[15331] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Current Cites, April 2004
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (CITES Moderator)
Thu Apr 29 20:15:08 2004
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 12:36:24 -0700
From: CITES Moderator <citeschk@LIBRARY.BERKELEY.EDU>
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
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Current Cites
Volume 15, no. 4, April 2004
Edited by [2]Roy Tennant
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2004/cc04.15.4.html
Contributors: [3]Charles W. Bailey, Jr., [4]Terry Huwe, [5]Shirl
Kennedy, [6]Leo Robert Klein, [7]Roy Tennant
[8]Digital Library Federation Spring Forum 2004 Washington, DC:
Digital Library Federation, April 2004.
(http://www.diglib.org/forums/Spring2004/springforum04abs.htm). -
Although you don't get to hear the speakers, or chat with them in
the hall, or nosh on a deep-fried, sugar-dusted beignet, the
presentation slides are the next best thing to being at the Digital
Library Federation 2004 Spring Forum in New Orleans. David Seaman,
the DLF Executive Director, made a concerted effort to "harvest"
all of the presentations then and there, and put them up on the web
literally within hours of their presentation. And you are hearing
about them through Current Cites no more than a week after they
were presented. Now that's current. But besides being current,
these presentations often describe cutting-edge digital library
projects, from extending the OAI harvesting protocol to accommodate
distributed full-text searching of math monographs to XML-based
book publishing and beyond, there is something here for just about
everyone who is interested in where libraries are going. But
although the meeting was held in The Big Easy, it was clear from a
number of presentations that building digital libraries would be
better characterized as The Big Difficult. - [9]RT
Bausenbach, Ardie. "[10]Character Sets and Character Encoding: A
Brief Introduction" [11]RLG DigiNews 8(2) (15 April 2004)
(http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=17068&Printable=1&Article_I
D=992). - Anyone who has worked with computers long enough has run
into the character encoding issue. Even if you are able to get a
non-English character to display appropriately on your computer,
sending the file to someone else is likely to spell disaster for
anything beyond the 256 characters identified in the ASCII
character set. But thankfully help is near, in the form of Unicode.
This excellent overview piece lays the groundwork and explains the
issues related to depicting nearly 100,000 separate characters
(about 70,000 of which are Chinese) from 55 writing systems. As
Bausenbach explains, we are far from character encoding nirvana,
but we're on the right track and making progress. Highly
recommended for anyone needing a primer or refresher on these
issues. - [12]RT
Boutin, Paul. "[13]Can E-Mail Be Saved?" [14]InfoWorld (16) (19
April 2004): 40-53.
(http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/16/16FEfuturemail_1.html).
- "Battered by junk and reeling under makeshift fixes, e-mail is
ripe for reinvention. Here's how six of the industry's most
provocative thinkers envision a brighter day.... Our six experts
gave us six different answers. But all of them agreed that positive
identification, rather than rejiggered economics, is the key to
clearing the clutter from the e-mail channel in the enterprise."
Ideas from [15]Eric Allman (author of [16]Sendmail); [17]Bill
Warner (developer of the Wildfire voice system); [18]Eric Hahn
(former Netscape CTO; now CEO of own startup, [19]Proofpoint);
[20]Ray Ozzie (creator of Lotus Notes; founder/CEO of [21]Groove
Networks); [22]Dave Winer (chairman/founder of [23]Userland and
[24]uberblogger); [25]Brewster Kahle (creator of WAIS, [26]Alexa;
now head of [27]The Internet Archive). - [28]SK
Eden, Bradford Lee, editor. "MARC and Metadata: METS, MODS, and
MARCXML: Current and Future Implications" [29]Library Hi Tech
22(1) (2004) - It's a brave new world for bibliographic
description, which this special issue of Library Hi Tech makes
readily apparent. With articles contributed by a wide range of
experts on topics like METS, MODS, EAD, and MARC, there is
something he re for anyone interested in cataloging, metadata, and
where the field is going. The editor of this issue, Brad Eden from
the Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas, lined up so many authors for this
issue that the contributions have been split into two issues, with
t he second to follow in the summer. According to Brad, this next
issue will look more to the future. [Full disclosure: I contributed
a piece that will run in the next issue] - [30]RT
Guterman, Lila. "[31]Scientific Societies' Publishing Arms Unite
Against Open-Access Movement" [32]The Chronicle of Higher
Education 50(29) (26 March 2004): A20.
(http://chronicle.com/cgi2-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronic
le.com/prm/weekly/v50/i29/29a02001.htm). - Reacting to the growing
influence of the open access movement, a group of scholarly
not-for-profit publishers has issued the "[33]Washington D.C.
Principles for Free Access to Science." This document supports free
access to selected important articles, to all articles either
immediately or after an embargo period as determined by publisher
policy, to scientists in developing nations, to reference linking
systems, and to search engines for indexing. However, it does not
support financing journals solely through author fees, and it does
not address the issue of the relatively unfettered use of scholarly
literature that the "[34]Budapest Open Access Initiative" strongly
advocates: "By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free
availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read,
download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full
texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data
to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without
financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those
inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only
constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for
copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over
the integrity of their work and the right to be properly
acknowledged and cited." In addition to discussing the DC
Principles, the article also briefly examines the new BioMed
Central variable institutional fee structure (it was previously a
flat fee determined by the size of the institution), which has its
own controversial elements. - [35]CB
Jones, William. "[36]Finders, Keepers? The Present and Future
Perfect in Support of Personal Information Management " [37]First
Monday 9(3) (1 March 2004)
(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_3/jones/index.html). -
Jones explores the impact of decisions to keep or discard the kind
of personal data that accretes daily in our inboxes and Blogs --
spam, email, the weather, sports news and more -- together with
critical information that has a longer term value. Since what seems
mundane today may have strategic value tomorrow, this isn't such a
lightweight matter, he says. What follows is interesting
deconstruction of the process of parsing through 'stuff', which we
often do unconsciously. Even though many information users don't
focus on their habits, how we handle extraneous information is an
essential part of personal information management, he argues. Bad
decisions come in many flavors; keeping too much stuff can be as
costly in time as keeping minimal backfiles. What's more, the wrong
information competes for attention with more appropriate sources as
tasks change during the day. He assesses decision support
strategies such as reducing 'false positives' (keeping useless
information), and avoiding 'misses' (not keeping useful
information). This article is an interesting analysis of how the
processes that surround the information cascade combine to take a
substantial bite of our time. - [38]TH
Knemeyer, Dirk. "[39]Jared Spool : The InfoDesign Interview"
[40]InfoDesign (April 2004)
(http://www.informationdesign.org/special/spool_interview.php). -
Jared Spool is a hero of mine. He showed me that you could be an
advocate of usability and a sensible human being at the same time.
He did this by limiting himself to conclusions based on a
thoughtful analysis of the facts together with enough flexibility
to realize that different situations sometimes call for different
approaches. All of these characteristics are on display in this
infoDesign interview. - [41]LRK
Michael, Sara. "[42]Making Government Accessible -- Online"
[43]Federal Computer Week 18(11) (29 April 2004): 21-30.
(http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0419/feat-access-04-19-04.asp
). - Federal Computer Week and SSB Technologies, a developer of
web-accessibility software and services, took a look at U.S.
e-government initiatives with an eye toward whether these services
were usable by disabled citizens. The results were not encouraging.
"As the e-government initiatives near completion and gain a broader
audience, none of the Web sites evaluated in our recent review were
found to be entirely accessible to citizens with disabilities, as
required by Section 508. Agencies clearly are committed to the
spirit of the law but are struggling with the details." The article
discusses [44]Section 508 compliance and related requirements,
accessibility pitfalls, and development and evaluation tools. -
[45]SK
TechWebNews. "[46]Average PC Plagued With 28 Pieces Of Spyware"
[47]InformationWeek (15 April 2004)
(http://informationweek.securitypipeline.com/news/18901641). - If
you're responsible for public access PCs, this recently released
[48]report by ISP [49]EarthLink and [50]WebRoot Software will not
be terribly shocking to you. During the first quarter of this year,
the two companies examined more than one million computer systems
and unearthed more than 29 million instances of spyware. Most of
this nasty stuff was ad-related -- e.g., pop-up windows, ad
tracking, etc. -- but more than 360,000 system monitors (which spy
on user activity) and Trojans (which masquerade as something benign
but which are actually destructive) were detected. "If spread
equally across the scanned systems, that means one in three
computers contains a system monitor or a Trojan horse." View the
Earthlink Spyware Audit [51]here. - [52]SK
Udell , Jon. "[53]Firefox Fills the IE Void" [54]InfoWorld (19
March 2004 )
(http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/03/19/12OPstrategic_1.html). -
Encomium on the open-source cross-platform Mozilla web browser
currently known, perhaps inelegantly, as 'Firefox'. If you haven't
had a chance to test-drive Firefox, Jon Udall goes over many of the
reasons why you should. Feel free to download it at [55]mozilla.org
and while you're at it, have a look at the email application
'Thunderbird' too. - [56]LRK
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites - ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright (c) 2004 by the Regents of the University of California All
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References
Visible links
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32. http://chronicle.com/index.htm
33. http://www.dcprinciples.org/statement.pdf
34. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
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56. http://leoklein.com/
57. mailto:listserv@library.berkeley.edu
