AgNIC: Agricultural Resources through Collaboration
Joan Giesecke, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Jeanne Pfander, University of Arizona
Ina Pour-El, Iowa State University
Richard Thompson, National Agricultural Library
AgNIC (Agriculture Network Information Center) is a virtual information center that provides Internet access to agriculture-related information, subject area experts and other distributed multi-media resources, to include online library reference assistance. Current participants in AgNIC include the National Agricultural Library, Cornell University, Iowa State University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Nebraska.
This session will provide an overview of the project and its future directions, and will demonstrate the resources and services available through AgNIC. Although the focus of AgNIC is agriculture-related, its concept of collaboration to provide discipline-specific resources serves as a model for other disciplines.
Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO): Museum Multimedia Data for Educational Use
David Bearman, Archives & Museum Informatics
Jennifer Trant, Archives & Museum Informatics
This fall more than 20 of the largest art museums in North America joined together to create the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) and make rich documentation of their holdings available for educational use (see www.AMN.org/AMICO). Beginning with a “testbed” project in the 1998/99 academic year, AMICO will offer universities (and eventually public libraries and K-12 school systems) access to an unprecedented breadth and depth of art documentation in text, image, and multimedia. A Call for Participation in the testbed project issued in mid-October, solicits partners in determining and evaluating distribution systems.
This session will provide an opportunity to discuss AMICO’s plans, the ways in which universities can participate, and the terms of license agreements which were previously introduced to CNI at the spring 1997 meeting. This briefing will also touch on discussions AMICO is having with foreign consortia of museums to incorporate their content into the licensable resource and on discussions under way with artists and artists rights organizations to ensure than contemporary materials are also available for study.
Authentication: Developing a CNI Initiative to Address Infrastructure Needs
Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information
Authentication and authorization have emerged as essential infrastructure requirements for network-based access to information, and have become a particularly critical need as institutions enter into site-license arrangements with publishers and other information providers. Join Clifford Lynch for a discussion to shape a CNI initiative that will address technology approaches, standards, best practices, and policy and business issues for an authentication and authorization infrastructure.
CNI’s Assessing the Academic Networked Environment Project
Christopher Peebles, Indiana University
Charles McClur,e Syracuse University
David Taylor, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Joanne Eustis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Ann Lees, King’s College London
Hushang Balyuzi, King’s College London
Institutional teams are working on various aspects of assessing the impact of networks and networked information resources on their campus communities under the auspices of this CNI project. Two of the participating institutions will provide updates on their projects, which include efforts to assess the impact of networks on teaching and learning and the impact on users of the availability of online information resources. Participants will provide specific examples of evaluation activities and techniques being used at their institutions.
A CNI Project: Background Information
Computing and the Humanities: Promise And Prospects
David Green, NINCH
Charles Henry, Rice University
Sandria Freitag, American Historical Association
Lorna Hughes, New York University
How can computer scientists and humanists work together more effectively when they are driven by methodological, conceptual, institutional and funding divisions? Increasingly, computer scientists admit to the rich challenges that humanities professionals can bring to them but finding common ground on which to collaborate can be difficult.
A recent roundtable (hosted by the National Research Council’s Communications Science and Telecommunications Board) of researchers and executives from the arts, humanities and computing and communications communities concluded that “a national effort to foster programmatic interaction between the humanities and the computer science communities could significantly enrich both disciplines.” This session will present reports and perspectives from two of the roundtable’s participants together with news of New York University’s strategy for connecting humanities computing with Internet 2 applications.
CUPID Project Update
Steven L. Worona, Cornell University
CUPID was designed to facilitate use of high-end printing devices, such as Xerox’s DocuTech, from sites all over the Internet. Working CUPID prototypes were developed and demonstrated, but the demand for this capability never reached expected levels. Today, however, in our world of Web-based digital libraries and online publishers — both commercial and not-for-profit — the need for standardized Internet print protocols has re-emerged. CUPID’s unique two-server architecture meets this need extremely well, leading to a new round of CUPID implementations, including a commercial service called “PubWeb” aimed at textbook publishers. This session will review both the ancient and current history of CUPID, and will compare CUPID’s approach to such alternatives as IPP and PrintMill.
The Digital Economy: What Is It? And Do Libraries Have a Role?
Vinod Chachra, VTLS, Inc.
The emerging digital economy is global in scope. It promises to establish a global community in which we will discover and invent new ways to work, learn, teach, think and play. Radical changes can be expected in the workplace, education, health, financial services and leisure activities. A key to the success of the digital economy is the realization of electronic commerce. Businesses, government, non-profit organizations and individuals alike will play an important role in this transition to electronic commerce and the digital economy. This presentation will provide an introduction to the key elements of electronic commerce and outline the initiatives the government is taking to facilitate the development and deployment of electronic commerce. In addition, libraries will have an important role in the digital economy, but not every library has to play the same role.
Digital Preservation Archiving Workshops
Peter Graham, Rutgers University
A proposal has been submitted to NEH, sponsored by ARL, CNI, and CLIR, to implement a series of workshops that will focus on digital archiving issues including the problems and solutions related to digital preservation. The purpose of this session is to provide a forum for input from CNI Task Force representatives to aid in planning the content of the workshops.
Distributed Searching of Museum and Bibliographic Information: An Update on CIMI’s International Z39.50 Testbed
John Perkins, CIMI
William E. Moen, University of North Texas
CIMI, the Consortium for the Interchange of Museum Information, has been developing a Z39.50 profile for the search and retrieval of museum information. Over the past six months a number of implementers from Canada, the US, Europe and Taiwan have been implementing the CIMI profile. This work included building test databases from a number of museums and a Z39.50 Java application to facilitate searching of multiple databases including museum, bibliographic, and image resources. This update will discuss and demonstrate the work of the testbed project.
Evaluation of the Government Information Locator Service
Charles McClure, Syracuse University
William E. Moen, University of North Texas
The U.S. Federal implementation of the Government Information Locator Service (GILS) is an initiative to assist users in identifying and locating publicly available government information resources. This session presents key findings and recommendations from a major evaluation study of the U.S. Federal GILS and discusses the complexities in examining a multi-faceted networked information service. The Principle Investigators conducted a 9-month study (September 1996-June 1997) of GILS to assess the current status of Federal agencies’ implementations and the extent to which GILS is meeting user needs. The Investigators designed a multi-method evaluation strategy commensurate with the complexity of GILS. The architecture of GILS includes actual digital collections of government information resources, metadata describing those resources, human intermediaries, technical standards, government-wide and agency policy, users, and various information technologies.
GALILEO–GeorgiA LIbrary LEarning Online
Jayne Williams, University System of Georgia
William G. Potter, University of Georgia
GALILEO provides universal access to shared academic materials and services for students, faculty, and staff at the thirty-four University System of Georgia (USG) institutions and is being made available to all private colleges, public schools, public libraries, and technical schools in Georgia. GALILEO features electronic full-text core academic journals, research journals, encyclopedia, dictionary, library catalogs, state publications, and census data. GALILEO demonstrates how a reliable, shared, statewide, Internet-based, educational telecommunications network, such as PeachNet, delivers enormous benefits to educational institutions by providing access, regardless of geographical location, institutional size, or mode of instructional delivery.
Hyperlinking Journal Articles by their References
Ed Pentz, Academic Press, Inc.
Ken Metzner, Academic Press, Inc.
Perhaps one of the most profound ways research journals will change on the Web is by being hyperlinked to one another via citations. One of the key enabling concepts for citation linking is the Digital Object Identifier. We will show examples of the DOI in action with IDEAL service of Academic Press and invite discussion of this concept and where it might lead.
Information Strategy and Network (Web) Tools for Instruction
Paul Dobosh, Mt. Holyoke College
Wendy Lougee,University of Michigan
CNI’s Institution-Wide Information Strategies (IWIS) initiative has brought together nine teams of institutions from the US and UK who are engaged in institution-wide information planning in a diverse array of organizational settings and with a range of organizational goals. In this project briefing, two participants in the IWIS project will present preliminary case study reports of information strategies for the use of network tools and networked information resources in support of instruction and administration.
Information Strategy and Strategic Planning
Ann Hughes, Joint Information Systems Committee
Jim Penrod, The University of Memphis
CNI’s Institution-Wide Information Strategies (IWIS) initiative has brought together nine teams of institutions from the US and UK who are engaged in institution-wide information planning in a diverse array of organizational settings and with a range of organizational goals. In this project briefing, two participants in the IWIS project will present preliminary case study reports of institutional (and multi-institutional) information strategies and strategic plans for information technology.
InformationQuest – A New Access Solution for E-Journals
Adrian W. Alexander, The Faxon Company, Inc.
The Faxon Company announces the launch of InformationQuest, a unique new Web-based access service to full-text electronic journals. InformationQuest, or IQ, provides full-text indexing to articles from over 500 scholarly journals in PDF format, as well as sophisticated searching capability for over 7,000,000 citations from the tables of contents of over 12,000 journals (dating back to 1990) in the Faxon Finder database. IQ’s sophisticated search software, which employs neural networking technology, provides not only Boolean searching, but also Adaptive Pattern Recognition for pattern matching and concept searching via Natural Language Processing. This presentation will include a demonstration of IQ’s unique and powerful searching capabilities.
Internet2 Update
William H. Graves, University of North Carolina
Ted Hanss, Internet 2 Project
The Internet2 Project is moving at Internet speed. This session will feature a brief update on the I2 project — its engineering and application efforts and its new organizational context. Time will also be allotted for discussion of CNI/I2 issues and perspectives.
Into the Future: On the Preservation of Knowledge in the Electronic Age
Donald Waters, Council on Library and Information Resources
A video by Terry Sanders, produced in association with the Commission on Preservation and Access (a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources) and the American Council of Learned Societies, explores the issues behind the survival of digitally stored information into the future. In this session, you can preview the video, which will be shown later this Fall on PBS, and discuss the issues it raises.
Monticello Electronic Library Update
Keith Belton, Southeastern Library Network, Inc.
The Monticello Electronic Library is an evolving component of the Southeastern Library Network’s Electronic Information Services. The library has completed its planning phase, will be completing a concept demonstration phase this fall, and will be extending its focus to include online community information in the coming phase. This session will provide an overview and update to the project, including experiences in metadata mapping and project management.
Museum Digital Licensing Collective
Geoffrey Samuels, Museum Digital Licensing Collective
Bernie Hurley, University of California, Berkeley
Peter Hirtle, Cornell Institute for Digital Collections
The Museum Digital Licensing Collective (MDLC) is a non-profit corporation formed to provide technical and financial assistance for the digitization of museum materials, and to manage the storage, distribution, and licensing of digitized materials to educational institutions and the public. The MDLC will be organized and run in conjunction with museums to serve the entire American museum community. The MDLC will fund the necessary technical services to handle all aspects of safely storing and distributing digitized museum materials, and licensing these images. The MDLC will also help finance the digitizing by museums of significant museum holdings through grants and donated funds, then license these collections to build eventually a stream of site licensing income to fund continuing digitization projects.
A National Authentication Service – Progress in the United Kingdom
Norman Wiseman, Joint Information Systems Committee
The Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils for the UK are investigating the requirements for a national network security and privacy infrastructure for the academic community in the UK. Progress is being made in three strands: a weak authentication service to control access to national electronic services has been implemented; a user needs study is identifying the wider requirement for a national infrastructure; and a partner is being sought to provide the infrastructure for commercial activities. The session will describe progress and the unanticipated benefits and opportunities that have arisen during the work.
Progress on Digital Dissertation Initiatives
Joan K. Lippincott, Coalition for Networked Information
William E. Savage, UMI Library Division
Edward A. Fox, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
This presentation will provide information on two important networked information content initiatives. A report will be given on the current progress of UMI’s digital dissertations initiative, the approach UMI has taken to promote access to, distribution and preservation of its digital archive and the value added services that have resulted from this approach.
Progress on The National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) project, which is working towards a sustainable, worldwide, collaborative, educational initiative of universities committed to encouraging students to prepare electronic documents and to use digital libraries, will be described. One of the goals of this competency-oriented program is to ensure that the next generation of scholars is prepared more completely for the Information Age, in which they can apply and pass on their skills in academia or other research situations.
handout #1
handout #2 (in PDF format)
A Relational Database Approach to Metadata
Carol A. Mandel, Columbia University
Stephen Davis, Columbia University
David Millman, Columbia University
Columbia University digital library projects have experimented with several methods of metadata representation to provide access to online collections, including SGML and MARC. We are currently experimenting with a relational database (RDBMS) approach to metadata. We have found the relational model flexible enough to accommodate traditional MARC mappings as well as to represent more recent digital structures such as image collections, monographs and menu navigation. This briefing will discuss our rationale for this strategy, will describe the Columbia relational metadata record in some detail, will show examples of mappings from other formats and will describe the new access tools enabled by this approach.
Reports from the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project
Howard Besser, University of California, Berkeley
Robin Dowden, Walker Museum of Art
The Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) was a major demonstration project designed to identify and resolve the problems of licensing and delivery of images and accompanying text from content providers to groups of content users. The MESL project served as a laboratory for developing and testing the legal, administrative and technical mechanisms needed to enable the full educational use of museum collections through routine delivery of high-quality museum images and information to educational institutions. Robin Dowden will discuss knowledge representation and the MESL data dictionary which was used to map data into and out of a common dataspace. Howard Besser will show the wildly different query results from identical queries to the same dataset of 10,000 images at each of the seven implementations.
SURA Information Technology Initiatives Update
George Brett, Southeastern Universities Research Association, Inc.
SURA has been active in the past year with a number of activities in networking and information technologies. This presentation will provide the audience an insight on those activities which include advanced networking, applications that require advanced networks, and collaborative projects with other organizations. The speaker will also present next steps and goals of the various activities.
SpamTrap: Handling Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
Craig A. Summerhill, Coalition for Networked Information
Mark McCahill, University of Minnesota
Farad Anklesaria, University of Minnesota
Unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE or SPAM), is becoming an increasing problem for many organizations, postmasters, and casual e-mail users. On commercial networks, SPAM can result in significant costs to users. This session will provide an overview of the issue and address some of the approaches which are being use to alleviate SPAM (technical and legislative). The experience of the University of Minnesota in using procmail recipes to filter for spam (SpamTrap) will be discussed.
SPARC: The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition
Kenneth Frazier, University of Wisconsin Libraries
Duane E. Webster, Association of Research Libraries
SPARC is conceived as a partnership project of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and other educational and research organizations. Its mission is to be a catalyst:
- To create a more competitive marketplace for research information by providing opportunities for new publishing ventures; endorsing new publications and information products; and recruiting authors, editors, and advisory board members.
- To encourage innovative uses of technology to improve scholarly communication by collaborating in the design and testing of new products; advancing new publishing models as appropriate applications of Internet 2; and developing systems and standards for the archiving and management of research findings.
- To promote academic values of access to information for research and teaching; the continuation of Fair Use in an electronic information environment; and the ethical use of scholarly information.
Standards Update: Identifiers and the Dublin Core
Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information
This session is intended to provide an update on two standards activities that CNI has been involved in — the Dublin Core descriptive metadata program, and the various identifiers such as the IETF Uniform Resource Name (URN), the NISO Serials Item and Contribution Identifier and the Association of American Publisher’s Digital Object Identifier. It will offer an update on the latest developments, including the Helsinki Dublin Core meeting that CNI co-sponsored earlier this month, and recent developments related to the DOI.