[15814] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
[CurrentCites] Current Cites, May 2005
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roy Tennant)
Tue May 24 21:02:53 2005
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Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 15:57:30 -0700
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From: Roy Tennant <roy.tennant@UCOP.EDU>
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Current Cites
Current Cites, May 2005
http://lists.webjunction.org/currentcites/2005/cc05.16.5.html
Edited by [2]Roy Tennant
Contributors: [3]Charles W. Bailey, Jr., [4]Terry Huwe, [5]Shirl
Kennedy, [6]Leo Robert Klein, Jim Ronningen, [7]Roy Tennant
[8]Digital Library Federation Spring Forum 2005 Washington, DC:
Digital Library Federation, April
2005.(http://www.diglib.org/forums/spring2005/2005springabstracts.htm)
. - Those interested in cutting edge library technologies, standards,
and procedures would be well advised to pay attention to the
presentations at the twice-yearly forums put on by the Digital
Library
Federation. This one is no exception, with presentations ranging from
digital repositories to METS records and OAI harvesting. Library
techies are sure to find something of interest here, as well as
library administrators who want to know what's coming up next. -
[9]RT
Blumenthal, Ralph. "[10]College Libraries Set Aside Books in a
Digital
Age" [11]The New York Times (13 May
2005)(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/14/education/14library.html). -
As of mid-July, the [12]undergraduate library at the University of
Texas-Austin will be devoid of books. It is being transformed into "a
24-hour electronic information commons, a fast-spreading phenomenon
that is transforming research and study on campuses around the
country." The reason this is a "fast-spreading phenomenon" is that
undergraduate libraries are becoming superfluous in an age when so
much full-text material has migrated online, and "top research
libraries" are no longer restricted only to graduate students and
faculty. The information commons, like others of its type, will be
"staffed with Internet-expert librarians, teachers and technicians."
And yet, according to the article, "Library staff members said they
were taken by surprise when told last month of the conversion, which
is how the news first emerged." Apparently no jobs were lost,
however,
and the books were not discarded, but rather redistributed to other
university libraries. The article says librarians in general are in
favor of this trend, because it allows them to provide the kind of
service their users are increasingly demanding. - [13]SK
Brent, Doug. "[14]Teaching as Performance in the Electronic
Classroom" [15]First Monday 10(4)(4 April
2005)(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_4/brent/). - Brent
takes an analytical look at the increasingly subtle and complex
relationship between teaching and teaching technology. Pedagogy
today,
he argues, would be recognizable by teachers 500 years ago. Moreover,
the culture of teaching retains a reticence to embrace technology. At
the same time, new developments in online educational technology have
a profound effect on notions of intellectual property. Drawing on
Walter Ong's research on the alphabet, and Shoshana Zuboff's research
on managerial knowledge as commodity, he depicts the challenge for
teachers as a tension between the paradigm of knowledge as
performance, and knowledge as thing. The performance paradigm
emphasizes the human agents, whereas knowledge as "thing" (read:
textual tools) follows longstanding emphases on curricula. Whichever
social group wins the paradigm battle -- performance versus text --
will have great influence on the future relationship between
classroom
teaching and technology design. - [16]TH
Corrado, Edward M.. "[17]The Importance of Open Access, Open Source,
and Open Standards for Libraries" [18]Issues in Science and
Technology Librarianship (42)(Spring
2005)(http://www.istl.org/05-spring/article2.html). - This is a good
summary overview of three important concepts for libraries: open
access to scholarly and research literature, software for which the
source code is available for users to view and change, and standards
that are developed and shared in a non-proprietary manner. Corrado
argues that the confluence of these three "opens" provides
synergistic
benefits for libraries when used together. For those who want a
gentle
introduction to these "hot" topics, and find the religious fervor of
some advocates off-putting, this is the piece to read. - [19]RT
Davis, Marc, et. al."[20]MMM2: Mobile Media Metadata for Media
Sharing" [21]Author's website (April
2005)(http://fusion.sims.berkeley.edu/GarageCinema/pubs/pdf/pdf_49DE28
4E-CF77-4385-934F1AC56079D0AD.pdf). - Information management for
information that won't stay put - that's often the point at which
many
librarians say "that's not me." How people create and share their own
information is certainly something that we need to be aware of,
though, and the popularity of digital imaging can't be denied. With
mobile phones becoming a global platform for sharing images, this
work
by Marc Davis and his colleagues deserves your attention. The brief
paper, presented at ACM's CHI 2005 conference, describes a mobile
metadata scheme for cameraphone pictures in which metadata
information
can be initiated at the point of capture, and then augmented through
the process of sharing. That process is facilitated with a prototype
mobile browser interface which can integrate preset lists of
recipients with a "co-presence" list of Bluetooth-sensed mobile
users.
Thus, as the authors wrote, "sharing and metadata could be used in a
mutually reinforcing way," which addresses a fundamental aspect of
personal information usage that goes beyond cameraphones. It's not
yet
at the point where public adoption of the system has been assessed;
readers should keep in mind that the stats showing field test success
result from use by his own grad students. At Davis' website ("Garage
Cinema Research: To Enable the Billions of Daily Media Consumers To
Become Daily Media Producers") you'll find related work on personal
media production, collaboration and management. - JR
Gast, Matthew. "[22]Top Ten 802.11 Myths of 2005" [23]O'Reilly
Wireless DevCenter (2 May
2005)(http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2005/05/02/80211myths.h
tml). - Gast, author of [24]802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive
Guide, 2nd Edition, points out inaccuracies he sees in media coverage
of wireless technologies. These include security issues, confusion
over different flavors of 802.11x, and wireless LAN issues. Some of
this stuff is a bit on the geeky side for the average reader, but the
article is relatively brief and touches on things you may have heard
about, such as [25]AirSnort and [26]WEP. - [27]SK
Givler, Peter. "[28]Association of American University Presses Letter
to Google" [29]Business Week Online (20 May
2005)(http://www.businessweek.com/print/bwdaily/dnflash/may2005/nf2005
0523_9039.htm). - Google has received a great deal of notice for its
"Print" and "Library" projects, which seek to digitize or obtain from
publishers the full-text of books, then provide full-text searching
and limited display of these works. Everyone agrees that the legality
of such efforts is murky at best, and this latest salvo in the debate
is one that Google can ignore only at its peril. There aren't many
deeper pockets out there in the area of intellectual property law,
and
many a career can be made on a high-profile suit alleging major
copyright infringement. This AAUP letter outlines 16 sets of serious
questions for Google management, and ones that may presage legal
action if not adequately answered. It did not escape this reader that
the AAUP letter includes a deadline of June 20, 2005 by which Google
is expected to respond, and I doubt Google's legal counsel is so
dense
as to overlook that either. - [30]RT
Hagedorn, Katerina. "[31]Looking for Pearls" [32]Research
Information (16)(March/April
2005)(http://www.researchinformation.info/rimarapr05oaister.html). -
The [33]Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting has
made it possible to federate access to hundreds of content
repositories world wide. But as the earliest and largest federation
service, [34]OAIster at the University of Michigan is the most
experienced in the problems of unifying access to such a diverse
range
of content. Hagedorn identifies issues with the data they harvest,
some normalization procedures they apply, and future plans for the
service. - [35]RT
Jacso, Peter. "Google Scholar: the Pros and the Cons" [36]Online
Information Review 29(2)(2005): 208-214. - In case you haven't heard
enough about Google Scholar, here's an analysis of what it does and
doesn't do. In fine librarian tradition, Jacso subjects the database
to a battery of searches. He then compares these results with what
he'd get using alternative sources. The picture isn't pretty. -
[37]LRK
Pennock, Lea, and Rick Bunt. "[38]Whose System Is It, Anyway?
Partnering with Faculty in Administrative System Projects"
[39]EDUCAUSE Quarterly 28(2)(2005): 24-31.
(http://www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm05/eqm052.asp). - Librarians are
no strangers to projects that require buy-in from the institution at
large. That's why this article about planning and implementing a new
Student Information System at the University of Saskatchewan may
strike a few chords. The authors report on a successful effort, still
underway at the time of writing, of moving a large project forward in
the unique circumstances of a large academic institution. They worked
to get everyone on board, hired outside consultants when necessary,
and generally tried to maintain a "perception of accomplishment,
productivity and achievement". - [40]LRK
Poynder, Richard. "[41]The Role of Digital Rights Management in Open
Access " [42]INDICARE Monitor
2(2)(2005)(http://www.indicare.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=93)
. - This is a very important paper for librarians and open access
advocates to read. The negative view of Digital Rights Management
(DRM), which I confess to holding, is that it is like a silent,
deadly
cancer that one discovers too late. We are largely unaware of it
because publishers have not widely chosen to utilize it to actively
control scholarly articles yet. But, once DRM is put in place, it
allows publishers to control how article files are used in
fine-grained ways, regardless of whether they are on the publisher's
server, the user's PC, or in an archive or institutional repository.
Poynder suggests that DRM is like "a two-layered cake. . . . the
first
layer consists of metadata that define the usage rules (rights)
associated with the content. Then on top of this can be placed an
(optional) second layer of software-imposed limitations on copying,
printing, viewing etc. (i.e. technical measures) in order to enforce
the usage rules." To control self-archived articles, publishers would
ask authors to archive DRM-protected copies, which "would potentially
become a Trojan horse capable of transforming OA articles into
'pay-per-view objects'." Think this is unlikely? According to
Poynder,
Springer Science+Business Media currently "invites" authors to
purchase the PDFs of their articles, which have been protected by
DocuRights. Poynder does not say that Springer has activated
particular restrictions, but they could at some future point. As long
as a publisher controls the copyright to the article, not the author,
the publisher can mandate that its DRM-protected copy of the article
be the self-archived final copy, and it can choose what restrictions
are activated. What if publishers could remotely turn on restrictions
at will? SoftVault Systems holds patents that "specifically claim
technology that enables the remote activation and disablement of
digital content, such as audio, video, text, data and image files."
So
what to do? The SPARC Author's Addendum modifies "the publisher's
agreement to make explicit the fact that the author is retaining
sufficient rights to self-archive, and to also require that the
publisher provides a free PDF version of the article--moreover, with
no DRM functionality incorporated into it." Of course, authors can
also attempt to retain copyright. But either strategy may imperil the
publication of the author's paper. OK, enough gloom. Poynder also
points out that DRM can be used for the author's benefit "to ensure
correct author attribution, to certify document integrity and
provenance, to prevent plagiarism, and indeed to enable creators
assert their rights in ways that encourage--rather than
restrict--access." (This issue also contains several other articles
about DRM issues that will be of interest.) - [43]CB
Shirky, Clay. "[44]Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and
Tags" [45]Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet (Spring
2005)(http://shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html). - Shirky
is
not a librarian, but he has a lot to say about library classification
schemes. And most of it isn't complimentary. "One of the biggest
problems with categorizing things in advance," he states, "is that it
forces the categorizers to take on two jobs that have historically
been quite hard: mind reading, and fortune telling. It forces
categorizers to guess what their users are thinking, and to make
predictions about the future." Catalogers in particular will want to
come to this piece with as open a mind as they can muster, and wait
on
interjecting until reading through the entire piece. Shirky is well
worth reading, because even if you don't agree, simply thinking
through his points and carefully will likely make you think of more
possibilities than you came to this piece with. And that alone is
worth the price of admission. - [46]RT
Sternstein, Aliya. "[47]'Tomahtoes' Get in the Way of Saving
E-Records" [48]Federal Computer Week (23 May
2005)(http://www.fcw.com/article88936-05-23-05-Print). - "When it
comes to managing electronic records, technologists may say 'tomato,'
but archivists will say 'tomahto.' The differences may seem subtle,
but they often result in a breakdown in communications that
undermines
the effort to protect e-records." This is an interesting take on the
disconnect between archivists and historians when it comes to the
retention and preservation of electronic records, such as back-up
tapes, e-mail, electronic calendars, etc. In particular, it discusses
the uproar after the [49]National Archives and Records Administration
(NARA) placed a notice in the Federal Register that it planned "to
get
rid of Clinton-era backup tapes." Of course, a large part of the
whole
e-records conundrum is that fact that the original
software/media/hardware used to create the records may not be around
anymore, which essentially renders the information inaccessible.
Which
brings IT people into the mix. Better communication among all parties
concerned is obviously vital. - [50]SK
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