PROJECTS BRIEFINGS ARE SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS REGARDING PROJECTS, IDEAS, AND ISSUES RELATED TO CNI THEMES AND PRIORITIES. THEY PROVIDE A FORUM FOR SHARING INFORMATION AND EXPLORING PERSPECTIVES.
National Digital Library of
Theses and Dissertations
Edward A. Fox
Professor, Department of Computer Science
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
William Savage
Director, Dissertation Publishing
UMI Serials and Research Publishing
The National Digital Library of Theses and
Dissertations invites universities to join in its efforts to
encourage graduate students to learn to use digital
libraries and to be electronic publishers, using Adobe PDF
as well as SGML. Through this effort, universities
can unlock this tremendous research resource, and
government and industry can benefit from faster
technology transfer made possible by this growing distributed
digital library. The list of universities that have
expressed serious interest or are already implementing plans
to join this effort is ever growing. The project has
support from Adobe, IBM, SURA, and the U. S. Department
of Education. This discussion will highlight a
presentation from UMI of its electronic capture and
publishing plans, and its efforts to develop a permanent
electronic archive.
Handout provided at the meeting
Overview and Discussion of Meta Content Format (MCF):
A Proposed Open Standard for a Format Representing
a Wide Range of Information about Content
R.V. Guha
Senior Scientist
Apple Research Laboratories
In May of 1996, Apple Research Labs released
ProjectX, a Technology Demonstration, designed to show how MCF (Meta Content Format) might be used to represent
information about content. ProjectX (and MCF) have
since become quite popular, and the product effort is
now called HotSauce . MCF is an open format for representing information about content. The goal of MCF is to provide an adequate language for representing a wide range of information about content. The content targeted includes Web pages; gopher and ftp files; desktop files; email and structured (i.e., relational and object oriented) databases; etc. The corresponding meta-content includes indices such as
Yahoo!, gopher and ftp directory structures, email headers, data dictionaries, etc. The draft specification of MCF is available at <http://mcf.research.apple.com/hs/mcf.html>.
The Internet II Project:
Focusing on A New Generation of Internet Applications
William H. Graves
Associate Provost, Information Technology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M. Stuart Lynn
Associate Vice President, Information Resources & Communications
University of California, Office of the President
After building tremendous success in generalizing and adapting Internet technology to the needs of the research and
education community, a number of universities are now joining together with government and industry partners to accelerate the next stage of Internet development in academia. The "Internet II" project will bring focus, energy and resources to the development of a new family of advanced applications to meet emerging requirements in research, teaching and learning by addressing major challenges of the next generation of university networks. This project briefing will cover progress on the Internet II initiative, and will deal specifically with how the research and education community is being organized to articulate and build
Internet II applications.
Building Electronic Journal Collections:
Implementing Elsevier Electronic Subscriptions
Laurie Stackpole
Chief Librarian
Naval Research Laboratory
Roderick D. Atkinson
Associate Librarian for Information Technology
Naval Research Laboratory
Karen Hunter
Senior Vice President
Elsevier Science Inc.
Peter Clinton
Director of Information Technology
University of Toronto
Elsevier Electronic Subscriptions (EES) is an
electronic version of traditional research journals, providing libraries with complete electronic editions in a way that parallels the paper-based subscription process.
Libraries receive the data incrementally and are
responsible for providing end-user access. EES, like its TULIP predecessor, provides subscribing libraries with
journal page images, OCR-generated text, and
SGML-tagged bibliographic header information. Elsevier is
working with 20 libraries in testing this model for
electronic subscriptions. Each library builds its own
infrastructure and selects its own hardware, software, and
access methods. Following a publisher overview, a
number of several successful implementations by
different types of libraries will be presented.
Handout provided at the meeting
The ROADS Project
(Resource Organization And Discovery in Subject-based services)
Lynne Brindley
Librarian and Director of Information Services
London School of Economics
Rachel Heery
Metadata Project Coordinator
University of Bath
Frank Norman
Deputy Librarian
National Institute of Medical Research
ROADS is a two-year collaborative development project to design and implement a user-oriented
resource discovery system. The ROADS project will
investigate the creation, collection, and distribution
of resource descriptions, to provide a transparent
means of locating (with browsing and searching
techniques) and using networked resources. Furthermore,
ROADS aims to provide a common platform to allow searching across multiple subject-based services. The
ROADS system will be easy to use in order to enable the
process of creating resource descriptions to be kept
with the appropriate subject specialists. The object is not
to create an individual and idiosyncratic system, but
to draw on, and help create, standards of good
practice which can be widely adopted by subject
communities to aid and automate the process of resource
organization, description and discovery.
OMNI is a project to build a gateway for the UK
higher education and research community to facilitate
access to high quality information about clinical, research
and management aspects of health and biomedicine. It
is creating a catalogue of networked information
resources through a process of discovery, filtering,
describing, classifying and indexing. Users of the
OMNI Gateway can browse through or search for entries
and dynamically connect to resources of interest.
Handout provided at the meeting
The CLIC Consortium:
A Flagship Electronic Journal in Chemistry
Ben Whitaker
School of Chemistry
University of Leeds
The CLIC consortium, funded by the U.K.'s
Electronic Libraries Progam, is a collaborative project in
electronic publishing involving the Universities of
Cambridge and Leeds, Imperial College and the Royal Society
of Chemistry (RSC). The primary aim of the project is
to produce an electronic version of the flagship
journal of the RSC, Chemical Communications. The project is also concerned with exploring mechanisms by
which electronic publishing can extend and add value
to conventional paper chemistry journals.
Handout provided at the meeting
A Digital Library in a Virtual Enterprise
Lizanne Payne
Executive Director
Washington Research Library Consortium
The complex issues surrounding development of
digital libraries are even more complicated within a
consortium, a virtual enterprise which must support
both collective and individual needs. The Washington
Research Library Consortium (WRLC) has added digital library collections and a Web interface to its
long-running electronic library system shared by the
seven member universities in the Washington, DC area.
Designing a Web-based digital library to be shared
by multiple institutions raises issues such as which
technologies and standards are appropriate for
various kinds of locally created digital collections, and
where various electronic resources should fit in the
interlocking systems and Webs offered to searchers.
Handout provided at the meeting
Alzheimer Research Forum:
Networking for a Cure
Elizabeth Wu
Associate Director for Research and Systems
Harvard University
The Alzheimer Research Forum is a non-profit
organization established at <http://www.alzforum.org>. The purpose of the forum is to support the
information needs of researchers and to promote
openness and collaboration with colleagues worldwide to
accelerate their common search for effective
treatments for Alzheimer's disease and narrow the gap
between clinical and basic science research. The forum is
designed to engender new kinds of collaboration
and communication within the Alzheimer's disease
and related neuroscience research communities by
employing the latest Internet technology.
Handout provided at the meeting
THESE TWO BRIEFINGS FOCUS ON ENTERPRISE-WIDE STRATEGIES.
Western Kentucky University:
An Enterprise Approach to Campus Networking
Charles M. Anderson
Vice President for Information Technology
Western Kentucky University
At Western Kentucky University, access to
computing resources is a basic, universal utility. All
classrooms, laboratories, offices, and residence hall
rooms have network connections. The network,
WKUNET, is funded and administered centrally with
standardized hardware and software. All computing
resources are aggregated behind an easy to use graphical
front end. GUI front ends have also been developed
for several of the legacy mainframe applications.
There are 2,500 active nodes in the network 5,400
outlets (14,400 connections) in 44 buildings are available.
The fiber backbone, activated in 1993, is 100 Mbs
FDDI. Other unique aspects of the network are the use
of an RF wireless system to reach two buildings,
and the use of Zenith cable modems in four
residence halls. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the
network is its financing. More than half of the
network electronics, premises wiring, and fiber backbone
was financed through a tax-exempt master lease
purchasing program at three, five, and ten-year
terms. WKUNET was nominated for the Smithsonian Award in Networking.
A User-Centered Approach to
Enterprise-wide Information Strategies
Paul B. Gandel
Associate Provost for Information and Instructional Technology
Ohio University
Ohio University's user-centered approach to
developing and supporting network information resources
has helped overcome traditional organizational
barriers. Policies and practices are developed through a
representative university council: the Information
Resources Council (IRC). The Council is made up of
representatives from all University planning units and its
purpose is to promote cooperation, coordination and
effective use of information technology. The Council
is divided into program groups, which have large
user components, and are often led by information
technology users rather than IT professionals. The
technical support of the network and desktop
environment is also a shared responsibility between various
central services providers (the Library, Communications
Network Services, Computers Services, Telecom, etc.)
and individual Colleges and departments. To further
empower users, the network is designed to provide
maximum flexibility. The goal is to make "plug and
play" a reality and provide a desktop environment that
can be managed at the user level. Ohio University's
experience highlights how teamwork and flexibility can
create a network environment responsive to user needs.
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