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Current Cites, August 2003
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Fri Aug 29 20:13:33 2003
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:13:45 -0700
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Current Cites
Volume 14, no. 8, August 2003
Edited by [2]Roy Tennant
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2003/cc03.14.8.html
Contributors: [3]Charles W. Bailey, Jr., [4]Terry Huwe, [5]Shirl
Kennedy, [6]Leo Robert Klein, [7]Roy Tennant
Bates, Marcia J.. [8]Task Force Recommendation 2.3 Research and
Design Review: Improving User Access to Library Catalog and Portal
Information Wash., DC: Library of Congress, June 2003.
(http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/2.3BatesReport6-03.doc.pdf).
- Don't let the daunting title get you down. This report, an
outgrowth of the [9]Library of Congress Conference on Bibliographic
Control for the New Millennium, responds to the charge to "explore
ways to enrich metadata records by focusing on providing additional
subject and other access mechanisms...and increasing granularity of
access and display (e.g., by enabling progression through hierarch
and versions and by additional description information including
summaries)". Bates and those with whom she discussed this work item
came to understand that this charge could be recast as three
distinct areas of inquiry: 1) user access vocabulary, 2) links
among bibliographic families, and 3) staging of access to resources
in the interface. Bates begins with the obligatory review of
pertinent literature, but in an informative and interesting manner,
which properly sets the stage for the next section of "Implications
and Recommendations." Well worth reading for anyone interested in
where we're heading with bibliographic search systems -- or at
least with where we should be heading. - [10]RT
Bausch, Paul. "[11]Amazon Hacks: Power-Search for Books"
[12]O'Reilly and Associates: Amazon Hacks (August 2003)
(http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/393). - OK. Technically, this is
not an article. Rather, this is "Sample Hack #9" from a new
[13]O'Reilly and Associates title, [14]Amazon Hacks. In our
library, we use [15]Amazon.com all the time to verify titles
because its search engine is so much better than the lame one at
[16]Baker & Taylor Online. But I gotta tell you...I did not have a
clue that Amazon's search engine supported the kind of advanced
syntax that is described in this particular hack. You will learn
how to go above and beyond what the advanced search form offers by
employing judicious grouping of phrases, Boolean operators and
creative alterations to URLs. Says the author -- an experienced Web
application developer and the co-creator of [17]Blogger --"Over its
lifetime, Amazon.com has invested $900 million in technology." The
[18]collection of hacks is on O'Reilly's website, but only a few
are available in full-text. - [19]SK
Darlington, Jeffrey, Andy Finney, and Adrian Pearce.
"[20]Domesday Redux: The Rescue of the BBC Domesday Project
Videodiscs" [21]Ariadne (36) (July 2003)
(http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/tna/). - This fascinating article
describes how a team of UK preservationists rescued the BBC
Domesday videodiscs from certain obsolescence. The modern-day
[22]Domesday Project aimed to capture a snapshot of life in Britain
in 1986, on a pair of videodiscs, as a celebration of the 900th
anniversay of the original [23]Domesday Book of William the
Conqueror. Videodiscs are now an anachronism, but these discs were
rescued just in time, and recreated using modern technologies. The
story is interesting, and is one of the first of many we will
experience over the years, as we rescue important data from the
death grip of obsolete technologies. - [24]RT
Festa, Paul. "[25]Battle of the Blog: Dispute Exposes Bitter Power
Struggle Behind Web Logs" [26]CNET News.com (4 August 2003)
(http://news.com.com/2009-1032-5059006.html?part=dht&tag=ntop). -
All is not well in blogland. As many of our readers know, blogs,
newsletters, web sites, and virtually any Internet technology that
can use or produce a syndication service use a technology called
RSS. RSS variously stands for "Really Simple Syndication," "RDF
Site Summary," or "Rich Site Summary," depending on which version
you're talking about. And therein is the rub. The war is being
fought over who should control the RSS format, which is expressed
in XML. Dave Winer, of [27]UserLand Software fame and now of
[28]Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, believes it
should be him, while others prefer to launch out on their own.
Therefore, there are now two warring versions of RSS, one dubbed
RSS 2.x and the other still in search of a name. If you want to
wade into this battle, you should first start with the recently
released [29]RSS Primer cited elsewhere in this issue, then choose
your weapons. But my suggestion is to just fire up your favorite
[30]RSS reader, and leave the fighting to others. - [31]RT
Kauppila, Paul, and Sharon Russell. "Economies of Scale in the
Library World: the Dr Martin Luther King Jr Library in San Jose,
California." [32]New Library World 104(7) (2003): 255-266. -
What do you do when money's tight and both the state university and
the local public library need new library buildings? Why, combine
the two in one building, of course. At least that's what they're
doing in San Jose in the "first large-scale joint-use venture of
its kind in the nation". The facility itself just opened this month
so there's not much of a record as to whether this marriage is
going to work or not. The collections will remain separate with the
academic portion sticking with LC classification and the public
part continuing with Dewey. Both technical services and reference
will be combined though staff may hale from either the city or
university. Certain databases licensed to the university will only
be available to students and faculty and not to the general public.
Boy, is this a leap in faith! The authors call it a "win-win"
situation but only time will tell. Note, available through Emerald
at [33]http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0307-4803.htm. - [34]LRK
Keller, Michael A., Victoria A. Reich, and Andrew C. Herkovic.
"[35]What Is A Library Anymore, Anyway?" [36]First Monday 8(5)
(May 5, 2003) (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_5/keller/).
- This paper was presented at the Fourth Annual Conference on
Libraries and Museums in the Digital World, which was held in
February 2003, in Washington, DC. The authors tackle a familiar
topic -- rumors of our imminent demise -- with imagination and
energy. They avoid defensive tones, but bluntly assert that
forecasts of obsolescence are often the result of projection upon
libraries from other perspectives. Moreover, it is interesting to
observe what suppositions are embedded in those forecasts, because
they all too often miss the deeper functions libraries perform. The
authors argue that "local custodianship" of collections is a key
value point for libraries, and by focusing on collections as an
expression of local community will help assure their future. The
extent to which libraries forget their roles as custodians of
collections may determine how bright their future turns out to be.
- [37]TH
Kunze, John A.. [38]Towards Electronic Persistence Using ARK
Identifiers Oakland, CA: California Digital Library, July 2003.
(http://ark.cdlib.org/arkcdl.pdf). - The topic of persistent
identifiers is as old as the first broken URL. With [39]PURLs,
[40]Handles, URNs, and lord only knows what else, why another
scheme in the form of Archival Resource Keys (ARKs)? Because, as
Kunze points out, existing schemes are constructed on the wrong
foundation. PURLs and Handles are simply indirect naming schemes
that allow an authority to change the physical location of an item
without causing the published identifier to break. But persistence
is much more than that, Kunze asserts. "A founding principle of the
ARK is that persistence is purely a matter of service, and is
neither inherent in an object nor conferred on it by a particular
naming syntax. The best an identifier can do is lead users to those
services." By definition, Kunze explains, an ARK is bound to three
things: "(a) object access, (b) object metadata, and (c) a faceted
commitment statement." In other words, an ARK for a given object
can be queried to retrieve a statement that describes the level of
persistence that the owning organization declares regarding that
object (the specific statement is entirely up to the individual
institution, and can be anything from "we'll drop this like a hot
potato at the first sign of trouble" to "we'll go down fighting to
keep this available" and numerous points in between, worded in
whatever way is appropriate). Although some details on the scheme
are included in this succinct document, the whole nine yards are
also available in the [41]full ARK specification. Kunze ends by
describing how the [42]California Digital Library is [43]using ARKs
for digital objects it controls. Whether or not ARK as a persistent
identifier scheme wins the day, Kunze has a handle on exactly what
makes or breaks persistence -- commitment, not redirection. -
[44]RT
"[45]Married to the Mob(log)?" [46]ABCNEWS.com (29 July 2003)
(http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/FutureTech/moblogging030729
.html). - My sons roll their eyes so far back into their skulls
that only the whites are showing. Mom just got a [47]camera phone.
Right now, I am amusing myself mainly by taking pictures of myself
at work and e-mailing them to friends. But just wait till I start
my own [48]moblog (pronouced MO-blog, as in "mobile blog")! This,
folks, is the bleeding edge. If you have a camera phone with
wireless Web access, there are a bunch of sites that make it
relatively easy for you to create your own online digital journal.
And people are doing this in droves. Think of the possibilities!
This article describes how a student in Singapore took cell phone
photos of an out-of-control teacher ripping up a classmate's paper
and then posted these on the Web. This single act touched off a
nationwide debate "over the state of student-teacher relations in
the country's education system." While a lot of moblogs are merely
content to explore the bizarre and indulge the voyeur, some are
said to be changing the very nature of journalism. For example,
some folks stuck in the recent northeastern U.S. blackout (who were
able to get a scarce wireless signal) provided illustrated
on-the-scene reports throughout the event. - [49]SK
Moffat, M.. [50]RSS - A Primer for Publishers & Content
Providers (August 2003) (http://www.eevl.ac.uk/rss_primer/). -
RSS is an interesting technology that underlies blogs (web logs),
as well as some newsletters, journals, and web sites. Basically, it
is a method to provide current awareness kinds of services using a
simple XML-encoded metadata format. This primer, aimed at those
providing content on the Internet, is a very useful primer for
virtually anyone wanting to know more about this technology. -
[51]RT
Rimmer, Matthew. "[52]The Dead Poets Society: The Copyright Term
and the Public Domain " [53]First Monday 8(6) (2 June 2003)
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/rimmer/). - The author
evaluates U.S. copyright litigation from a variety of perspectives,
including history, intellectual property law, constitutional law
and freedom of speech, cultural heritage, and international trade.
He essentially argues that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act 1998, which was recently upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court,
will inhibit the advancement of cultural and artistic expression
using new technologies. He cites the Eldritch Press and Project
Gutenberg as examples of innovative uses of digital technology that
may become less possible in the future, if the law becomes adopted
as an international standard by other nations. - [54]TH
Susman, Thomas M., David J. Carter, and Ropes & Gray LLP, et.
al.[55]Publisher Mergers: A Consumer-Based Approach to Antitrust
Analysis Washington, DC: Information Access Alliance, 2003.
(http://www.informationaccess.org/WhitePaperV2Final.pdf). - This
report discusses the critical importance of the wide dissemination
of legal and research information, analyzes the skyrocketing cost
of scholarly journals and its effect on libraries' ability to
purchase these journals, examines the roles of publisher mergers in
such price increases, and proposes new criteria for antitrust
regulators to use in evaluating publisher mergers that are based on
how libraries make collection development decisions. The focus is
on two sectors of the scholarly publishing marketplace that have
been most heavily impacted by cost increases: legal and STM
(scientific, technical, and medical) information. A key argument of
the report is that the scholarly publishing marketplace has
exceptional characteristics: journals on the same topic provide
unique content and they do not substitute for each other.
Consequently, demand is often "inelastic": driven by researchers'
needs for a journal's specific content, libraries are often
reluctant to cancel its subscription, even in the face of
significant cost increases. However, given budget constraints and
constantly rising costs, libraries are forced to make decisions
about what journals to cut, and, when they do so, they frequently
group journals into broad academic fields, analyzing relative price
and usage factors. This analysis results in journals in different
sub-disciplines being in competition with each other for library
funding despite the fact that their content may have little
overlap. Antitrust regulators may not be aware of this collection
development strategy and believe that journals in different
sub-disciplines do not compete with each other. This new view of
the dynamics of the library marketplace has profound implications
for how antitrust analysis should be conducted: "Market definition
would be based on broad portfolios of journals consistent with the
portfolios that libraries construct when selecting journals, rather
than on narrow content-based comparisons that fail to take account
of the competition for library dollars between journals with little
content overlap." - [56]CB
Tufte, Edward. "[57]PowerPoint Is Evil" [58]Wired Magazine
11(9) (September 2003)
(http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html). - When the
author of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" comes
out against your product, in this case PowerPoint, likening it to a
bad drug, you might wish you hadn't got out of bed that day. Tufte
blasts the popular Microsoft product for its "pushy style", a style
which "routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content". In
the right hands, it can be "a competent slide manager" but it can
also lend itself (perhaps inherently?) to what he condemns as
nothing but "chartjunk". Great article to get slideware newbies
thinking about the impact of visual information. - [59]LRK
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites - ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright (c) 2003 by the Regents of the University of California All
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References
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2. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/
3. http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm
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