[14585] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Current Cites, November 2002
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (CITES Moderator)
Mon Nov 25 20:34:26 2002
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 2002 13:29:14 -0800
From: CITES Moderator <citeschk@LIBRARY.BERKELEY.EDU>
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Current Cites
Volume 13, no. 11, November 2002
Edited by [2]Roy Tennant
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2002/cc02.13.11.html
Contributors: [3]Charles W. Bailey, Jr., [4]Margaret Gross, [5]Shirl
Kennedy, [6]Roy Tennant
Banerjee, Kyle. "[7]How Does XML Help Libraries?" [8]Computers in
Libraries 22(8) p. 30-35 (September 2002)
(http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/sep02/Banerjee.htm). - Banerjee
has written a brief and gentle introduction to XML and a few of the
ways that libraries are using it to provide useful services to
their clientele. The piece is accompanied by a simple example of
XML-encoded information and an XSLT stylesheet for transforming the
XML into an HTML web page. Although readers will need to do
additional investigation and learning before they can use and
transform XML themselves, this article is a good place to start. -
[9]RT
Cheverie, Joan F. "The Changing Economics of Information,
Technological Development, and Copyright Protection: What Are the
Consequences for the Public Domain?" The Journal of Academic
Librarianship 28(5) p. 325-331 (2002) - The author has done a
great job of boiling down her Georgetown University M.A. thesis
(The Intellectual Land Grab: How Does the Public Domain Fare in the
Networked Environment?) into this densely packed, but highly
readable article, which provides a thoughtful analysis and critique
of the economic and legal dynamics of the current networked
information environment. In the article's conclusion, she summaries
the impact of these dynamics on the multifaceted principle of
information access in libraries and similar institutions: "Today,
however, the changing economics of information is incrementally
negating this principle by allowing content owners to control
access through restrictive licensing agreements, expanded legal
protection and penalties, and technological measures that
ultimately eliminate fair use and gouge the public domain while,
simultaneously, undermining the traditional mission of libraries
and other institutions of learning who engage in education,
research, and the preservation of our cultural and scientific
heritage." - [10]CB
Greenemeier, Larry. "[11]PCs Not Ready for Retirement"
[12]InformationWeek (913) p. 50, 52 (4 November 2002)
(http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20021031S0005). - It's not
news that companies are cutting back on IT spending due to the
moribund economy. One common way businesses slash technology costs
is to extend the life cycle of employee PCs. At AT&T, discussed in
this article, computers were routinely replaced every three years.
"Now that's being stretched to four or even five years, and buying
a new PC takes a higher level of managerial approval." An IT
analyst quoted here says corporate PC purchases have traditionally
been influenced by three factors: "a healthy economy and
accompanying healthy IT budgets, an abundant stream of must-have
applications, and a need to keep up with the latest processor and
memory configurations." All three of these factors "have fallen
off," the analyst said, predicting that PC sales are unlikely to
revive until the second half of 2003. An added negative? The costs
above and beyond the actual hardware -- "making sure each machine
works on the existing network and gives users the applications
needed for their jobs." Of course, some companies are buying new
PCs -- typically to run new applications -- and PC manufacturers
are trying to woo potential customers with space-saving smaller
size desktops and flat panel monitors. - [13]SK
Karagiannis, Konstantinos, and Matthew D. Sarrel. "[14]Keep
Hackers Out" [15]PC Magazine 21(20) p. 98-130 (19 November 2002)
(http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,653189,00.asp). - This is a
two-part article that discusses security threats and reviews
hardware and software firewalls for both home and the small
business broadband-connected networks. It covers distributed
denial-of-service attacks, malicious websites (i.e., embedded rogue
ActiveX, Java code), trojan horses, worms and viruses. And it
explains common vulnerabilities: e-mail attachments, open ports,
unpatched outdated software, always-on connections and clueless
users who indulge "in risky computing behavior." There's a chart
comparing the pros and cons of hardware versus software firewalls,
and a group of popular products of both types are reviewed. The PC
Magazine "Editor's Choice" for a home software firewall is
[16]Norton Internet Security 2003; for a home hardware firewall,
either the [17]D-Link DI-604 or the [18]Linksys Firewall Router.
The editors recommend the [19]SonicWall SOHO3 for a small business
firewall. - [20]SK
Martin, Kingsley. "[21]"Show Me the Money" - Measuring the Return
on Knowledge Management" [22]Law Library Resource Xchange: LLRX.com
(4 November 2002) (http://www.llrx.com/features/kmroi.htm). -
Kingsley Martin is a graduate lawyer who is currently a knowledge
management consultant. His article proposes KM measurement tools
such as Return on Investment (ROI), the Cost of Information (COI,
and tools to be used in the evaluation of knowledge-sharing
strategies. While focussing on KM costing in law firms, the
analysis proposed can easily be applied to any KM project in any
environment. Law firms employ primarily two chargeback mechanisms:
1) Cost recovery and 2) Cost justification. The first method is to
directly charge usage back to the client, i.e. the cost of time and
materials expended. The Investment cost of KM activity is generally
rationalized within the second mechanism, because of the difficulty
in calculating its usage charge. The author presumes that
investment in KM is necessarily preceded by investment in enabling
technology. Thus Return on Investment (ROI) estimation can be
derived by measuring the rate at which this technology is converted
into information assets. ROI= (Present Value times Incremental
Gain) minus Total Cost of the Project; The second measure is Cost
of Information (COI) COI=Document Preparation Cost divided by Reuse
Rate; Document Preparation Cost subsumes three elements: 1)
bibliographic coding (in library terms, document nunmber, author,
title, physical description, etc.); 2) Subject analysis and
headings; and 3) Search and retrieval engines. For each element
hypothetical numbers are presented. The author concludes the
article by suggesting that law firms can develop sustainable
stratetgies for knowledge sharing by calculating individual profit
models, the cost of the KM system, and document reuse numbers. -
[23]MG
Standage, Tom. "[24]Securing the Cloud: A Survey of Digital
Security" [25]The Economist 365(8296) (26 October 2002)
(http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1389589
). - This special section in [26]The Economist contains an
introduction explaining why digital security "is now everyone's
problem," and six articles covering hardware and software tools;
how people are "the weakest link" in any security system ("insider
abuse of Internet access" being a large issue); what biometrics can
and cannot do; the perils of always-on, interconnected company
networks; "balancing the risks and benefits" to come up with an
optimal security budget; and why, though cyberterrorism is
possible, it isn't very likely to happen. This highly readable
package of stories, available in its entirety online, presents a
good overview of digital security issues and technology, and is
particularly recommended for those who feel they need to know more
about this but do not want to wade through technical publications.
- [27]SK
Weston, Wil. "[28]Access to Scientific Literature" [29]Nature
420(19) (7 November 2002)
(http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v4
20/n6911/full/420019a_fs.html). - Wil Weston, a librarian at the
University of New Orleans, Earl K. Long Library, reinforces what
all librarians already know. The internet is no substitute for
libraries, and concomitantly, the guidance to research that
librarians provide. Presently only 8% of journals and scarcely a
fraction of books are accessible via the World Wide Web. Not only
are search engines selective as to what to include, but also are
biased. Search engines promote those sites which pay a listing fee,
thereby ensuring these display early and prominently in retrieved
site listings. This would be analogous to librarians offering their
clients primarily those books for which publishers had paid a fee
for precedence ranking. While this article doesn't present anything
new for librarians, it is nevertheless a concise recap for
non-librarians about the state of web research, and the qualitative
advantage offered by libraries. Interesting citations included are:
Lebedev, Alexander Moscow State University, Best search engines for
finding scientific information in the Web, Version: August 9, 1996.
[30]http://scon155.phys.msu.su/~swan/comparison.html and Lawrence,
Steve Online or Invisible
[31]http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/ -
[32]MG
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites - ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright (c) 2002 by the Regents of the University of California All
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References
1. LYNXIMGMAP:http://sunsite/CurrentCites/2002/cc02.13.11.html#head
2. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/
3. http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm
4. http://www.cam.org/~mgross/mgross.htm
5. http://hooboy.blogspot.com/
6. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/
7. http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/sep02/Banerjee.htm
8. http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/ciltop.htm
9. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/
10. http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm
11. http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20021031S0005
12. http://www.informationweek.com/
13. http://hooboy.blogspot.com/
14. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0%2C4149%2C653189%2C00.asp
15. http://www.pcmag.com/
16. http://www.symantec.com/sabu/nis/nis_pe/
17. http://www.dlink.com/products/broadband/di604/
18. http://www.linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=23&prid=433
19. http://www.sonicwall.com/products/soho/index.html
20. http://hooboy.blogspot.com/
21. http://www.llrx.com/features/kmroi.htm
22. http://www.llrx.com/
23. http://www.cam.org/~mgross/mgross.htm
24. http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1389589
25. http://www.economist.com/
26. http://www.economist.com/
27. http://hooboy.blogspot.com/
28.
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v420/n6911/full/420019a_fs.html
29. http://www.nature.com/
30. http://scon155.phys.msu.su/~swan/comparison.html
31. http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/
32. http://www.cam.org/~mgross/mgross.htm
33. mailto:listserv@library.berkeley.edu
