Clips and Pointers

Workshop Summary: Second DELOS Workshop -- Interoperability and Metadata

Some thirty experts in databases and librarianship met at an ERCIM-sponsored workshop on interoperability and metadata that took place 7-8 October 1996 in Bad Honnef, near Bonn, Germany. The workshop was organized by Thomas Baker of the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) as the second in a series of workshops on strategic issues for the DELOS Working Group, a European Union-sponsored initiative of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), University of Michigan, and Elsevier. The goal was to bring together diverse communities oriented to "interoperability" (database experts) and "metadata" (more library scientists) in order to identify objectives held in common, though couched perhaps in different terms.

The Dublin Core -- a simple but extensible set of descriptive metadata elements -- was discussed both by its designers and by several German organizations currently using it to catalog Web materials. Researchers described how "thesauri" or "ontologies" or "attribute models" or "inheritance hierarchies of attributes" could be used to generate "asset models" or "conspectuses" for use by intelligent agents or in middleware. Of particular interest was the Warwick Framework for managing diverse metadata sets as packages within containers. Other speakers related these issues to catalog convergence among European national libraries, metadata of hypertext links, integrating text and relational databases, Z39.50, and payment schemes.

The workshop Web page, which includes a list of attendees, position papers, and links to related articles and Web sites, can be found at the Web site of the ERCIM Digital Library Initiative. A brief summary of the workshop will appear in issue 28 of ERCIM News.

Workshop Summary: Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives

The Cornell University Library Department of Preservation and Conservation held its seventh digital imaging workshop, October 13-18, 1996. The class of sixteen included librarians, archivists, records managers, and service bureau representatives from the United States and Australia. Participants convened in Ithaca, New York for theoretical and technical overviews to access, quality, and cost issues associated with the digital reformatting of library and archival materials.

The Cornell workshop emphasizes a managerial approach to imaging, and seeks to provide information managers with decision-making approaches to create, manage, and make available digital collections of long-term value. The curriculum combines lectures, discussion, and hands-on training in directed labs. Benchmarking image quality, vendor relations and RFP development, and hybrid approaches to imaging were among the specialized topics discussed. Carl Lagoze led the session on organizing and indexing digital objects, and James Reilly addressed issues associated with scanning photographs.

Throughout the week, participants worked with sample documents representing the wide range of materials in libraries and archives. In their final reports, each group emphasized that digital imaging projects are acts of collaboration. Making decisions about selection, reformatting, and access requires negotiation, and no single approach brings multiple parties into easy agreement. The organizers of the Cornell workshop hope that the "alumni" who go on to initiate their own projects will continue these discussions in a number of forums, and participate in collective efforts to adopt standards and best practices for digital library development.

For further information about the Cornell workshop series, contact Anne R. Kenney, Associate Director of the Department of Preservation and Conservation [email protected].

Point-to-Point

• The Government of Canada launched a Government Information Locator Service (GILS) pilot project in English and French on November 1, 1996. The goals of the project are "to determine if the GILS record is sufficient to describe and provide access to government information resources; to evaluate the Government Telecommunications and Informatics Service's GILS record creation tool and central GILS record repository; and to help departments and agencies identify requirements for creating, maintaining and updating GILS records." The pilot site describes the project and provides the tools to enables users to download the necessary SGML files and create records. Searching will be available, but since the participating agencies are only contributing a small number of records to the pilot, the information available will only represent a fraction of the total.

• The Jack London Collection at the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE (tm) contains images, documents, writings, bibliographies and research aids, a listserv devoted to the writer and his times, and a pointer to Jack London State Historic Park, a web page maintained by the State Park. Components of the collections (e.g., images) can be searched by keyword or phrase or browsed topically. "Browsing" is achieved by activating "canned" searches, which means that the pages are visually concise (unlike, for example, pages that offer long lists of titles) and that the browsing facility is automatically updated as the on-line collection grows without revision to the pages displayed to the reader. Searches yield titles of items; selecting the item brings up the full catalog record, which includes an scanned image of the item and links to related information (e.g., web site of the document's owner).

• IMAGES 1: The National Library of Australia's Documentary Images
  This collection contains more than 13,000 images of watercolors, paintings, drawings, prints and photographs from Australia's National Library's Pictorial Collection. The forms-based search permits users to search the associated catalog records. Results are returns in table format, comprising the title, artist, and thumbnail of the image. The default is set to suppress the thumbnail, but settings may be adjusted prior to initiating the search. The full catalog record, which includes notes and other information (e.g., format, medium, size), may also be selected, reducing the number of images users need to download. Advanced, boolean searching is also available.

• Digitization Activities at the National Library of Canada-Bibliotheque nationale du canada
  This bilingual English-French resource describes on-line resources and on-going projects. The collections are particularly strong in the areas of music and Canadian history and culture. They include searchable databases of various text resources (e.g., the more than 25,000 items in the Canadian Music Periodical Index, which covers 475 journals) as well as collections of pointers to on-line resources and on-line exhibitions, which combine text and images.

• Charles H. Bailey of the University of Houston Libraries has released Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. This bibliography, which will be updated monthly, supersedes the author's earlier "Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography," a PACS Review article. The collection may be browsed by topic or searched by keyword. Boolean searching is also supported.

In Print

• Journal of Internet Cataloging
  Gerry McKiernan, Iowa State University

  A new professional journal has been established to address a much-expressed need to make scholarly research on Internet organization and access more easily available. Co-edited by Dr. Ruth Carter of the University of Pittsburgh and Roger Brisson of the Pennsylvania State University, The Journal of Internet Cataloging: The International Quarterly of Digital Organization, Classification and Access (JIC) will begin official publication early next year.

  In recognizing the need for enhancing the accessibility of Internet resources, JIC will include research on traditional library techniques and procedures for bibliographical control and access, as well as reviews of novel methods appropriate for effective digital resource management. A full description of the scope and coverage of JIC and subscription information are available at URL:

  http://jic.libraries.psu.edu

• SIGIR-96 Workshop on Networked Information Retrieval, August 22, 1996. The summary of this workshop, which followed the annual conference in Zurich, includes access to the papers and a synopsis of the discussion. Twelve papers were presented, and 51 people registered to attend the workshop.

• The September issue of the newsletter of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) is devoted to digital libraries research. In addition, ERCIM has established a site devoted to digital libraries.

• The full report of the June 1-2, 1995 workshop on Culture, Society, and Advanced Information Technology, hosted by the American Anthropological Association and the Computing Research Association with sponsorship from the National Science Foundation, is available in Postscript or Adobe Acrobat via the Executive Summary, which is on the web.

• The Joint ICSU/UNESCO Conference have released the proceedings of their conference on Electronic Publishing in Science, held last February in Paris. This version of the proceedings has been made available as part of a joint experiment between the ICSU conference organizers and Thomson Science and Professional for Rapid Science Publishers to manage post-conference proceedings electronically. ICSU has currently granted access to this material without restriction. Says Ian Jindal of Rapid Science, "comments from visitors to the site are appreciated." The proceedings are also available via the ICSU home page: http://www.lmcp.jussieu.fr/icsu/.

Goings On

• 16th Annual Minnesota State, Local Government and Education Computer and Information Management Symposium, November 19-21, 1996. This three-day event in Bloomington, Minnesota, features presentation, workshops, and training materials for professionals engaged in information management in government, libraries, and education. More information, including the schedule, is available at http://www.state.mn.us/ebranch/admin/iisac/conf/comsym96.html.

• Learning to Live with E-Journals: Some Practical Solutions , November 21, 1996. The UK Serials Group has organized a one-day seminar in London on electronic serials with presentations covering university and corporate environments, user studies, and management. For more information, see the program announcement at http://epip.lboro.ac.uk/uksg/hi/diary.htm.

• Licensing Electronic Resources: The State of the Evolving Art, December 8-9, 1996. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are co-sponsoring a workshop following CNI's fall 1996 Task Force meeting in San Francisco on issues surrounding the licensing of electronic resources. More information is available at http://arl.cni.org/scomm/licpr.html.

• The 2nd ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 23 - 26, 1997, has issued its call for papers. Proposals should have been submitted to the appropriate chair by January 14, 1997. For further information, see http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~diglib97/ or contact [email protected].

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