Digital Library News
A publication of the IEEE Computer Society
Task Force on Digital Libraries
archives at: http://cimic.rutgers.edu/~ieeedln
January 1998, v.1 no.2
<![CDATA[ *** Contents ***
Current Projects
Recent Publications:
Announcements
Calendar of meetings and events
Useful URL's
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NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:
When I started working on a digital library in 1992, we weren't even
sure what to call it. The name "digital library" arrived later. Yet,
in six short years, we have moved from something so new it didn't have
a name to a veritable feast of events and projects. For this reason,
events included in this calendar are listed quite briefly, with URL's
given for more information. Workshops and conferences have been
selected for their emphasis on digital library technology as opposed
to allied subjects such as archiving, or more traditional library
subjects which have been translated to the digital medium. Admittedly,
there is no clear line between intellectual property questions in print
or online, or metadata vs. cataloging, but our scope emphasizes new
technologies and ideas, rather than electronic versions of existing
libraries.
Digital Library News is a publication of the IEEE Computer Society.
It is a brief alerting/reporting service for those working in the
diverse fields which comprise digital libraries. While we monitor
a number of Digital Libraries sources, coverage can only be as
complete as your submissions are. To submit articles and announcements
of events, send a brief report (one to two paragraphs) by email to
Susan Feldman, editor, sef2@cornell.edu. Be sure to include a contact
name, email address and a URL so that readers can find more extensive
information.
Please send comments and suggestions to me at sef2@cornell.edu.
--Sue Feldman, Editor
**************************************************************
***CURRENT PROJECTS***
NEW DIGITAL LIBRARY PROJECT AT GMD - IPSI
GMD IPSI, the Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute
at the German National Research Center for Information Technology, is
currently launching several Digital Library research projects. One of
the first projects will be a virtual digital library for GMD and the
CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) computer science institutes
in Pisa (Italy). This digital library will allow researchers and
developers in the two institutions and cooperating industrial partners
to access publications of controlled quality from their desk in a
uniform way, regardless of where the documents are stored. It will
offer both bibliographic and content retrieval. The common virtual
library will strengthen scientific cooperation among the participating
institutes by providing fast availability of research results.
In addition it will enable the investigation of distributed and
multilingual digital library systems in a realistic setting.
The CNR - GMD virtual library project will proceed in two phases. The
first phase will consist of the coordinated creation of digital c
ollections of selected technical reports within the framework of NCSTRL.
This collection will be used to study state-of-the-art retrieval methods
and multilingual access, providing appropriate database support for
storage and security, extension of the metadata model, or problems with
limited network bandwidth.
In the second phase the collections will be extended to all the GMD
institutes and the CNR computer science institutes, the scope of
document formats will be extended to include multimedia objects, and
the virtual library system will be extended by the enhanced services
studied in the first phase.
More information:
http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/delite/Projects/CNR-GMD/index.html
http://www.darmstadt.gmd.de/~ferber/cnr-gmd/dl-news-cnr.html
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THE EULER PROJECT
EULER (European Libraries and Electronic Resources in Mathematical
Sciences) is a project to be co-funded by the European Commission in the
Telematics for Libraries sector. The project will start in 1998 and have a
duration of 30 months.
The aim of the project is to provide strictly user-oriented, integrated
network based access to mathematical publications. The EULER service intends
to offer a "one-stop shopping site" for users interested in Mathematics.
Using Dublin Core-based Metadata descriptions EULER will integrate:
Bibliographic databases; library online public access catalogues; electronic
journals from academic publishers; online archives of preprints and grey
literature; indexes of mathematical Internet resources. A common user
interface - the EULER Engine - will assist the user in searching for
relevant topics in all sources at once.
Main partners: FIZ Karlsruhe (Dept. Math. & Comput. Sci., Berlin, Germany)
(Coordinator), The European Mathematical Society, Cellule de Coordination
Documentaire Nationale pour les Mathématiques (France), NetLab, Lund
University Library (Sweden), - und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
(Germany), Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (The Netherlands),
Università degli Studi di Firenze (Italy)
For more information: http://www.emis.de/projects/EULER/
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CANADIAN INITIATIVE ON DIGITAL LIBRARIES
A new alliance of Canadian libraries interested in the development of
Canadian digital library resources has been formed. CIDL will provide a
forum for discussing digital libraries issues and technologies, as well as
defining the roles and responsibilities for long-term archiving of Canadian
digital resources.
For more information: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/cidl/.
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RESULTS OF DIGITAL LIBRARY CONFERENCE SURVEY
Academic, public, and special libraries, as well as governmentment
agencies,museums and archives were surveyed to determine interest in a US
midwest conference on digital libraries. The respondents were primarily
novices or intermediate in DL expertise level. A conference was predicted
to attract 250-300 people from all parts of the country and from all
professions. Of 62 responses, 61% would be willing to pay a registration
fee in the range of $100-199, with 40% being willing to pay over $200
(up to $450). Most preferred a large metropolitan site with good airport
access. Preferred topics included: new developments, trends, projects,
organizations, digitization and imaging systems, hardware and software,
Text and image indexing, search and retrieval, database management tools;
Copyright and licensing.
Nick Berezovsky,
Coordinator,
Kansas Electronic Document Center,
Salina, KS
nberezov@tri.net;
785-825-4624; 785-823-0706 FAX.
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THE SCOTTISH CULTURAL RESOURCES ACCESS NETWORK (SCRAN)
SCRAN is a millennial project to build a Digital Library for the
teaching, learning and celebration of history and material culture in
Scotland. It is not trivial in scale, proposing to spend some 15 Million
pounds sterling over five years: half from the UK Millennium Commission,
and the rest from a range of galleries, museums, archives and other
institutions in the form of cash, in-kind contributions and, crucially,
intellectual property rights.
SCRAN is in a position to fund projects to create digital multimedia
resources from existing Art, Architecture and Artifacts. In exchange,
institutions grant to SCRAN and its members a non-exclusive license to
exploit these resources for educational purposes. By the Millennium, the
resource base should contain some 1.5 million text records of real world
objects, plus 100,000 multimedia representations of a selection of these.
Teachers, Lecturers, Students and others who might currently be inhibited
from using multimedia resources in their work by the logistics and cost
of clearing copyright, will be encouraged to use SCRAN resources freely
for educational purposes.
For more information: www.scran.ac.uk
-------------------
MAKING OF AMERICA PROJECT AT UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
The University of Michigan Digital Library Initiative has completed
the first phase of its Making of America project, now including approximately
650,000 pages of books and journals from the latter part of the 19th century.
This tremendous resource now contains 1,601 books and ten journals with more
than 49,069 articles documenting America's social history. Based on feedback
solicited in earlier announcements for the resource, as well as local user
studies, the current implementation adds functionality in a number of areas.
For more information, see: http://www.umdl.umich.edu/moa/
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MEK
The Hungarian Electronic Library (MEK),, started in 1994, will make
electronic documents available by collecting, organizing and transforming
them to a uniform format using "human labor". MEK collects Hungarian or
Hungary/ Central and Eastern Europe-related full-texts to be used for
scientific, educational or culture-related activities. MEK is a non-profit
movement: the service shall remain free and open to the general public
forever Any computer may be used to set up partial collections;
MEK documents may be freely copied and distributed if a few simple rules
are obeyed. (See the copyright section in the front of the files.) As of
November, 1997 there are more than 1,600 documents in the library, most of
them written in Hungarian. Half of the collection is classical and modern
fiction, the other half is scientific and educational literature.
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ROBERT RUNYON PHOTOGRAPH COLLECTION.
The General Libraries of the University of Texas at Austin, in
cooperation with the Center for American History, also of UT Austin,
are making available, on the Web, the Robert Runyon Photograph Collection
of the South Texas Border Area. The collection consists of 8,241
photographic images captured on eight different media. This project
involves digitizing these images (by means of a Kontron digital camera),
and making them available using Uniform Resource Names (URNs) as persistent,
location-independent identifiers. The syntax of the Runyon URNs is based on
RFC 2141, for example "urn:utlol:runyon.00001". The resolver performs two
functions: resolving the URN to a metadata record and resolving the URN to
the resource itself. The experimental resolution protocol "THTTP", outlined
in RFC 2169, is used for encoding resolution requests. Metadata is stored
in an LDAP database using the Dublin Core object class described in the
Internet-Draft, "Representing the Dublin Core within X.500, LDAP and CLDAP".
JJT, Inc. (an imaging bureau of Austin, Texas) is producing 3 images for
each original: a 3K, 24-bit, uncompressed TIFF image for the archive;
a 1.2K, 24-bit, compressed JPEG image for online viewing and downloading,
and a 150 x 192 pixel, 8-bit GIF for the index image. Intellectual access
to the collection will be provided through a finding aid marked up according
to the Encoded Archival description (EAD) DTD. INQUERY is the search engine
used to index and search the site.
For more information,
contact: Mark McFarland
General Libraries,
UT Austin.
512-495-4358
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A new Digital Object Identifier System has been developed by the
Association of American Publishers and the Corporation for National
Research Initiatives in order tol facilitate the extension of copyright
to the Internet. The DOI is a unique identifier (similar to an ISBN or ISSN),
which will allow access to documents-even when their URL changes. The DOI
is already being implemented by many publishers to provide access to
electronic journals. The International DOI Foundation was recently founded
with headquarters in Geneva and Washington DC.
for more information: http://www.doi.org
***PUBLICATIONS***
DIGITAL LIBRARIES: BOOKS, BYTES AND BUCKS
Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes and Bucks by Michael Lesk is
just what it claims to be-- a practical overview of the emerging field of
digital libraries. It is a concise compendium of practical knowledge,
background information and clear explanations of basic digital libraries
concepts, issues and technologies. Aimed at intelligent people who need
to understand both the library and computer aspects of digital libraries,
the book is not meant to cover any one subject in depth, but rather to
provide some background, and a brief discussion of the subjects with which
anyone who is setting up a digital library must be conversant. Lesk has
been an active participant in developing the technologies which support
digital libraries. He knows many of the prominent researchers. This
intimate knowledge creates a personal viewpoint which adds vitality to the
writing. Each of the myriad topics includes both a current and an historical
perspective which gives the reader a sense of why the technology evolved as
it did. Each section concludes with a discussion of the implications,
issues and pros and cons for use of a technology or approach. Topics
covered include: history of digital libraries and associated technologies;
text information retrieval and document conversion; scanning; file formats
for text and images; knowledge representation; security of data;
intellectual property; interface issues; preservation; economics; public
policy, and current digital library projects. Lesk asks hard questions
about the future of libraries and universities, and discusses the economics
of online information. This is the broadest treatment of the subject to
date, and it will be useful to students and to practitioners who are just
getting their feet wet. The book is published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers,
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers: http://www.mkp.com
DISCOVERING ONLINE RESOURCES ACROSS THE HUMANITIES: A PRACTICAL
IMPLEMENTATION OF THE DUBLIN CORE. Edited by P Miller and D Greenstein on
behalf of the AHDS and the UK Office for Library and Information Networking,
"Discovering Online Resources" provides a practical and accessible
introduction to the importance and use of Dublin Core "metadata" for the
purposes of describing and discovering humanities information resources
online. "Discovering Online Resources" is available from the AHDS's web
site: http://ahds.ac.uk/public/metadata/discovery.html
-------------------
A report on the July 1997 Research Libraries Group "summit meeting" on
metadata issues is available at: http://www.rlg.org/meta9707.html
-------------------
Final Reports on the CORE (Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment) Project
can be found in "Making a Digital Library: The Contents of the CORE Project,"
ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1997, pages
103-123. and in "Testing a Digital Library: User Response to the CORE
Project," Library Hi Tech, Vol. 14, No. 4, consecutive issue #56, 1996,
pages 99-118.
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FINAL REPORT ON THE EVALUATION OF GILS ( U. S. Government Information
Locator Service) by Willam Moen and Charles McClure can be found at:
http://www.unt.edu/slis/research/gilseval/gilsdocs.htm
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INTERNET FREE-PRESS
MCB University Press announces its sponsorship of Internet Free-Press,
a new organization that aims to virtually bring together people and
information on the subject of electronic publishing. The Internet
Free-Press Library archive, a continuously updated
archive of e-journals on the Web.
Free Access at http://www.free-press.com/
-------------------
THE REPORT ON THE NSF PLANNING WORKSHOP ON DISTRIBUTED KNOWLEDGE WORK
ENVIRONMENTS: DIGITAL LIBRARIES, March 9-11, 1997 Santa Fe, New Mexico
included consideration of the current NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Library
Initiative: what has been accomplished, learned, demonstrated and what
does this suggest about the need for follow-on activities? What are the
new frontiers opened by the DLI and related work? Like the DLI, it is
proposed that this new initiative should broaden research horizons for
computer science/engineering by linking fundamental research to testbed
construction which is evaluated and refined in real domains of use. It
should strive to produce new knowledge and technology/infrastructure
products which are useful not only in computer science and engineering,
but in many other research and application domains.
The Workshop report sets out to map the future in broad terms, noting
first the promise that participants saw in digital library research
(section 2). It discusses the central issues around which it seemed
particularly important to frame future research in order to fulfill
this promise (section 3). It presents this framework under the headings
"System-Centered Issues," "Collection-Centered Issues," and "User-Centered
Issues." It next considers various interested public and private groups
with whom partnerships might prove synergistic (section 4). The report
reflects the many discussions held about the structure of future research,
including questions of size and duration of projects (section 5). Finally,
it offers some conclusions drawn at the workshop. The final Workshop report,
along with details of the Workshop, is available at the Web Site:
http://www.si.umich.edu/SantaFe/
*The IEEE metadata conference (September 16-17, 1997) papers are now
available at: http://computer.org/conferen/proceed/meta97/
SCHOLARLY ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING BIBLIOGRAPHY Version 14 is now available.
This selective bibliography presents over 600 articles, books, electronic
documents, and other sources that are useful in understanding scholarly
electronic publishing efforts on the Internet and other networks.
URL:http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html.
(Acrobat: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.pdf)
(Word: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.doc).
"THE LAST BOOK," IBM Systems Journal, Vol 36, No. 3 1997. J. Jacobson,
C. Turner, J. Albert, and P. Tsao.
This paper describes efforts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Media Laboratory toward realizing an electronic book comprised of hundreds
of electronically addressable display pages printed on real paper substrates.
Such pages may be typeset in situ, thus giving such a book the capability
to be any book. Outlines the technology and describes a number of
applications that such a device enables.
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/journal/sj/363/jacobson.html
***1998 WORKSHOPS AND CONFERENCES***
February 23-24. RIDE'98. Eighth International Workshop on Research Issues
in Data Engineering: Adam's Mark Hotel, Orlando, Florida. Sponsored by IEEE
Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering
(http://www.cs.buffalo.edu/ride98.html)
February 23-24. RIDE'98
March 11-13. Digital Libraries in the New Millennium: Building on Our
Past" Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, Virginia in conjunction
with the IBM Renaissance Consortium and Virginia Council of Health Sciences
Librarians.
Contact: jdjones@vcu.edu or 804-828-1881
Mar 22-27. Workshop on Digital Imaging Technology in Libraries and Archives.
Cornell University Library Department of Preservation and Conservation .
Ithaca, New York. The training will focus on the reformatting of paper and
film-based library and archival materials and on the use of digital images
in a networked environment.
www.library.cornell.edu/preservation/digital.htm
March 17th to 20th. Digital Libraries Asia 98. The Westin Stamford & Westin
Plaza, Singapore. Digital Libraries Asia 98 will present a mix of
international and regional perspectives on successful applications and
developments that have taken place since the emergence of digital libraries.
http://dla98.digilib.org.sg/
Email: hexat@singnet.com.sg
March 4-7. EURO-MED NET 98 CONFERENCE: The Role of Internet and the World
Wide Webin Developing the Euro-Mediterranean Information Society. Hilton
Hotel, Nicosia, Cyprus.
http://www.euromednet.ucy.ac.cy.
March 25-27. IRSG 98: Discovering new worlds of IR. THE 20TH BCS COLLOQUIUM
ON INFORMATION RETRIEVAL. Grenoble, France. Some funding is available for
attendance at the conference.
http://irsg.eu.org/colloq/
April 1-2: Search Engines and Beyond: Using new software tools to develop
knowledge management systems. Boston MA. Covers an overview of search
engine technology, with emphasis on new research and development.
Representatives from TREC, Internet search engines, and top researchers
in the field will speak.
www.infonortics.com
April 3. VOCABULARY LINKS FOR INFORMATIONSYSTEMS: An introduction to
Thesaurus Design and Natural Language Searching. Professional Development
Seminar by Dr. Bella Hass Weinberg.. Location; Association of the Bar
of the City of New York.
HTTP://www.stjohns.edu/gsas/dlis
E-mail:libis@sjumusic.stjohns.edu
April 14-18. THE 7TH INTERNATIONAL WORLD-WIDE WEB CONFERENCE
Brisbane, Australia.
Objective: to foster development of the World Wide Web by providing a
forum for the exchange of ideas about the underlying technology. Intended
for those exploring the leading edge of this technology, including
researchers,developers, content providers, and users. The Conference is
sponsored by Charles Sturt University, DSTC Pty Ltd, The Prentice Centre,
Queensland Information Industries Board, and Southern Cross University,
under the auspices of the International WWW Conference Committee.
For more information: http://www7.conf.au/
April 20-22. SECOND ICCC/IFIP CONFERENCE ON ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING:
Towards the Information-Rich Society. Budapest, Hungary. Papers on
technical, human and economic aspects of electronic publishing will be
welcomed on such topics as electronic scholarly publishing, publishing of
technical manuals, electronic art galleries, and other specialist areas.
electronic publications in public libraries, and electronic provision of
local community or tourist information, government information.
Fytton Rowland, Co-Chair, E-mail J.F.Rowland@lboro.ac.uk
April 22-24. IEEE ADVANCES IN DIGITAL LIBRARIES CONFERENCE '98.
Santa Barbara, CA. Sponsored by Alexandria Digital Library, CESDIS,
IEEE Computer Society, Library of Congress, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,
and National Library of Medicine.
ADL'98 Web Site: http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/conferences/ADL98/
April 23-25. SOCIOECONOMIC DIMENSIONS OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING WORKSHOP:
Meeting the Needs of the Engineering and Scientific Communities.
Santa Barbara, California Sponsored by the National Science Foundation,
the IEEE Foundation, the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society. In Cooperation
with the IEEE International Conference on Advances in Digital Libraries.
www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/conferences/ADL98
June 1 -19. Sixth DELOS Workshop Preservation of Digital Information Lisbon
(Portugal) http://www.inesc.pt/events/ercim/delos6
June 29-July 1. UKOLN: Information Landascapes for a Learning Society:
Networking and the future of libraries 3. The University of Bath
The opening keynote presentation will be given by Richard Heseltine,
Director of Academic Services and Librarian, University of Hull. Clifford
Lynch, Chief Executive of the Coalition for Networked Information has been
invited to give the closing keynote address. Other sessions cover:
Information architectures:
constructing the digital library; Information and the public sphere:
an informed citizenry; Information exchanges: the library, the network and
the future. For full information,
see : http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/ukoln-conf-98/.
June 23-26. DIGITAL LIBRARIES '98. The Third ACM Conference on Digital
Libraries. Pittsburgh, PA. Sponsored by ACM through SIGIR and SIGLINK)
Conference Chair:
Robert M. Akscyn Knowledge Systems rma@ks.com.
Program Chair: Ian Witten ihw@rimu.cs.waikato.ac.nz
June 3-5 1998. INFORMATION SCIENCE AT THE DAWN OF THE MILLENNIUM:
26th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science/
Association canadienne des sciences de l'information Universite d'Ottawa,
Ottawa, Ontario.
Contact: Elaine Toms. E-Mail: etoms@is.dal.ca
June 20 - 24. HYPERTEXT '98: http://www.ks.com/ht98. The 9th ACM Conference
on Hypermedia and Hypertext. Marriott City Center - Pittsburgh, PA, USA
June 23-26 Digital Libraries '98 - The Third ACM Conference on Digital
Libraries. Pittsburgh, PA. Sponsored by ACM through SIGIR and SIGLINK.
//www.ks.com/DL98.
Conference Chair Robert M. Akscyn Knowledge Systems rma@ks.com
August 13-15. INFORMATION SEEKING IN CONTEXT: an International Conference on
Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts. Sheffield, United
Kingdom
Hosted by: The Department of Information Studies at Sheffield University.
http://panizzi.shef.ac.uk/david_allen/ISIC/isic.html
Official ISIC-98 e-mail list:
send an e-mail message to m.x.walker@sheffield.ac.uk
Aug. 24-28. SIGIR '98 - ACM Conference on Information Retrieval.
Melbourne, Australia. The Twenty-First Annual International ACM--SIGIR
Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval,
jointly hosted by the Departments of Computer Science at the Royal Melbourne
Institute of Technology and the University of Melbourne
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/sigir98/.
August 25-29. Structures and Relations in Knowledge Organization. The
International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) will conduct its
fifth International Conference (ISKO 5) in Lille, France, The conference
will focus on knowledge structures as represented in the human mind, in
the formation of categories, in information handling tools, including
classification schemes, thesauri and indexing systems, knowledge structures
as represented in computers and intelligent systems, indexing systems.
September 19 - 23. Second European Conference on Research and Advanced
Technology for Digital Libraries. Heraklion, Crete, Greece. Web Page:
http://www.csi.forth.gr/2EuroDL funded by the European Commission's TMR
Programme.
E-mail: ecdl@cc.uch.gr.
Proposals for tutorials, panels and demos due 3/15.
September 23-26. PKDD'98 -- 2nd European Symposium on Principles of Data
Mining and Knowledge Discovery. Nantes, France.
http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/pkdd98.
Both theoretical and applied submissions are sought. Submission deadline
for papers: May 15th, 1998.
Sept. 27-30,Asia Pacific Web Conference (APWeb98). Beijing, P.R China
Theme: "World Wide Web: technologies and applications".
http://www.cm.deakin.edu.au/apweb98
***USEFUL URL'S***
ARIADNE the Web version: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk. A lively collection of
articles on digital library research, particularly in the UK.
D-LIBMAGAZINE. Monthly. D-Lib Magazine is produced by the Corporation for
National Research Initiatives and is sponsored by the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on behalf of the NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital
Libraries Initiative.
Available at:<http://www.dlib.org>with mirror sites at:
http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/mirrored/lis-journals/dlib/, a
nd http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/mirrors/dlib.
VISUAL RESOURCES ASSOCIATION, devoted to issues of handling and maintaining
visual collections as well as related image storing technology. THE VRA
maintains a World Wide Web home page at: http://www.vra.oberlin.edu
JOURNAL OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, JoDI:
http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING:
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-02/doi.html
THE BERKELEY DIGITAL LIBRARY SUNSITE:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu
contains a mixture of electronic resource collections and tools.
Managed by Roy Tennant.
METAWEB: The Australian metadata project
http://www.dstc.edu.au/RDU/MetaWeb.
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