May 22-24, 2000
Washington, D.C.
Sponsored by the IEEE
Computer Society Technical Committee on Digital Libraries
http://lsdis.cs.uga.edu/ADL2000/ADL2000CFP.htm
Digital libraries are a critical component of emerging distributed knowledge environments and hold the potential of providing unprecedented universal access to nearly all areas of human knowledge and for improving standards of health, education, economic well-being, and the overall quality of life. As such, the field of digital library research and technology encompasses information creation, acquisition, access, distribution, evaluation and processing. Major applications of digital library research and technology include not only education, science, commerce, medicine, but the arts and humanities as well.
The goal of ADL 2000, the seventh in a series of annual conferences, is to share and disseminate information about important current issues concerning digital library research and technology. This goal will be achieved by means of research papers, invited talks, workshops, and panels, as well as demonstrations of innovative technologies and prototypes. The conference has the additional goal of promoting the importance of applications of digital library technologies in the public and private sectors of the economy by reporting on and demonstrating available systems.
Papers are now being solicited that describe technical advances in all areas of digital library technology, including, but not limited to the areas of:
· Collaborative research
· Data mining
· Digital library testbed systems
· Document models
· Human-computer interaction
· Intellectual property, protection, security and privacy
· Intelligent agent technology
· Meta-information
· Multimedia libraries
· Searching, browsing, filtering and personalization
· Resource discovery and management
· Standards and protocols
Authors are invited to submit manuscripts (not to exceed 6000 words) or proposals for panels or workshops (not to exceed 1500 words) by December 20, 1999. Notification of acceptance will be made by February 21, 2000. The program will be finalized by March 15, 2000. The IEEE Computer Society Press will publish the proceedings, and a selected number of papers will be considered for publication in the International Journal of Digital Libraries. Authors are encouraged to submit papers electronically, preferably in PostScript format. Contact information for submissions is available at the conference Web site.
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AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
ANNUAL CONFERENCE
June 25, 1999
Morial Convention Center
New Orleans, Louisiana
http://purl.oclc.org/corc
At the recent annual meeting of the American Library Association (ALA meeting held in summer 1999, OCLC sponsored two pre-conference sessions on its recently-initiated Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) project. Through the CORC project, participating libraries are exploring the use of automated cataloging tools to create a database of cataloged Web resources. The morning half-day session offered an orientation for library managers, while the afternoon session focused on the potential benefit to reference services librarians. Each session provided an overview of the CORC project as well as demonstrations of the CORC system.
The presentation slides for both sessions has been made available at the CORC home page as well as from the CORC ALA presentation page (http://www.oclc.org/ oclc/research/projects/corc/ppt/index.htm). The latter also provides access to CORC presentations given at a panel discussion and participants meeting also held during the conference.
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Electronic
Book ’99: The Next Chapter
September
21-22, 1999
National
Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg,
Maryland
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/ebook99/
In mid-September 1999, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO) jointly-sponsored a workshop on the ‘Electronic Book’. An Electronic book or e-Book is a hand-held device expressly designed for reading and viewing book-length texts in electronic format. Like the Internet, the e-book is expected to redefine the information industry and change how people and individuals read and learn in the next century. Nearly 600 individuals attended this second annual conference and workshop which featured 35 speakers and showcased nearly 30 exhibitors.
The program included presentations by representatives from major computer information technology companies, and members of the e-Book industry. Of note were presentations by Dick Brass, Vice President for Technology Development, Microsoft (“The Future of Reading”); Jim Sachs, CEO, SoftBook Press, one of the major e-book manufacturers (“Electronic Books – Year One in Review”) and Martin Eberhard, CEO and Co-Founder of NuvoMedia, another major e-book manufacturer (“The Rocket eBook ‘99”). The program also included presentations on accessibility and international publishing, new technologies for e-Books, e-Book security, and a meeting of the Open eBook Initiative Group.
There are plans to include conference transcripts, copies of PowerPoint presentations, and video of the conference in a streaming format on the program Web site. Currently the Web site includes lists and links to exhibitor and manufacturers’ Web pages and full-text press releases and articles from the popular business and trade press that describe the development, use, and future of the e-Book.
A Web site for the first e-Book workshop, held in October 1998 and co-hosted by NIST and the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA), is also available (http://www.nist.gov/itl/div895/isis/ebook98.html/).
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Training
ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTING
MACHINERY
SIGIR’99 Post-Conference
Workshop
http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/sigir99/
A workshop on Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval (MMIR) was one of several specialized workshops offered in association with SIGIR’99, the twenty-second International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The annual SIGIR meeting is recognized as a major international forum for the presentation of new research results, and for demonstration of new systems and techniques, in information retrieval.
The workshop began with a presentation on the general issues in MMIR by the workshop organizers. One of the expected outcomes of the workshop was the establishment of consensus on the role of SIGIR in multimedia information retrieval research. The user need for semantic retrieval in different domains was emphasized and was a theme of subsequent panel discussions during the workshop. The overview was followed by a session of technical presentations which included papers on combining text and image information for content labeling of images, frameworks for information retrieval of multimedia documents, and experiences on a real-time system for multidimensional browsing of video archives.
The workshop included three panels. The morning session included a panel discussion on “Adaptive Multimedia Search Agents”. This discussion focused on providing user-friendly search mechanisms in the context of multimedia. Actual examples were introduced to illustrate the importance of multi-modal search capabilities and a single query space for all modalities. As users may have only portions of the information in different modalities, panelists stressed the importance for multimedia systems to recognize user needs from these different approaches. The differences between adaptable (user-initiated) and adaptive (system-initiated) systems were introduced and select issues in adaptive multimedia searching were identified, notably multi-modality and scalability, user and usage modeling.
Drawing upon
their experiences, workshop participants identified deficiencies between results
presented by retrieval systems and user needs. Among the more significant
problems were inferring semantics from a user query and their representation in
different modalities. Image understanding was given as an example of a problem.
Participants suggested that efforts be directed towards identifying specific
applications with short-term results in multimedia indexing and retrieval. A
list of MMIR applications expected in the next few years include searching
clipart and image databases for professional presentations and filtering Web
documents of specific visual content.
The second panel discussion was devoted to “Video and Image Databases”. It included a presentation by Paul Over on the plans of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to build a video test collection with digitized videos and their transcripts for use and evaluation by researchers in content-based information retrieval and related fields. The presentation sought to solicit feedback from the workshop participants on this test collection, its improvement, potential users, and its design. A second speaker, Rohini Srihari, presented details of a similar effort for an image test collection undertaken at University at Buffalo, State University of New York. This session included a presentation on the status of the MPEG-7 standard. MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) is the name of a family of standards used for coding audio-visual information (e.g., movies, video, and music) in a digital compressed format. Workshop participants offered suggestions on the type of data that could constitute a test video collection, noting their importance in comparing and evaluating multimedia indexing systems.
The last panel discussion was on “Multimedia Query Processing”. This panel focused its discussions on expressing and interpreting multimedia queries. While SQL-like relational database representations have been suggested for multi-modal queries, the panel and participants agreed that such approaches are inadequate for representing low-level mechanisms used in multimedia processing and recommended that MMIR systems be provided with a multi-modal query interface.
The participants recommended that a workshop on multimedia indexing and retrieval be held in conjunction with the annual SIGIR conferences, and that such workshops focus on a single task or a single medium in future programs.
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http://www.niso.org/image.html
In mid-April 1999, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) and RLG (The Research Libraries Group) sponsored an invitational workshop in Washington D.C. to examine technical information needed to manage and use digital still images that reproduce a variety of pictures, documents and artifacts. About 60 individuals with a range of diverse interests and perspectives attended the meeting on the problem of metadata information for these images. Attendees represented libraries, universities, museums, archives, the digital library community, the government, and the digital imaging vendor community. Jennifer Trant of the Art Museum Image Consortium facilitated the meeting.
During the first session, attendees heard introductory remarks from Howard Besser, a member of the program organizing committee, as well as reports on metadata initiatives by the Library of Congress, the Research Libraries Group, and the Art Museum Image Consortium. In addition, there was a report on the Making of America II project, a Digital Library Federation project to continue and extend research and demonstration projects that have developed best practices for the encoding of intellectual, structural, and administrative data about primary resources housed in research libraries. Later, three breakout groups met to discuss: 1) characteristics and features of images; 2) image production and reformatting features; and 3) image identification and integrity issues. The group as a whole reconvened to hear reports from the three breakout groups and their recommendations for further action. It reached agreement on:
· a preliminary list of technical metadata elements
· the need for a categorization of elements as mandatory or optional
· the need for metadata to help evaluate the utility of an image for a particular application or use
· using industry standard metrics for assessing images where they existed (tone, color, icc profiles)
· the need for methods of pointing at external test charts
· the importance of mechanisms for referring to external metadata files
· the need for image specific metadata and methods for creating this metadata
· the importance of persistence of metadata through transformations of an image
· the fact that the metadata assigned an item depended on the metadata creators' definition of the work
· the desirability of solutions devised to work in a broad array of contexts
Workshop participants identified and are committed to the following next steps:
1. publication of an expanded/edited set of metadata elements with examples
2. description of the tools needed to assess the quality of images
3. exploration of the viability of creating an integrated image test chart
4. preparation of an inventory of existing tools and metadata standards
5. development of guidelines and a template for the kind of data that should be included a project description
6. establishment of a canonical image format that will express equivalence of data that may have been stored in multiple image formats
7. defining a vocabulary to express the relationships between images
The organizing committee plans to publish a formal report of the workshop and will seek the participation of other stakeholders in future discussion of the issues identified from the workshop.
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PROJECTS
http://www.sos.state.il.us/depts/library/isl_home.html
The Illinois State Library (ISL) recently announced plans for an ambitious project to identify, collect, and organize an integrated virtual library of state-supported information sources. The project, Capture Illinois, will seek to create a searchable integrated digital library of Illinois state documents, state agency Web pages, public, academic, special, and school library catalogs, digitized historical resources, and other relevant materials. Plans call for these electronic resources to be archived for long-term access.
The Illinois State
Library is also participating in the WAGILS project (http://www.statelib.wa.gov/projects/imls/webpage.html),
a consortium of 22 state libraries led by the State Library of
Washington. This larger project
seeks to establish standards and methods for creating unified access to
Internet-accessible U.S. state government documents. The ISL
plans to use the standards developed by WAGILS if they serve the needs of
the Capture Illinois project. WAGILS
will use the GILS (Government Information Locator Service) set of attributes as
metadata fields for state documents. A
subject tree developed by Oregon is currently under consideration for subject
fields (www.osl.state.or.us/ep/gils/ subtree.html).
For additional information, contact Anne Craig, Coordinator, Digital Imaging Program Illinois State Library, 300 South Second Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701-1796 (acraig@ ccgate.sos.state.il.us). Susan Feldman, Datasearch, 170 Lexington Drive Ithaca, New York 14850 (sue@datasearch1.com) is technical consultant for the Request for Proposals (RFP).
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http://orc.rsch.oclc.org:6990/
Number of Records as of September 1998 44, 745
Number of Records as of September 1999 102, 630
Year-to-Date Difference 57,885
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http://www.interpares.org/
A newly-funded research project will tackle one of the most critical global issues of the digital age--the long-term preservation of vital organizational records and critical research data created or maintained in electronic systems. The project, known as the InterPARES Project (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems), will investigate and develop theories, methodologies, and prototype systems required for the permanent preservation of electronic records. It will also seek to develop model policies, strategies, and standards to ensure preservation of the authenticity of those records. The project will be supported for eighteen months by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the funding agency of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
InterPARES
is a three-year collaborative project based at the University of British
Columbia. It brings together national teams of researchers from Canada, the
United States, Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands,
Sweden, Japan, China, and Hong Kong. In the U.S., researchers at the University
at Albany, UCLA, the University of Missouri, Georgia Tech, and Pennsylvania
State University will be involved in the project in cooperation with electronic
record specialists at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.. Philip Eppard,
Dean of the School of Information Science and Policy at the University at
Albany, State University of New York, and editor of the American
Archivist, will be the principal investigator and director for the United
States component. Professor Anne Gilliland-Swetland from the Department of
Information Studies at UCLA will serve as its co-director.
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http://www.lcweb.loc.gov/marc/dccross.html
In October 1999, the Network Development and MARC Standards Office of the Library of Congress announced the availability of a crosswalk between fifteen elements in the Dublin Core Element Set (http://purl.oclc.org/dc/) and MARC 21 bibliographic data elements (http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ecbdhome.html). The crosswalk may be used in conversion of metadata from another syntax into MARC. For conversion of MARC 21 into Dublin Core, many fields may be mapped into a single Dublin Core element. In the Dublin Core to MARC mapping, two mappings are provided, one for unqualified Dublin Core elements and the other for qualified elements. In addition, some qualifiers used in the OCLC Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) project are indicated. As core qualifiers are further standardized within the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the crosswalk will be revised.
The crosswalk Web site also includes a crosswalk from Dublin Core to GILS attributes.
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NATIONAL
LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA
Preserving
Access to Digital Information (PADI)
http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/
Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) is an initiative of the National Library of Australia to identify, organize, and provide access to information resources and services relating to the preservation of digital resources. Its objectives are:
· to facilitate the development of strategies and guidelines for the preservation of access to digital information
· to develop and maintain a Web site for information and promotion purposes
· to actively identify and promote relevant activities
· to provide a forum for cross-sectoral cooperation on activities promoting the preservation of access to digital information
Resources and services within this subject gateway are categorized into two major groupings. The first group is an annotated compilation of resources and services organized into type. These include Events; Policies, Strategies, and Guidelines; Projects; Organisations and Websites; Bibliographies; Discussion Lists; Glossaries; and Journals and Newsletters. To assist users in identifying specific resources and services relevant to particular aspects of the preservation of digital information, the gateway also provides access through a listing of broad categories. These categories include such key aspects as Digisation, Formats and Media, Digital Records, Data Documentation and Standards, Rights Management Digital Libraries, National Approaches, as well as General Resources, Issues, and Strategies.
In several cases, a broad category is subdivided by relevant subtopics (e.g., the ‘Issues’ category is subdivided by such aspects as ‘archiving,’ ‘authenticity,’ and ‘technological obsolescence’). In some cases, a link from a subtopic will lead to a listing of all relevant resources or services determined to be relevant to that subtopic (e.g., Articles, Events, Organisations and Websites, Bibliographies, etc.). In other cases, a concise profile of the particular issue will precede the selected listing of relevant resources or services. Such profiles and subsequent resource and service listings are also to be found for broad categories without subtopics.
In addition to allowing users to browse broad categories and their associated subtopics, and their associated profiles, resources and services, PADI also provides a consolidated listing of all broad categories and their associated subtopics. Users may also search the PADI site directly. Three collections are available for direct searching: the PADI Database, PADI Topics, and Linked Web Sites. A search of the PADI Database will retrieve a list of resources that have been indexed for PADI. A search of PADI Topics will retrieve a list of pages on the PADI site relating to a specific topic from the PADI Thesaurus, a designation for the listing of broad and specific categories used in the subject gateway (e.g., ‘Issues,’ archiving,’ ‘authenticity’). A search of linked Web sites will retrieve pages that contain terms or phrases in the texts of pages indexed for the PADI gateway.
This is a most impressive collection of full-text Web resources and services relating to the preservation of information sources in digital form and will be of interest and value to archivists, catalogers, and reference specialists alike. For additional information about PADI, users may contact the PADI Coordinator by post (Preservation Services, National Library of Australia, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia) or by e-mail (padi@nla.gov.au).
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OCLC ONLINE COMPUTER LIBRARY
CENTER
http://purl.org/net/intercat/
jul@oclc.org
OCLC recently announced the availability of a new version of its InterCat Catalog (http://purl.org/net/intercat). The database was created using a version of the new OCLC SiteSearch software (v. 4.1.0 beta) (http://purl.org/sitesearch).
This catalog search software provides many new features, including:
· Advanced searching, which provides easy access to Boolean search capabilities using a wide variety of searchable indexes
· Sorting, which enables users to view your retrieval set organized by up to three levels of sorting using title, author, and date
· Term finder, which enables users to match terms against Library of Congress Subject Headings, to explore related, broader, or narrower terms, and to construct and execute searches using selected terms and headings
· "Refine" search, which enables users to modify a query without re-entering it
· Search history, which enables a user to review and combine the results of previous searches
· Saved records, which enables a user to select records from retrieval sets for subsequent use
· "Jump to," which enables a user to navigate retrieval sets easily
Within the records themselves, the following new features are now available:
· Searchable author fields, which enables a user to retrieve all records by the same author by clicking on the author name
· Searchable subject headings, which enables a user to execute a new search by clicking on a subject heading
· Subject navigating, which enables a user to browse the Library of Congress Subject Heading structure by clicking on the "hierarchy" icon, and to create new searches using related, broader, or narrower terms
· A clickable 856 field
· A MARC view of the record
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http://www/mirror.ac.uk
A new service funded by the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and supported by Sun Microsystems will make it easier for Internet users to access the most popular academic Web-based materials. The UK Mirror Service offers ‘mirrors’ or duplicates of the most frequently accessed overseas Web-hosted files. The UK Mirror Service currently holds more than 1.3 million items, all freely available to members of the UK higher education community. The service includes the HENSA collection of free software and a range of multimedia and other non-text items, including databases, graphics, audio, and video, as well as access to other mirror sites relevant to those involved in higher education. The main benefits of the mirror service include improved access speed and an intuitive interface with a powerful search engine.
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PUBLICATIONS
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kunze-dchtml-02.txt
September 15, 1999
Expires March 15, 2000
The Dublin Core (DC) metadata initiative has established a select set of resource description categories or elements of metadata to describe Internet resources. Relative to the resource they describe, metadata elements are typically small, and therefore may, if the resource format permits, be embedded in it. Two such formats are the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). HTML is currently in wide use, but once standardized, XML in conjunction with the Resource Description Framework (RDF) holds the potential of offering a significantly more expressive means of encoding metadata.
This Internet Draft explains the procedures on encoding metadata using HTML 4.0. It is not concerned with element semantics The HTML encoding allows elements of the DC metadata to be interspersed with non-DC elements, provided such mixing is consistent with rules governing use of those non-DC elements. A DC element is indicated by the prefix "DC”, and a non-DC element by another prefix. Internet Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. They are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or made obsolete by other documents at any time.
This Internet Draft explains how these Dublin Core elements are expressed using the META and LINK tags of HTML 4.0. A sequence of metadata elements embedded in an HTML file is taken to be a description of that file. This draft includes a number of examples which illustrate conventions which allow interoperability with current software that indexes, displays, and manipulates metadata (e.g., SWISH-E, freeWAIS-sf2.0, GLIMPSE, etc.).
An appendix to the draft includes two simple Perl scripts that manipulate HTML encoded metadata. The first is a metadata format converter and shows how a modest scripting effort can produce a utility that converts metadata from one format to another. The second is a script for automating metadata creation by letting the provider of an HTML document abbreviate an entire embedded resource description using a single HTML comment statement.
Individuals interested in commenting on this Internet Draft may contact its author, John A. Kunze, Center for Knowledge Management, University of California, San Francisco 530 Parnassus Ave, Box 0840, San Francisco, CA 94143-0840, USA; 415-476-4653 (FAX), or jak@ckm.ucsf.edu (e-mail).
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Guidance on Expressing the Dublin Core within the Resource Description Framework (RDF)
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/resources/dc/datamodel/WD-dc-rdf/
The
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is a cross-disciplinary international effort to
develop mechanisms for the discovery-oriented description of diverse resources
in an electronic environment. The Dublin Core Element Set is comprised of
fifteen (15) elements that together capture a representation of essential
aspects related to the description of Internet resources. To date, a majority of
work on the Dublin Core has addressed the definition of semantics rather than
syntax or structure. While this focus has promoted conceptual development of
this metadata set, it has led, at times, to a lack of clarity, especially in
relation to development of qualifications for a Dublin Core description. Such
emphasis has also made interoperability difficult, as individual implementers
have typically developed their own internal mechanisms for encoding Dublin Core.
A
significant number of users currently implement Dublin Core within the HyperText
Markup Language (HTML). The Dublin Core Data Model Working Group (DCDM) was
established to investigate the means by which the richness of the Dublin Core
model might be expressed outside the limitations of HTML. This draft document is
a technical report on two specific outcomes from a review by the DCDM: 1) a
model for considering, extending, testing and manipulating the model within the
Resource Description Framework (RDF); and 2) suggested mechanisms by which both
a simple and complex Dublin Core might be expressed using the eXtensible Markup
Language (XML), the formal syntax of RDF.
This
document is a Working Draft of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and is
intended to reflect consensus reached within the Data Model Working Group of
that Initiative. Following further discussions within the working group, and an
open review period by the wider Dublin Core community, the draft will be offered
to the Dublin Core Advisory Committee for acceptance and ratification. Comments
and feedback can be sent to the working group mailing list (dc-datamodel@mailbase.ac.uk).
A browsable archive of previous comments is also available (http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/dc-datamodel/).
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Guide
“Digitising History:
A Guide to Creating Digital
Resource from Historical Documents”
By Sean Townsend, Cressia Chappell
and Oscar Struijvé
History Data Service
http://hds.essex.ac.uk/g2gp/digitising_history/index.html
The History Data Service (HDS) (http://hds.essex.ac.uk/) recently announced the publication of Digitising History, a new Web-based guide to creating, documenting and preserving digital resources derived from historical documents. In addition to its availability as a free Web publication, the guide is scheduled to be issued as a print publication by Oxbow Books (http://www.oxbowbooks.com). The HDS is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the U.K. higher education funding councils to collect, catalogue, manage, preserve and encourage the re-use of historical digital resources. The HDS is located in the Data Archive at the University of Essex and is the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) (http://ahds.ac.uk/) service provider for the historical disciplines.
The guide is intended as a reference work for individuals and organizations involved with, or planning, the computerization of historical source documents. It aims to recommend good practice and standards that are generic and relevant to a range of data creation situations, from student projects through large-scale research projects. The guide focuses on the creation of tabular data that can be used in databases, spreadsheets or statistical packages. Many of the guidelines are, however, more widely applicable.
The guide includes a glossary and a bibliography of recommended reading, and offers guidance about:
· Effectively designing and managing a data creation project
· Transferring historical source documents into digital form and designing a database
· Choosing appropriate data formats and ensuring that a digital resource can be preserved without significant information loss
· Documenting a data creation project
The guide is
one of three commissioned by the History Data Service as part of the Arts and
Humanities Data Service publication series Guides
to Good Practice in the Creation and Use of Digital Resources (http://ahds.ac.uk/public/guides.html).
The series aims to provide guidance about applying recognized good practice and
standards to the creation and use of digital resources in the arts and
humanities. For additional information contact, Cressida Chappell (cress@essex.ac.uk),
Acting Head, History Data Service (http://hds.essex.ac.uk), Data Archive,
University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ.
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http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/pubs/isbd.htm
The primary purpose of an International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) is to provide the stipulations for compatible descriptive cataloguing worldwide to aid the international exchange of bibliographic records between national bibliographic agencies and the international library and information community. The International Standard Bibliographic Description for Electronic Resources (ISBD(ER)) specifies the requirements for the description and identification of electronic resources, assigns an order to the elements of the description, and specifies a system of punctuation for the description. Its provisions relate first to the bibliographic records produced by national bibliographic agencies in printed or electronic form, and second, to bibliographic records of other cataloguing agencies in either format.
This document is a hypertext Web version of the ISBD(ER) originally issued by K. G. Saur in the IFLA Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC Programme publication series in 1997. It is a revision of the ISBD(CF) International Standard Bibliographic Description for Computer Files prepared by the ISBD(CF) Review Group of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) chaired by John D. Byrum, Jr., Chief, Regional and Cooperative Cataloging, at the Library of Congress.
The ISBD(ER) includes an index and five appendices. Appendix A offers a prescription for the special technique of multi-level description. Appendix B provides a brief sketch of the way in which data should be transcribed when partly in a script reading from right to left and partly in a script reading from left to right. Appendix C lists the recommended general material designation, resource designations and specific material designations with their definitions. Appendix D gives recommended abbreviations for use in English-language records. Appendix E conveys the examples formulated to offer an illustration of the result of applying ISBD stipulations in all areas of a record.
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Public Library Association
(PLA)
http://www.pla.org/
The Public Library Association (PLA), a division of the American Library Association, has established a new publication series entitled Tech Notes devoted to major technical issues facing libraries worldwide. To date, nine Web-based Tech Notes have been prepared, and range from 1200 - 2000 words in length. Of particular note are the Tech Notes devoted to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), Intranets, Metadata, Push Technology, Digital Disaster Planning, and Wireless Networks. A Tech Note on electronic acquisitions was recently completed and is expected to be published in the near future.
Each Tech Note provides a clear and concise summary of its topic. All include a bibliography of key information sources prepared by noted authorities and most are hotlinked to the source document. Where appropriate a brief annotation is provided for a listed reference. For some Tech Notes a select list of Web sites is also provided.
The Tech Notes have been prepared for the association by GraceAnne A. DeCandido, a writer, Web consultant, and former editor-in-chief of the Wilson Library Bulletin.
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American Library Association, Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, Chicago: June 1999.
http://www.ala.org/alcts/organization/ccs/ccda/tf-meta3.html
This report summarizes discussions of the ALCTS Task Force on Metadata, Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access relating to the first four of its five charges. The charges are to:
1. Analyze the resource description needs of libraries
2. Build a conceptual map of the resource description landscape and developing models for using metadata both inside and outside the library community
3. Devise a definition of metadata and investigating the interoperability of newly emerging metadata schemes with the cataloging rules and MARC format,
4. Recommend ways in which libraries may best incorporate the use of metadata schemes into current library methods
5. Recommend as needed, rule revisions to enable interoperability of cataloging with AACR2 with metadata schemes
To pursue the first four charges, the task force divided into four subcommittees. For the first charge, a subcommittee reviewed existing principles of the purpose of the catalog, characterized library and catalog users and their expectations, and examined the context resources in which resources are described. For the second charge, a separate subcommittee developed a conceptual map of the resource description landscape that briefly describes the sources for metadata for various categories of materials over time. A third subcommittee divided its activities into two phases. In the first phase, three of the subgroup members collected and submitted definitions of “metadata,” “interoperability” and of newly emerging “metadata schemes” for open discussion and comment on an electronic discussion list. The planned second phase of this review will involve an evaluation of these candidate definitions against AACR2 and the MARC format to devise working definitions.
For the fourth charge, another subcommittee characterized the features and functionalities of future catalogs. In the process it established a definition of a prototype of the catalog of the future as a “virtually seamless access to information and relevant retrieval of information from the user’s point of view”. In addition, it identified existing information systems considered to be prototypes of future library catalogs.
The fifth charge will be considered in the future within the context of the conclusions reached on the first four charges.
The report contains two appendices: a link to the conceptual map of the resource description landscape prepared to address the second charge of the task force, and a listing of definitions of terms ‘metadata’ and ‘interoperability’ culled from a variety of sources and discussions.
12-3-99 / GMcK