D-Lib Magazine
July/August 2002

Volume 8 Number 7/8

ISSN 1082-9873

In Brief

IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries Web Site Launched

Contributed by:
Erich Neuhold
Chairman, IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries
Professor, GMD-IPSI Darmstadt, Germany
<[email protected]>

The IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (TCDL) has recently launched a web site at <http://www.ieee-tcdl.org/index.html. The TCDL has as its mission promoting research in the theory and practice of "all aspects of Collective Memories, i.e., the fields of Digital Libraries, Digital Museums, and Digital Archives of all kinds."

The TCDL position statement provides an overview of the committee's goals and summarizes the technical challenges facing the Collective Memory community, including:

• Storage
• User interface
• Classification and indexing
• Information retrieval
• Content delivery
• Presentation
• Administration and preservation

Members of the IEEE Computer Society may join as voting members of the Technical Committee on Digital Libraries free of charge. However, anyone who wishes to join may do so as a corresponding member of the TCDL, also at no charge. There is an online form at the TCDL website for those who wish to join.

A list of upcoming TCDL events is also available online at the web site. The next meeting of the TDCL will be held at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2002 in Portland, Oregon, USA on 16 July. Additional TCDL meetings for 2002 may be held concurrently with the following major digital library conferences: 6th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2002), the 4th All-Russian Scientific Conference (RCDL 2002), and the 5th International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL 2002). Please refer to the TCDL web site from time to time for more information about committee activities and TCDL announcements.

OECD Follow-up Group on Issues of Access to Publicly Funded Research Data

Contributed by:
Peter Arzberger (Chair), Peter Schroeder* (Co-Chair)
Geoffrey C. Bowker (Member), Kathleen Casey (Expert)
University of California at San Diego, USA
*Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, The Netherlands
<[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, and <[email protected]>

Research data produced by government investments in technology and in the social and natural sciences at taxpayer expense are valuable public resources central both to national and international research efforts and important for the economy and for society. The most economically efficient, innovative, and productive uses of public investments in science and technology in many cases require more appropriate and consistent policies on access to publicly funded research data.

Indeed, a recent survey has shown that there is a great deal of uncertainty in Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member nations concerning policies for storing publicly funded data, maintaining it, and rendering it accessible. Over the past fifteen years, developed and developing countries have moved further in the direction of privatizing maintenance of and access to government data — for example, the recent European Union (EU) directive on Databases (see <http://www.codata.org/data_access/summary.html> for a brief discussion) makes it simpler to protect databases as intellectual property. In times of national crisis, scientifically generated yet politically sensitive data (such as, for example, satellite pictures) require special attention. And yet privatization and security constraints can run counter to strongly held scientific, political and social commitments to universal free access to publicly funded data.

These questions are clearly central to the Digital Library (DL) community. As in much DL work, there is a subtle set of trade-offs between technical innovation, organizational innovation and legal and policy work in operation. Given the complexities of the issues arising, the Committee on Science and Technology Policy (CSTP) of the OECD agreed to the creation of a group to follow up on recommendations from the Third Global Research Village Conference (Amsterdam 2000) to study issues of access to publicly funded research data. The key tasks for the follow-up group are threefold: to locate examples of best (and worst) practice in contemporary research fields; to produce a set of principles useful in policy considerations in this area, and to consider implementations to recommended policies. A by-product of the work will be the indication of key areas where further research is essential before policy can be established.

Participants from the United States are being funded through NSF Grant ACI-9619020 to both coordinate this group�s activities and develop a series of case studies to explore data access issues. Additional support for the group�s activities comes from Netherlands' Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, CODATA, and governments and agencies of the members. The European Science Foundation is partner in this activity. A fuller description of the work of this group and its membership can be found at <http://dataaccess.ucsd.edu/>. Those interested in providing input or receiving a copy of the eventual report should contact any of the individuals listed in the byline to this article.

ARCHway: Access to the UK's Best Archaeology Libraries and Their Journals

Contributed by:
William Kilbride
Archaeology Data Service
University of York
United Kingdom
<[email protected]>

The University of York Library, the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) and the Research Support Libraries Programme are pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new, free service for everyone involved in archaeological research: the ARCHway Database. ARCHway provides an integrated catalogue to the journal holdings of 25 leading academic libraries and is set to become a fundamental resource for archaeologists and their research.

ARCHway, which offers 3 different research tools, is available free of charge at <http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/ARCHway.html>.

The ARCHway "Journal Locator" describes the journal holdings of 25 leading research institutions. Between them, these libraries hold more than 2,000 journals on every aspect of archaeological research, covering every topic and location of interest to archaeologists based in the UK and beyond. These journals represent many thousands of individual volumes, and hundreds of thousands of articles and notes. The "Journal Locator" provides the title of the journal, contact details for each of the libraries that hold it, the volume numbers of each journal they hold, and the years covered by these collections. So, for example, you can find the eight libraries that hold volume one of the "Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt" or locate all five volumes of the "Orkney Miscellany".

The ARCHway "List of Journals" presents the same data for each of these journals in turn, providing a short description of the content of each journal, its publisher and ISSN, as well as a list of institutions that hold the journal. So, if you want to check the details of any archaeological journal, then you can find them here.

The ARCHway "Citation Index" indexes the tables of contents from Britain's 14 most popular archaeological journals. This means that a researcher can cross search the complete indexes of 14 journals and identify all the articles or notes that relate to their own area of expertise or interest. References range from as far back as 1770, and as recently as 2001. In this way you can recover 71 different articles concerning research at or near Winchester in journals as diverse as Medieval Archaeology, Britannia and the Journal of Archaeological Science. With an author search, you can track the career of different archaeologists through the pages of these different publications. So, you can find 73 articles written by Stuart Piggott in the Antiquaries Journal, the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and others.

Combining these tools, you can find an article that is relevant to your research, then find the institution nearest you that hosts it. You can even scan the contact details to find opening times and lending privileges.

ARCHway Project Manager Gordon Bower said "This is a fundamental research tool that will make a significant impact on the way that academics and others pursue their research. For the first time it allows us to see a complete listing of all the journals available to UK-based archaeologists. Most of the volumes listed will be available to students either directly through reciprocal lending and browsing agreements, or through inter-library loan."

He added, "Even for well-stocked libraries, this is a major step forward, because the tables of contents provide a really detailed view of what is available between the covers of a volume, rather than just listing items in stock."

The ARCHway project was led by the University of York Library, with help from many different partners including most of the leading academic libraries with archaeology holdings in the UK. Other Partners include the Council for British Archaeology, the British Library, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Institute of Classical Studies and the National Museums of Scotland. It was funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme. The data is now available from the Archaeology Data Service at <http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/ARCHway.html>.

OAIster Search Interface Launched

Contributed by:
Kat Hagedorn
OAIster Librarian
Digital Library Production Service
University of Michigan Libraries
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
<[email protected]>

The University of Michigan Libraries Digital Library Production Service is pleased to announce the launch of the OAIster search interface, version 1:

<http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/b/bib/bib- idx?c=oaister;page=simple>

OAIster has harvested a large number of records from a variety of institutions — 274,046 records from 55 institutions — that have made these records available using the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol (see <http://www.openarchives.org>). Each of these records leads to an actual digital resource hosted at an institution.

The OAIster project is one of the Mellon Foundation Metadata Harvesting Initiative grants awarded to 7 institutions in July 2001. The institutions were tasked with developing web services of digital resources that use the OAI protocol. The OAIster service is designed to reveal digital resources previously "hidden" from users behind web scripts. Users are able to retrieve not just information (metadata) about resources, but also the actual digital resources. We expect the service to provide "one-stop shopping" for users interested in authoritative digital resources.

You can learn more about a particular institution's collection we are harvesting at <http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/viewcolls.html>. We are also committed to improving our service — see our future plans and the progress we are making at <http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/phase2.html>.

We are very interested in gathering more records, OAI-enabled or snapshots of records that aren't yet OAI-enabled, to include in our service. The more records we serve, the more valuable this service becomes for the end-user. Please get in touch with Kat Hagedorn at <[email protected]> to discuss this further.

The launch of the OAIster site itself was announced in the March 2002 issue of D-Lib Magazine <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march02/03inbrief.html#HAGEDORN>.

Citebase: an OAI Citation-ranked Search Service

Contributed by:
Steve Hitchcock
Open Citation (OpCit) Project, <http://opcit.eprints.org>
IAM Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
United Kingdom
<[email protected]>

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is stimulating access to an increasing number of digital repositories within a wide range of institutions. The recently announced OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting V2.0 provides an interface for machines to collect data about the contents of these repositories. But how will users know what is in these diverse and distributed repositories, and how will they judge the veracity of the contents?

A number of OAI search services have emerged to enable users to locate documents. Now a new search engine assists users in judging quality. Citebase is a citation-ranked search service that allows results to be ordered by user selectable criteria, such as how many times a paper has been cited in the searchable literature.

Citebase has been produced as part of the Open Citation project, funded by the Joint NSF — JISC International Digital Libraries Research Programme. It is intended to develop Citebase as a fully supported OAI service beyond the lifetime of the project. We are asking you to help shape the transition from project to ongoing service, simply by trying the service and commenting on it. You will find a Web form that acts as an introductory guide to the service and which takes you through a short exercise highlighting the principal features. The form can be found (via redirect) at <http://citebase.eprints.org/survey>.

OAI will truly be useful when participation spans the mass of the global academic community, but many seem unaware of the possibilities. As you learn about the Citebase service your responses will help us not just to understand how to improve this service, but will provide insights into the prospects for widening coverage to more disciplines.

Update on the FAIR Programme

Contributed by:
Christopher Pressler
JISC
King's College London
London, United Kingdom
<[email protected]>

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has made substantial progress on a new programme. Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) has now been awarded funding to 14 projects, comprising partnerships between more than 50 institutions and teams and involving universities, libraries, JISC services, art galleries, colleges, museums and commercial companies.

Many innovative areas of work were proposed, a large number of which have the potential to positively alter methods and practices in the fields of content submission and disclosure in the UK. In particular, FAIR will dramatically develop technologies and knowledge in the areas of e-prints and e-theses, two areas where the UK is in need of substantial progress.

FAIR is already a large and vibrant programme, and in order to focus the impact of relative fields of work JISC has further grouped the projects into 5 clusters. These clusters will aid in the management of the programme but will also serve as focal points for other organisations and interested parties to become involved in FAIR and to contribute to the success of the programme. Projects are clustered around the core areas of Museums and Images, E-Prints, E-Theses, Intellectual Property Rights and Institutional Portals.

If FAIR can work alongside X4L and other JISC initiatives, in collaboration with our partners in other organisations, the UK will increase the quantity of resources available online and thereby the quality of our users' experience of education.

For further details of specific projects or any other queries, please contact Christopher Pressler at the JISC London Office <[email protected]>.

In the News

Recent Press Releases and Announcements

Gabriel - Gateway to Europe's National Libraries in a new "outfit"

(The following announcement was sent to D-Lib Magazine on 11 July by Susann Solberg, Die Deutsche Bibliothek)

After 5 years of existence Gabriel presents itself in a new and user-friendlier layout.

Gabriel is the World-Wide-Web-Service of 41 European national libraries from 39 countries represented in the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL). The multilingual Internet service offers access to consistently structured information about European national libraries, their printed and electronic collections as well as access to their online catalogues and services. Information is offered in the more widespread languages English, French and German and arranged according to geography and subject. A treat for the eyes is the joint online exhibition Treasures of Europe's National Libraries: an illustrated selection of rare and precious treasures in National Libraries.

The websites of European national libraries can be searched simultaneously via a central search machine. For example if one wants to know which of the libraries holds a special collection of literature by and on Sigmund Freud - the founder of psychoanalysis - one will find a wealth of references. Numerous useful indications and links will be offered on the websites of the national libraries of Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Lithuania, Switzerland and Slovenia.

Dr. Elisabeth Niggemann, Director General of Die Deutsche Bibliothek, and Gabriel Chair: "The free-of-charge Internet service is an example of successful European cooperation and an important contribution to the construction of a European Virtual Library."

In order to be globally disposable and to guarantee rapid access Gabriel is being 'mirrored' and is available simultaneously via five European servers. Gabriel is considered [a] model and platform for further networking developments and services in the international library system apart from the function of an overall European Online Guide.

Gabriel is accessible under:

<http://www.kb.nl/gabriel/en/welcome.html>
<http://www.bl.uk/gabriel/en/welcome.html>
<http://www.ddb.de/gabriel/en/welcome.html>
<http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/gabriel/en/welcome.html>
<http://nuk.uni-lj.si/gabriel/en/welcome.html>

For more information, contact Susann Solberg at <[email protected]>.

Ingental Signs Strategic Partnership with the University of Southampton to Create Open Archive E-print Services

"CAMBRIDGE, MA � July 3, 2002 -- Ingenta Inc, which empowers the exchange of scholarly and professional research content online, has signed a strategic partnership with the University of Southampton to develop software which will form a key part of the growing Open Archives movement."

"The University has played a key role in the Open Archives initiative (OAi); with the development of the leading software resource supporting the initiative. ePrints, created by the Department of Electronics and Computer Science, allows organizations such as universities to create web-based archives (e-print services) for their research articles, lecture notes and other documents and associated metadata.Virginia Tech, University of Glasgow and the Australian National University are among the hundreds of organizations worldwide who have implemented the software in order to provide easy and open access to the activities being undertaken by their researchers."

"The goal of the OAi movement is to create inter-operability between these archives, ultimately allowing web users to search a number of them simultaneously. This would result in a powerful new distribution channel through which researchers could collaborate. This will sit alongside and complement the formally published and peer-reviewed scientific literature provided by journal publishers."

For more information, please contact Erin Lynn Marino at <[email protected]>.

Tessa Jowell Announces $13 Million Funding to Develop Projects for Culture Online

Department for Culture, Media and Sport
20 June 2002

"The school curriculum and adult learning will be enlivened by a series of Culture Online projects to be launched this year, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell announced today."

"Culture Online (COL) will use the latest technologies - via the Internet and other digital platforms - to offer new forms of access to the nation's cultural resources. As well as providing key resources for schools, it will allow people around the country to learn from and participate in a variety of innovative new projects. By inspiring and motivating children and adults, Culture Online will encourage them to interact with the arts, heritage and culture in new and more creative ways."

"GBP13m of funding will be available to fund this stage of Culture Online, covering the period 2002 to 2004. The money will be spent on 20 to 30 targeted projects. Drawing on the varied resources of cultural institutions, the projects will be accessible in a variety of ways including an online gateway linked to Curriculum Online and the National Grid for Learning, both run by the Department for Education and Skills."

For more information, please see <www.culture.gov.uk>.

Endeavor Announces XML Gateway to LexisNexis

"DES PLAINES, ILLINOIS, June 15, 2002: Endeavor Information Systems and LexisNexis� announced an agreement today that will make select LexisNexis databases available through ENCompass, Endeavor�s digital management, organization and linking tool. Through an XML Gateway, ENCompass will be able to search specified content from three popular LexisNexis research databases: LexisNexis� Academic Universe, LexisNexis� Congressional Universe, and LexisNexis� Statistical Universe."

"The first agreement of its kind with LexisNexis, the Endeavor plan will provide a single point of access for simultaneous searching that will include these three popular library databases. ENCompass employs multi-protocol federated searching across resources, using traditional protocols like Z39.50 and new technology advances in XML gateways and HTTP searching."

See the full press release at <http://www.endinfosys.com/news/enc_lexisnexis.htm>.

Endeavor Named CrossRef Affiliate Member:
Partnership Expands Opportunities for Linking, Access to Resources

"DES PLAINES, ILLINOIS, June 15, 2002: Endeavor Information Systems announced today an Affiliate Membership with CrossRef, a not-for-profit network founded on publisher collaboration with the goal of making reference linking efficient and reliable. The Endeavor-CrossRef alliance integrates digital object identifiers and CrossRef linking to assist libraries in providing complete access to available resources. The Endeavor-CrossRef partnership assists libraries that are CrossRef Library Affiliates and using Endeavor�s LinkFinderPlus comprehensive linking system."

"Libraries will benefit from this partnership because LinkFinderPlus ensures that digital object identifier links resolve to the copy of the resource for which the user has access rights, or the 'appropriate copy.' According to Ed Pentz, Executive Director of CrossRef, 'We are very pleased to have Endeavor as a linking solutions partner for our current and future library affiliates. There is nothing more important to CrossRef's success than allowing DOIs to resolve in a way that takes the end-users access rights into account wherever possible, using whatever software solution their library chooses. Our relationship with Endeavor allows us to further serve as a vehicle for collaboration among publishers, librarians, and vendors.'"

See the full press release at <http://www.endinfosys.com/news/crossrefreleasefinal.htm>.

David Seaman to Head Digital Library Federation

"WASHINGTON, D.C.�David Seaman has been named director of the Digital Library Federation, effective July 25, 2002. Since 1992, Mr. Seaman has been director of the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library, whose mission is to create an online archive of standards-based texts and images in the humanities, and to build and support user communities adept at the creation and use of online resources.

"Mr. Seaman will work from the Washington, D.C., offices of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), which is the administrative home of the DLF. CLIR President Deanna Marcum said 'David Seaman's work at the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center has connected the library and the scholarly community in an exemplary way. We are delighted that he will bring that experience to the Digital Library Federation.'"

See the full press release at <http://www.clir.org/pubs/press/2002_seaman.html>.

NISO Releases Digital Still Image Metadata Draft Standard

"Bethesda, Md., USA - (June 7, 2002) NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, has released a draft of Z39.87, the Data Dictionary for Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images for trial use. NISO collaborated with the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) in the development of this standard."

"Two overarching goals led NISO and AIIM to develop this data dictionary. The first is to identify the data elements that would be used by applications to control transformations of images against stated metrics (or "anchors") for meaningful quality attributes such as detail, tone, color, and size. The second is to propose elements that would be used by digital repository managers, curators, or imaging specialists to assess the current aesthetic and functional values of a given image or collection of images. The purpose of this data dictionary is to define a standard set of metadata elements for digital images. Standardizing the information will allow users to develop, exchange, and interpret digital image files. The dictionary has been designed to facilitate interoperability between systems, services, and software as well as to support the long-term management of and continuing access to digital image collections."

"Co-chairs Robin Dale (RLG) and Oya Y. Reiger (Cornell University) led this standards committee which included Janet Gertz (Columbia University), Meg Bellinger (OCLC), Dr. Marianne Doerr (Leitung VD17 und Muenchener Digitalisierungszentrum), Betsy Fanning (AIIM International), Dr. Franziska Frey (Image Permanence Institute, Rochester Institute of Technology), Erich Kesse (University of Florida), Matt Kirschenbaum (University of Kentucky), Kelly Russell (University of Leeds), Linda Tadic (HBO), Colin Webb (National Library of Australia) and Herbert J. White (LDS Church-Family History Division). This proposed national standard is being released as a Draft Standard for Trial Use for the period June 1, 2002 through December 31, 2003. Like all NISO standards documents, this document is available for downloading free from the NISO web site <http://www.niso.org>."

For more information, contact NISO Headquarters at <[email protected]>.

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DOI: 10.1045/july2002-inbrief