CNI: Coalition for Networked Information

The NSF Cyberinfrastructure Project

Dan Atkins
Director, Alliance for Community Technology
University of Michigan

In 2001 the National Science Foundation established an Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure, and charged the members with three broad goals:

  • Evaluating the performance of the PACI Program in meeting the needs of the scientific research and engineering community.
  • Recommending new areas of emphasis for the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering that will respond to the future needs of this community.
  • Recommending an implementation plan to enact any changes anticipated in the recommendations for new areas of emphasis.

This session will review the committee’s investigations, preliminary findings, and recommendations.

The Open URL Standard

Tony Hammond
Architect, Linking & Structures
Advanced Technology Group
Elsevier Science

Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research & Prototyping
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Eric Van de Velde
Director of Library Information Technology
California Institute of Technology

OpenURL is an enabling technology to provide services pertaining to resources. With OpenURLs, it becomes possible to provide links that are:

  • Multi-valued: link a single referenced resource to many services
  • Context-sensitive: links that adapt to the “context” in which they are traversed

The extensibility mechanisms of Version 1.0 OpenURL extend the reach of OpenURL beyond the scholarly-information community to any other networked-information community. Implementing communities will have at their disposal a variety of methods to introduce new metadata formats, and new identifier name spaces, appropriate to their specific application domain. As a result, Version 1.0 OpenURL provides a rich information structure for invoking context-sensitive services.

In this session, Herbert Van de Sompel and Tony Hammond will introduce the key concepts of the emerging OpenURL Standard Version 1.0. Eric Van de Velde will discuss the Committee’s plans for a trial of Version 1.0 with selected parties from the scholarly community.

Web Links:
OpenURL

An Overview of the Internet Scout Project and the Scout Portal Toolkit

Edward Almasy
Technical Director
Internet Scout Project

Rachael Bower
Director
Internet Scout Project

The Internet Scout Project, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, focuses on developing better tools and services for finding, filtering and presenting online information and metadata. This presentation will provide a brief overview of current work and a more in-depth look at The Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) project, which was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. SPT is a near-turnkey software package that allows an organization, with a minimum of technical expertise and resources, to set up a digital library collection. Version 1.0 of the SPT software was released in October 2002.

Web Links:
The Internet Scout Project
The Scout Portal Toolkit
Handout:
The Scout Portal Toolkit (PDF file)

A Resource Discovery Service for the Library of Texas: Requirements, Architecture, and Interoperability Testing

William E. Moen
Texas Center for Digital Knowledge
University of North Texas

Kathleen R. Murray
Texas Center for Digital Knowledge
University of North Texas

In the past several years, a number of states have initiated virtual library projects to enhance access to resources available through libraries and other information resource providers. Typically the resulting virtual library is deployed as a Web-based portal through which users may identify and access selected resources. Recent work at the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge (TxCDK) at the University of North Texas is demonstrating how attention to requirements, standards, architecture, and interoperability testing can provide the foundation for an extensible, services-oriented virtual library.

Handout:
A Resource Discovery Service for the Library of Texas
(MS Word document)

Security Issues for Licensed Resources

Kevin Guthrie
President
JSTOR

Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information

CNI members include many institutions that license a wide array of content for their communities, and many of our members also produce licensed content. Recently we are seeing the emergence of complex new threats to the security of licensed content on the network. Institutions will need to consider new measures to honor their responsibility to thwart unauthorized access and large scale copying of licensed resources and develop new strategies in conjunction with resource suppliers. This session will describe the current situation and provide a discussion forum to shape community responses.

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