CNI Spring 1995 Task Force Meeting Summary Report

AGENDA

SPRING 1995 MEETING OF THE TASK FORCE
April 10-11, 1995

Loews L'enfant Plaza Hotel
480 L'enfant Plaza, S.W.
Washington, D.C., 20024-2197

Phone: 202-484-1000
Fax: 202-646-4456

THEME

• Digital Library Research and Development

PURPOSES

• To promote understanding of digital library research and development, particularly that being sponsored by NSF, DARPA, and NASA.

• To promote understanding of key concepts and exemplary initiatives pertaining to the development of networked information resource and discovery tools and services.

• To provide an environment in which people associated with the Coalition and its Task Force can share experiences, visions, and plans.

• To provide an opportunity for people associated with the Coalition and its Task Force to discuss network and networked information policy issues and initiatives.

• To provide an opportunity for representatives of members of the Coalition Task Force, leaders of the Coalition working groups, members of the Coalition Steering Committee, and the Coalition CEOs to identify needs, to formulate priorities, and to evaluate results.

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Schedule for Monday April 10, 1995

11:00 am -- Registration and Refreshments [Ballroom Foyer]
Cold drinks and light refreshments will be available.

11:30 am -- Meeting Overview for First-Time Attendees [Ballroom]
Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, will provide first-time attendees with some background on the Coalition and the Meeting.

1:00 pm -- Call to Order and Welcome [Ballroom]
Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information, will call the Meeting to order and make opening remarks and announcements.

1:15 pm -- Shared Digital Library Research and Development Priorities of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense (DARPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) [Ballroom]
Stephen M. Griffin, Program Manager, National Science Foundation, Paul Hunter, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Glenn Ricart, Program Manager, Advanced Research Projects Agency will provide an overview of their shared Digital Library program goals and strategies.

2:15 pm -- Key Concepts and Terminology in Digital Library Research and Development [Ballroom]
William Arms, Corporation for National Research Initiatives, will provide attendees with an overview of technical issues and terminology.

2:45 pm -- Break [Ballroom Foyer and Monet Foyer]

3:15 pm -- Project Briefings and Synergy Sessions

Small group briefings and discussions on/of projects, ideas, and issues related to Coalition themes and priorities in order to provide a forum for sharing information and for exploring perspectives.

Stanford Digital Library Project [Monet I]

Andreas Paepcke, Senior Research Fellow and DLI Project Manager, Stanford University

Vicky Reich, Information Access Analyst, Stanford University

Rebecca Lasher, Head Librarian and Bibliographer, Math and Computer Science Library, Stanford University

The goal of the Stanford Digital Library project is to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and "universal" library, composed from the large numbers of emerging individual heterogeneous repositories of publication-related services. Our definition of a constituent repository includes everything from personal information collections to the collections in conventional libraries and large data collections shared by scientists. Our technology will provide the "glue" mechanism that will make this worldwide collection usable as a more unified entity, without "homogenizing away" useful differences in data models and interaction facilities.

The University of Michigan Digital Library Program [Monet II]

Randall Frank, Executive Director of Information Technology, College of Engineering and School of Information and Library Studies, University of Michigan

Wendy P. Lougee, Director, Campus-Wide Digital Library Program, University of Michigan

Michael Wellman Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan

The University of Michigan's NSF/DARPA/NASA-sponsored digital library project represents a coordinated program of experimental research and deployment of a digital library for earth and space science. The multi-disciplinary research team is developing an agent architecture which distributes information retrieval tasks for a highly heterogeneous set of collections. Intellectual property issues are being addressed as well as a computational economy developed. Deployment to both an on-campus community and high school environments will be evaluated from both system performance and user impact perspectives.

ISI Electronic Library Pilot Project [Monet III]

Jacqueline Trolley, Institute for Scientific Information

The Institute for Scientific Information initiated an in-depth study in order to test the many variables related to the electronic distribution of a focused set of scholarly journals from its vast database. ISI's decision to undertake this project was made in response to customer demand. Four key objectives were clear to ISI: the prototype electronic library must allow publishers and users the ability to test:

• technical systems required to support the electronic distribution of journal delivery (data access, storage, and retrieval);

• internal systems required to facilitate implementation of the electronic library - including billing, accounting, and business management reporting;

• economic models that will meet the diverse needs of the publishing and user communities; and,

• behavior of users to determine how the electronic distribution of journals may change traditional information purchasing and usage patterns.

In order to accomplish these objectives, ISI initiated ongoing cooperative partnerships with three major groups - STM publishers, libraries, and a technology partner, International Business Machines - to explain the parameters of the project and seek their participation.

HELIOS: The Heinz Electronic Archive: A Report on Development and Implementation [Monet IV]

David Evans, Director, Laboratory for Computational Linguistics, Carnegie Mellon University

Charles Lowry, University Librarian, Carnegie Mellon University

The HELIOS project at Carnegie Mellon University is now sixteen months old and is well on the way to realizing the goal of an interactive electronic archive. Documents are being scanned, OCR converted and indexed for retrieval using CLARIT natural-language processing software. To date, approximately sixty-thousand page images have been entered (of the expected more than one-million pages of the collection) and processed for content. The briefing will discuss the development of the infrastructure technologies of image server, image display, and NLP applications and will present the results of user focus groups for the development of the three user interfaces in the system - the scanning station, the archivist's management station, and the end-user (researcher's) station. We will give a "live" demonstration of the current working prototype of the system.

Humanities from a National Perspective: Politics and Programs [Renoir]

John Hammer, Director, National Humanities Alliance

George Farr, Jr., Director, Division of Preservation and Access, National Endowment for the Humanities

Douglas Bennett, Vice President, American Council of Learned Societies

David Bearman, Archives & Museum Informatics

Charles Henry, Director of the Libraries, Vassar College

This session presents important activity in humanities education from a variety of different though complementary approaches, all of which involve the Nation at large. Topics include the implication for the humanities in the current political climate - responses to the November elections; new technology programs being developed at the National Endowment for the Humanities; and, an update on the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH).

The NSF Synthesis Coalition's National Engineering Education Delivery System [Caucus]

David M. Martin, Engineering Network Coordinator, Iowa State University

John M. Saylor, Director, Engineering Library, Cornell University

The National Engineering Education Delivery System includes a complete, inter-networked, multimedia, virtual library built entirely on open standards. It will be demonstrated and described in detail. The virtual library is based on USMARC catalog records which are created with SGML. The catalog is searched through a World Wide Web HTML/Z39.50 gateway. Multimedia extended abstracts, etc. are transparently embedded in the catalog. Applications located as a result of a search can be launched or delivered by a mouse click. A Hypertext Transport Protocol "Location" server resolves symbolic catalog references to physical storage locations; this is a feature of the system which is essential for long term maintenance.

Electronic Dissemination of Physics Journals and Technical Reports on Campus Networks [Quorum]

Laurie Stackpole, Chief Librarian, Naval Research Laboratory

Roderick D. Atkinson, Electronic Resources Coordinator, Naval Research Laboratory

Robert A. Kelly, Director, Journal Information Systems Department, American Physical Society

As a joint effort between a library and a commercial publisher the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and the American Physical Society (APS) are experimenting in electronically disseminating journals and reports over selected campus networks to researchers at their desktops. The project itself is called TORPEDO (The Optical Retrieval Project: Electronic Documents Online) and consists of storing and disseminating two APS journals: Physical Review Letters (1994-Present), and the NRL collection of unclassified unlimited distribution (i.e., no security limitation) technical reports. These journals and reports are converted at NRL from paper format to scanned CCITT Group IV images, OCR'ed, associated with bibliographic information, and moved into a client/server-based commercial imaging system. Journals and reports are then made end-user searchable using OCR'ed full-text data combined with fuzzy logic, bibliographic data elements, or directly through a tree-structure hierarchy. Using freely distributed client software end-users are then able to display page images of journals and reports online from their desktop workstation (Windows, Macintosh, or window systems) to be read online or printed on their local printers. In addition, NRL and the APS will soon be experimenting with incorporating SGML formatted journals into TORPEDO as a substitute for the paper scanning process. These SGML based journals will be seamlessly integrated into the same system as the images for end-user search and retrieval.

NASA Public Use of Earth and Space Science Data Over the Internet [Lafayette]

Nand Lal, Manager, Digital Library Technology Project, Goddard Space Flight Center

Linda L. Hill, Senior Research Scientist, Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA is involved in various R&D efforts funded as a cooperative agreement notice entitled "Public Use of Earth and Space Science Data Over the Internet." A total of 26 projects are funded. Seven of these projects address research and development of digital library technologies. Specifically, they address problems related to: data compression and transmission techniques, search engines for content-based queries, enhancements to Mosaic, scalability and interoperability, access to Internet over cable television, and intelligent agents. Nineteen of the projects deal with developing applications pertaining to forestry, agriculture, tourism, museums and "info-tainment," cable television access to the Internet, and curriculum development for education. NASA is also a cosponsor of the NSF/DARPA/NASA Joint Initiative on research on digital libraries.

4:30 pm -- Break [Ballroom Foyer and Monet Foyer]

4:45 pm -- Project Briefings and Synergy Sessions

Small group briefings and discussions on/of projects, ideas, and issues related to Coalition themes and priorities in order to provide a forum for sharing information and for exploring perspectives.

The Alexandria Digital Library [Monet I]

Michael F. Goodchild, Associate Director of Alexandria Digital Library, and Professor of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara.

The Alexandria Digital Library is one of six research projects being funded over a four year period under a collaboration between NSF, DARPA, and NASA. The focus of Alexandria is on spatially indexed information, initially maps and images, and on the problems that need to be solved to make them accessible in the digital libraries of the future. Maps and images are difficult to catalog and cumbersome to access, and the move to the digital environment should allow many of these problems to be removed. Besides maps and images, Alexandria will incorporate other types of spatially indexed information such as text and photographs, and accommodate a range of user and query types. The presentation will focus on the prototype constructed in the past six months, and on plans for further development in the near future.

Building a Digital Library for the Engineering Community [Monet II]

William H. Mischo, Head, Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Ann P. Bishop, Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Supported by an NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Library Initiative grant, the University of Illinois is building a large-scale digital library testbed, planned to grow to 100,000 users and 100,000 documents. The goal of the DLI project is to bring professional quality search and display to Internet information services. The testbed collection consists of articles from engineering and science journals and magazines, obtained in SGML format directly from major partners in the publishing industry. The collection will be managed by the University Library on a production basis, growing into a standard service of the new Grainger Engineering Library Information Center. Extensive evaluation of the nature and extent of testbed use will be based on ethnographic observation of engineering work teams, interviews, usability testing, surveys, and system instrumentation. Mischo and Bishop will provide an overview of the DLI project and discuss issues encountered in developing the testbed and studying its use.

An Update on the TULIP Project [Monet III]

Clifford Lynch, Director, Library Automation, University of California, Office of the President

Jaco Zilstra, Project Manager, TULIP, Elsevier Science Publishers

The TULIP project is a joint effort between Elsevier Science publishers and a number of universities to provide access to journals in the area of materials science in bitmapped form. Access began in 1994 and the project ends at the end of 1995. At this panel session, participants from the universities that have implemented TULIP will discuss technical issues involved in providing access to the material and also operational experiences and reactions from their user communities.

Library of The Future Project at LLNL [Monet IV]

Hilary Burton, Technical Information Specialist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

This project involves two phases. Phase I consists of building an infrastructure to review and release documents electronically to determine their classification, digitizing 77,000 reports, and building a full-text reports database. Phase II consists of integrating all electronic resources within the library (OPAC, reports database, etc.) and integrating the tools (Internet) used to access these resources.

Cataloging Internet Resources: OCLC Project Updates [Renoir]

Erik Jul, Manager, Custom Services, OCLC, Inc.

Priscilla L. Caplan, Assistant Director for Library Systems, University of Chicago

This Synergy Session reports ongoing OCLC activities related to the description and access of Internet resources, including:

• overview and update of the OCLC Internet cataloging project "Building a Catalog of Internet Resources;"

• overview and update of "Spectrum: A Web-based Tool for Describing Electronic Resources;" and,

• results of the OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop.

The Morino Institute: Programs and Strategies Caucus

Kaye Gapen, Senior Advisor, Morino Institute

The formation of the Morino Institute was announced in May, 1994. The Morino Institute is dedicated to opening the doors of opportunity - economic, civic, health, and education - and empowering people to improve their lives and communities in the communications age. The Institute helps individuals and institutions harness the power of information and the potential of interactive communications as tools for overcoming the challenges that face them. This presentation will outline the various programs in which the Institute is engaged, as well as the strategic directions for further program development.

Vatican Library Accessible Worldwide [Quorum]

Richard Cerreta, International Image Consultant, IBM Corporation

This is an overview of a pilot project to find new ways to provide access to selected works from the Vatican Library to scholars and educators worldwide. It is a joint development project among the Vatican Library, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the IBM Corporation. Components of the project include: a digital image database containing a sample of full printed volumes, manuscripts and artworks; feasibility of using networks and other electronic media to distribute the images; conversion of the Library's pre-1985 two million card catalog into an electronic database; and, an exploration of issues of usability, protection of distributed images, and cost and permissions management.

Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL): An Introduction [Lafayette]

Jennifer Trant, Manager, Imaging Initiative, Getty Art History Information Program

Steve Dietz, National Museum of American Art

Sally Promey, Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland

Clifford Lynch, Director, Library Automation, University of California, Office of the President

The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) is a collaboration of museums, art galleries, and colleges and universities working together to define the terms and conditions for educational use of museum images and information on campus-wide networks. This two-year initiative, launched by the Getty Art History Information Program and MUSE Educational Media, brings participants together in partnership, with museums providing images and information, and educational institutions providing networked access and testing the use of the images for educational purposes. Together, project participants will evaluate the effectiveness of the chosen capture and delivery methodologies, and examine the impact of the introduction of digital museum materials into the curriculum. The MESL Project will develop and test administrative, technical and legal mechanisms that could eventually make it possible to deliver large quantities of high-quality images from the museum community to diverse academic institutions. Project participants will discuss the goals and objectives of the MESL project, the technical challenges it faces, and the opportunities it provides for both museums and universities.

6:00 pm -- Reception [Ballroom and Solarium]

Enjoy complimentary wine, beer, and soft drinks and a light buffet along with the company of your fellow Meeting participants. A cash bar will also be available.

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Schedule for Tuesday April 11, 1995

8:00 am -- Registration and Continental Breakfast [Ballroom Foyer and Solarium]
A breakfast buffet will be offered, and attendees may choose to join a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) table to discuss an issue or hot topic.

9:00 am -- Advances in Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval [Ballroom]
Michael Schwartz, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, Ann Mueller, Technical Manager, Stanford University, and Clifford Lynch, Director, Library Automation, University of California, Office of the President will describe current projects and perspectives on networked information discovery and retrieval (NIDR). Issues will include NIDR visions, architectures, and metadata. This session will be moderated by Avra S. Michelson, Digital Libraries Department, MITRE Corporation.

10:30 am -- Break [Solarium and Monet Foyer]

11:00 am -- Project Briefings and Synergy Sessions

Small group briefings and discussions on/of projects, ideas, and issues related to Coalition themes and priorities in order to provide a forum for sharing information and for exploring perspectives.

The CMU Informedia Digital Video Library [Monet II]

Howard D. Wactlar, Vice Provost for Research Computing and Associate Dean, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

Scott M. Stevens, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

The Informedia (tm) Digital Video Library Project is developing new technologies for creating full-content search and retrieval digital video libraries. Working in collaboration with WQED Pittsburgh, the project is creating a testbed that will enable users to access, explore, search and retrieve educational, sports and entertainment materials from the digital video library. One of the most interesting research aspects of the project is the development of automatic, intelligent mechanisms to populate the library through integrated speech, image, and language understanding. The library will initially contain 1,000 hours of video from the archives of project partners: WQED, Fairfax County, Virginia Schools' Electronic Field Trips, and the British Open University's BBC-produced video courses. This remote library testbed will be installed at Winchester Thurston School, an independent K-12 school in Pittsburgh, and be accessed via commercial telephone networks.

UC Berkeley Digital Equipment Library [Monet III]

Nancy Van House, Acting Dean, School of Library and Information Studies, University of California, Berkeley

The testbed system that we are constructing provides widespread online public access to environmental information. A digital library project focused on environmental data is of unusually wide-ranging scientific, political, educational, and economic interest; it involves an exceptional range of object types (texts, images, video, numeric data, software); it brings the added dimension of a geographical information system; and, it draws on our group's experience in developing related information and computing support systems. The technical focus of this proposal is the development of several critical technologies needed to implement our vision of electronic libraries. In this vision, large numbers of geographically distributed users can conveniently access the entire contents of very large and diverse repositories of electronic objects. These repositories will exist in locations physically near or remote from the users, and will contain objects comprising text, images, maps, sounds, full-motion videos, merchandise catalogs, and scientific and business data sets, as well as hypertextual multimedia compositions of such elements. Users will be able to browse and retrieve information from these repositories by content; and, both organizations and private citizens will be able to easily add repositories of their own, which will interoperate with this global system.

IBM Digital Library Initiative [Monet IV]

Jon Prial, Manager of Digital Library Market Development, IBM Corporation

Last month, IBM announced, with much fanfare, the IBM Digital Library. Today's session will discuss what it is, and how the digitization of information and the availability of an infrastructure to manage it will have a significant impact on how libraries serve their users.

Advances in Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval [Renoir]

Clifford Lynch, Director, Library Automation, University of California, Office of the President

Michael Schwartz, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder

Ann Mueller, Technical Manager, Stanford University

Avra S. Michelson, Digital Libraries Department, MITRE Corporation.

Cecilia Preston

Craig Summerhill, Systems Coordinator and Program Officer, Coalition for Networked Information

This session will provide an opportunity for in-depth discussion of the ideas and suggestions presented during the morning plenary session, and for spirited exchange with the panelists who participated in that session.

Measuring the Impacts of Networking on the Academic Environment [Quorum]

Charles R. McClure, Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University

Cynthia Lopata, Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University

The presenters will provide a status report on this Department of Education-funded project that began in October, 1994 and is scheduled for completion in December, 1995. After describing the activities of the project to date, possible performance measures that might be used to assess the academic networked environment in terms of extensiveness, efficiency, effectiveness, and impacts will be offered. Persons attending this session will have an opportunity to review these proposed measures and offer/discuss other possible measures for assessing the impacts of networking on the academic environment.

Long-Term Strategy for the Development of Digital Libraries: Financial, Legal, and Institutional Issues [Caucus]

Brian Kahin, Director, Information Infrastructure Project, Science, Technology and Public Policy Program, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

This session will discuss a framework and agenda for the institutional development of digital libraries and long-term policies needed to facilitate and maximize access to information within the research community and beyond. It will evaluate the basic enterprise models, the strategic problems faced by these models, and the short to mid-term needs for realizing self-sustaining information enterprises. Particular attention will be given to problems of information enterprise management within universities and the prospects for institutional re-engineering, outsourcing, autonomous noncommercial utilities, and commercialization.

Icarus, Pygmalian and Babbage: New Technologies and Humanities Research [Degas]

Nancy Ide, President, Association of Computers and the Humanities

Charles Henry, Director of the Libraries, Vassar College

This session presents: a broad view of current work in the humanities, including historical background, and paradigmatic projects, trends, and methodological issues prevalent within the Association of Computers and the Humanities; and, an update on the American Arts and Letters Network, a project for linking very large numbers of digital resources and tools in the arts and humanities, facilitating incorporation of these resources into teaching and scholarship.

Text Capture and Electronic Conversion at the Library of Congress [Lafayette]

David Williamson, Senior Descriptive Cataloger, Social Sciences Cataloging Division, Library of Congress

Members of the Cataloging Directorate at the Library of Congress are experimenting with ways of doing more cataloging with fewer resources, trying to get more out of an aging computer input-update system than the system can provide, and exploiting the new bibliographic workstation (BWS) that is being installed on the catalogers' desks. To those ends, we have created a package of utilities known as Text Capture and Electronic Conversion (TCEC). These utilities allow cataloging staff to take electronic information in various formats and convert that data to useable LC MARC records which are then cut-and-pasted into the LC computer catalog.

12:15 pm -- Circulation Break [Ballroom Foyer]

12:30 pm -- Lunch [Ballroom]

A buffet lunch will be offered, and attendees may choose to join a Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) table to discuss an issue or hot topic.

1:15 pm -- Luncheon Speaker [Ballroom]
Noted science fiction author, Daniel Keys Moran, will present his views on the Clinton Administration's National Information Infrastructure (NII), the public fascination with the "information highway" concept, and "third-wave, Toffler information revolutions." Mr. Moran is the author of the science fiction series The Tales of the Continuing Time. The Tales are a projected thirty novels spanning the birth and death of the universe; in breadth and depth of conception they rival Tolkien's Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings. In the field of science fiction - indeed, outside of Tolkien's universe - there has never been a fictional construct of similar size and ambition. The Tales to date consist of Emerald Eyes, The Long Run, and The Last Dancer, with Players: The AI War due in 1995 or early 1996.

2:00 pm -- Circulation Break [Ballroom Foyer and Monet Foyer]

2:15 pm -- Project Briefings and Synergy Sessions

Small group briefings and discussions on/of projects, ideas, and issues related to Coalition themes and priorities in order to provide a forum for sharing information and for exploring perspectives.

Cost Centers and Measures in the Networked Information Value-Chain [Monet II]

Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information

Mark A. Tesoriero, Market Research Account Executive, Robert Ubell Associates

Robert N. Ubell, President, Robert Ubell Associates

The two main objectives for the "Cost Centers and Measures in the Networked Information Value-Chain" project are: to produce a white paper on the value-chain of productive relations and activities that link authors and readers in the scholarly and scientific communication and publication system; and, to identify the value centers and cost categories that will experience the greatest impacts due to the increased significance of networks and networked information in the scholarly and scientific communication and publication system, and to formulate strategies for measuring those impacts over time. At this project briefing, we will review progress to-date on the project and discuss the focus groups that will be convened in late April and early May. We will also discuss benchmark measures by which to quantitatively track the cost trends attributable to the production, distribution, and use of networked information resources and services.

Stretching the Web: Early Experiences with Publishing Applied Physics Letters Online [Monet III]

Timothy Ingoldsby, Director of New Product Development, American Institute of Physics

W. Daviess Menefee, Consulting Product Specialist, OCLC, Inc.

OCLC's Electronic Journals Online (EJO) system has been available for nearly three years, using the Guidon (r) for Windows interface. With the addition of Applied Physics Letters Online in January of 1995, a World Wide Web version of EJO has been developed. Originally the focus of this effort was to support both Macintosh and X-windows subscribers, but the project has grown to include DOS/Windows. Adapting a "stateless" protocol like the Web's HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to enable session information has been a significant challenge. Furthermore, conveying the complex and rich information content of physics research articles within the limitations of even the latest and most advanced version of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML 2.0) has been equally daunting. This session will provide a side-by-side comparison of EJO/Guidon with EJO/Web, with the emphasis on how the attributes of HTML 2.0 and HTTP were stretched to provide essentially the same capabilities for EJO/Web as the lavish functionality provided by EJO/Guidon. Audience participation will be welcomed in discussing what additional capabilities are needed to make Web protocols and also the browsers robust enough to support the features required for effective scholarly communication.

OhioLINK -- Statewide Cooperation -- It's Not The Technology, Stupid [Monet IV]

Judith A. Sessions, Dean and University Librarian, Miami University

Edward D. Garten, Dean, Libraries and Information Technologies, University of Dayton

Tom Sanville, Executive Director, OhioLINK

OhioLINK will demonstrate that its statewide cooperative library program is highly successful in providing expanded resource sharing and access to electronic information. To achieve this success, many obstacles had to be overcome. Too much focus is paid to the technological obstacles of cooperation, and not enough to the policy, organizational and economic obstacles. What has set OhioLINK apart from many other state cooperative efforts is how it has achieved solutions to these obstacles. For those interested in achieving the full benefits of cooperative efforts, they must first understand the necessary changes in individual library practice if a group effort is to succeed. This session will show OhioLINK's experience in doing so. In addition to the presenters, other Library Directors of OhioLINK libraries will be in attendance to respond to questions.

The Humanities Scholar and the Digital Library [Quorum]

Susan Hockey, Director, Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Rutgers and Princeton Universities

David Chesnutt, Editor of the Papers of Henry Laurens, University of South Carolina

C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, Editor-in-Chief of the Text Encoding Initiative, University of Illinois at Chicago

The successful digital library must satisfy the needs of its users. In the case of the humanities, much source material is complex in nature and is studied for many different purposes often requiring fine detail. This session will focus on the challenges presented by humanities scholarship and on major initiatives to address these concerns in the context of the digital library.

The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH), a joint project of Rutgers and Princeton Universities supported by NEH and the Mellon Foundation, provides a forum for advancing scholarship in the humanities by the use of high quality electronic texts. CETH's activities include cataloging electronic texts and development of associated metadata, tools for SGML-based networked access to text, an annual international summer seminar, provision of information resources, and partnerships with associated projects.

The Papers of Henry Laurens is recognized as the leading project in electronic documentary editing. Based on his experiences of working with his own electronic archival material over a long period of time and serving as a consultant to many other projects, the editor of the Laurens edition will present his vision of the requirements for a national database of historical editions.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a major international project which has created guidelines for the encoding and interchange of electronic texts. Drawing on the expertise of over a hundred scholars in more than twenty countries, in a six-year project the TEI has created an application of SGML which satisfies a much broader range of purposes than HTML and can easily be customized for specific digital library applications.

Describing Image Files: An Update [Caucus]

Jennifer Trant, Manager, Imaging Initiative, Getty Art History Information Program

David Bearman, Archives and Museums Informatics

Howard Besser, Visiting Associate Professor, School of Information and Library Studies, University of Michigan

J. Dustin Wees, Photograph and Slide Librarian, Clark Art Institute and Visual Resources Association

An adequate description of the creation of a digital image file is central to maintaining its integrity, yet no consistent standard exists for such documentation. Progress towards a consistent way of describing the characteristics of image files will be reviewed. Profiles will be given of the Still Picture Interchange File Format SPIFF, proposed by ISO/IEC/JTC 29/WG 1 and the activities of the Visual Resources Association Data Standards Committee. Their relationships, and progress towards a comprehensive image description standard will be discussed.

Partners in the Creation of a Worldwide Library [Degas]

Sean Haggerty, Business Development Manager, SilverPlatter Information, Inc.

Rob McKinney, Director of Technology Relations, SilverPlatter Information

Scott Sutcliffe, Technical Support Specialist, SilverPlatter Information

SilverPlatter is helping to create a worldwide library. Using ERL, SilverPlatter's client/server technology, represents a significant breakthrough for the organization, management and distribution of vast amounts of electronic information. SilverPlatter has today over 250 ERL compliant databases, all of which are searchable with a choice of retrieval clients, operating on different platforms. It is now possible to search a SilverPlatter database located on a local CD-ROM drive, a hard disk database on a LAN, and another database located in another country over the Internet, simultaneously, with one search enquiry.

3:30 pm -- Meeting Adjourns

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