the
report is that only 25% of public libraries, 32% of museums, and 34%
of academic libraries are engaged in digitization activities. By
contrast, 78% of SLAAs are engaged in such activities. What's the
problem? Of institutions that have current or future digitization
plans, all four types say that the most common hindrances are: "lack
of funds to support digitization," "other projects have higher
priorities," "lack of available expertise," and "concern about costs
of preservation and management." There are many more interesting
findings in the report, such a different view of common hindrances by
institutions without digitization plans. - [18]CB
Janes, Joseph. "Digital Reference: Reference Librarians' Experiences
and Attitudes" [19]Journal of the American Society for Information
Science and Technology (JASIST) 53(7): 549-566 (2002). - As Janes
notes in his obligatory literature review at the beginning of this
research article, a number of articles have been written regarding
digital reference and it's impact on libraries and user services, but
nothing has covered the perceptions and attitudes of librarians toward
it. After reviewing the literature, Janes describes his research
methodology and summarizes the number of responses by size and type of
library. From there, the rest of the piece is devoted to the results.
The survey instrument is appended. One of the strongest findings was
that reference librarians who had experience with digital reference
tended to have a much more positive outlook on it than those who had
not. Another was that there is a large gulf between what types of
reference encounters librarians believe digital reference technologies
to be best at -- quick "ready reference" questions, or more involved
research questions. Such a disparity of opinion should not come as a
surprise when discussing a service that is still so new, but as Janes
points out, it is an issue that merits "further examination." - [20]RT
Kirkpatrick, David D. [21]"Battle Over Access to Online Books" [22]The
New York Times (June 17, 2002)
(http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/17/technology/17LIBR.html). - While
e-books have generated spotty interest among the general population,
many libraries have embraced them, making their contents easily
accessible to patrons online. Since libraries are virtually their only
paying customers, the e-book vendors are increasingly catering to
them, cutting liberal licensing deals. Publishers, meanwhile, fear
that this "remote access" is costing them book sales. At June's
American Library Association conference, e-book vendor Rossetta Books
was offering libraries a deal whereby, for $200-$1000 annually,
patrons would be provided with unlimited simultaneous access to a
collection of 20th century classics by such authors as Kurt Vonnegut
and William Styron. Random House is suing Rossetta Books. NetLibrary,
which originally sought to placate publishers by restricting library
e-book access to a single patron at a time, was acquired in January by
a consortium of libraries which is experimenting with more liberal
licensing arrangements. - [23]SK
Kloppenberg, Timothy J. and Warren A. Opfer. "The Current State of
Project Management Research: Trends, Interpretations, and
Predictions". [24]Project Management Journal 33(2) (June 2002): 5-18.
- The authors present the findings of a project to evaluate the state
of project management research, published in English, from 1960 to
1999. These findings were first presented to the PMI Research
Conference in 2002. Literature was examined from numerous sources,
including academic periodicals, conference proceedings, research
reports, dissertations, and unclassified documents emanating from such
government agencies as DoD and NASA. Subjects covered included
cost/schedule, systems management, value engineering, standardization,
and certification. The literature revealed interesting trends. Project
management is a relatively new discipline that has enjoyed increasing
acceptance, as reflected by the exponential growth of published
research. The 1960s yielded but one percent of the literature. The
1970s saw an increase to 7%, followed by 29% in the 1980s. The most
recent decade, the 1990s saw the number explode to 60% of program
management publications. These are now contained in the database
created as a result of the investigation. Included are several
interesting tables, the most important of which is a bibliography of
"best article candidates" The citations are organized along the
"knowledge areas", as outlined in the project management bible, A
Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOKB(). - [25]MG
LaBarge, Ralph. "DVD Compatibility Test." [26]DV Magazine 10(7) (July
2002): 20-29. - DVD looks to be the next big thing in removable
storage but with 5 different DVD formats to choose from and another on
the way, we're still in the nightmare stage of its development. The
author here describes a test for compatibility between different media
formats and DVD-Video players. For library media shops intending to
distribute video-based material on DVD, this is an important read. -
[27]LRK
Liu, Xiaoming, et.al.. [28]"Federated Searching Interface Techniques
for Heterogenous OAI Repositories" [29]Journal of Digital Information
2(4) (May 21, 2002).
(http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v02/i04/Liu/). - The [30]Open
Archives initiative is our latest, best hope for a technology that can
knit together access to a variety of dispersed repositories of
information. Although the underlying protocol for "crawling" (fetching
information from) such repositories is now in place, there remain some
thorny issues -- not the least of which is how to handle disparate
sets of metadata. In building the [31]ARC Cross Archive Search
Service, the authors had to make decisions on how to handle this
issue, which they share in this piece. They determined that to
federate metadata from disparate sources, no single approach would
work well in all cases. One relatively easy method is to use keyword
searching, but then any additional functionality offered by
well-described metadata is lost. Another approach is to map each set
of elements into a common set. Their decisions on how to handle this
dilemma (not surprisingly, a hybrid approach), as well as a thorough
accounting of the over 1 million records from dozens of archives with
which they were working, round out this very informative article. As
libraries try to build cross-archive search services, we will need to
become very good at dealing with the challenges outlined here, as well
as others. This early work should prove helpful. - [32]RT
Manfreda, Katja Lozar, Zenel Batagelj and Vasja Vehovar. [33]"Design
of Web Survey Questionnaires: Three Basic Experiments." [34]Journal of
Computer-Mediated Communication 7(3) (April 2002)
(http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol7/issue3/vehovar.html). - Does the
design of an online survey affect accuracy and completion rates?
That's what the authors in this report set out to test. Using three
surveys on internet use in Slovenia as their raw material, they
examine the impact of such design features as whether the survey is
one page or many, whether there are graphics, and whether the topic is
relevant to the user. - [35]LRK
Manjoo, Farhad. [36]"Public Protests NPR Link Policy" [37]Wired (June
20, 2002) (http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,53355,00.html) -
Yes, the P in NPR does stand for "Public." That's why there's no small
amount of outrage about NPR's policy of requiring anyone wanting to
link to anything on its site to fill out an online form that asked for
detailed information about the linking entity, its website, how long
the link will remain, whether it's a commercial site, etc. Apparently,
this policy isn't new. However, the form remained relatively hidden
until Cory Doctorow posted a link to it in his popular [38]BoingBoing
weblog, at which point it became fodder for a plethora of other
weblogs. An NPR spokesman said the station "does not refuse links but
it just wants to make sure that the links are appropriate to a
noncommercial and journalistic organization." Aside from the issue of
whether such a linking policy is desirable, there's the practicality
of enforcement. NPR is not a commercial broadcasting outfit with
unlimited resources to monitor all the websites linking to it
worldwide. And when Wired filled out the form requesting to link, it
received an autoreply and never got explicit permission to link before
running this story. The indication was that NPR's system was
backlogged. - [39]SK
Mann, Charles C. [40]"Why Software Is So Bad" [41]Technology Review
105(6) (July/Aug 2002): 33-38
(http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/mann0702.asp?p=1). - If a
tech problem is described in an MIT publication, you'd expect their
proposed solution to be equally tech -- but the author says that in
this case your best weapon is to sue the bastards. In all fairness,
after describing the bad programming and business practices which gave
us such bonehead classics as backup disks created by Windows XP Home
which won't work with Windows XP Home, Mann lists a variety of
remedies, some of which he sees coming over the horizon because they
are currently being adopted by software companies. Yet, the natural
urge to protect against litigation is the strongest motivation he sees
for them to clean up their act. Part "Risks"-style list of
malfunctions and part call to arms, this article is entertaining and
encouraging. You don't have to lay down and take it! - JR
Notess, Greg R. [42]"On the Net: Dead Search Engines" [43]Online 26(3)
(May/June 2002) (http://www.onlinemag.net/may02/OnTheNet.htm). - Let
us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of ... search
engines. That's the gist of this postmortem on the search engines of
yore, many quite popular at the time, their names still familiar to
our ear. The author, ending on a positive note, points to a list of
survivors but still you wonder what will happen if Google ever tanks
or goes the "pay-for-positioning" route. Stranger things have
happened. - [44]LRK
Schwartz, John. [45]"The Librarian's Web Dilemma" [46]The New York
Times (June 20, 2002)
(http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/20/technology/circuits/20FILT.html). -
This article explains how three public library systems in different
geographic locations handle the Internet "porn problem." In
Greenville, SC, the library board spends $2,500 a month "on a
filtering service that blocks access to millions of Web pages with
adult content." In DeKalb County, a suburb of Atlanta, the library
system uses the shame factor as a deterrent to porn surfers. Public
access computers are located out in the open, where librarians can
monitor use and enforce acceptable policy when necessary. In Virginia
Beach, VA, the emphasis is on privacy, where monitors are set beneath
the surface of glass-topped desks, invisible to everyone but the
individual using the computer. Meanwhile, an emerging national
standard in libraries is to link the choice of filtered or unfiltered
Internet access to a patron's library card, with parents specifying
preferences for their children. - [47]SK
Seipp, Catherine. [48]"Online Uprising" [49]American Journalism Review
24(5) (June 2002): 42-47 (http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=2555). -
Those of us involved in acquiring, cataloging and archiving
information have watched in awe as one medium after another,
previously packaged and manageable, has become fragmented by Web
technology. It's instructive to get a peek at what content providers
are going through as their previously secure turf breaks apart. In
this case, journalists weigh in about what Web logs (blogs) are doing
to their profession. Certainly the news gathering and disseminating
organizations have had a lot of adapting to do over the past ten
years, but most of us will still turn to their trusted, authoritative
voice for our current events. Bloggers are increasingly questioning
that authority. This article focuses most on the opinion side --
columnists and editorial writers, some of whom fess up that 'our dirty
little secret's out: it's really not that hard.' Those of us who care
just how much of this traffic will be findable in ten years won't find
any answers here, though -- nobody knows. - JR
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 13(6) (June 2002) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright B) 2002 by the Regents of the University of California All
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References
1. http://sunsite/cgi-bin/imagemap/cc
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50. mailto:listserv@library.berkeley.edu
