AMERICAN LIBRARY CONFERENCE
ANNUAL CONFERENCE
ALCTS PRECONFERENCE
"Metadata: Libraries and the Web ---
Retooling AACR and MARC21 for
Cataloging in the Twenty-first Century"
July 6 – 7, 2000
Chicago, Illinois
http://www.ala.org/alcts/events/metadata.html
This pre-conference has been designed for those who seek an understanding of the most effective and the most efficient options for providing users with access to Web resources. Among the issues to be discussed will be the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), the Dublin Core, Encoded Archival Description (EAD), ISSN, MARC 21, the Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). In addition, rules, views, and guidelines on seriality and AACR2 will be discussed. The pre-conference is sponsored by the ALCTS Serials Section, Committee to Study Serials Cataloging and the CCS Task Force on Metadata Pre-conference; ALCTS Networked Resources and Metadata Committee; CCS Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access.
Faculty for the pre-conference will include Murtha Baca, Laura Bayard, Matthew Beacom, Vivian Bliss, Stanley Blum, Diane Boehr, Beth Camden, Brad Eden, William Fietzer, William Garrison, Michael Gorman, Rebecca Guenther, Diane Hillmann, Jean Hirons, Sheila Intner, Erik Jul, Kris Kiesling, Mary Larsgaard, Clifford Lynch, Norm Medeiros, Elizabeth Mangan, Lynn Marko, Constance Mayer, Eric Miller, Regina Reynolds, Carlos Rodriguez, Carlen Ruschoff, Brian E.C. Schottlaender, Wendy Treadwell, and Jennifer Younger.
The tentative program includes the following presentations:
· Metadata and Access to Information Resources (Jennifer Younger)
· The Delsey Report, The Cardinal Principle, and (ER) Harmonization: AACR Complexities, Necessary and Otherwise (Brian Schottlaender)
· MARC 21 as a Metadata Standard: A Practical and Strategic Look at Current Practices and Future Opportunities (Rebecca Guenther)
· Seriality and AACR2 (Jean Hirons)
· ISSN: Link and Cross-Link for Data and Metadata (Regina Reynolds)
· Struggling Toward Retrieval: Can Alternatives to Standard
Operating Procedures Help? (Sheila Intner)
· Brave Old World: Using AACR2 to Catalog Web Resources (Matthew Beacom)
· CORC and Dublin Core: New Methods of Minimal-Level Cataloging (Erik Jul)
· Working Toward a Standard TEI Header for Libraries (Lynn Marko)
· Libraries and the Future of the Semantic Web: RDF, XML and Alphabet Soup (Eric Miller and Diane Hillmann)
· Anticipating the Deluge: The INFOMINE Project and Its Approach to Metadata (Carlos Rodriguez)
· MARCit Magic: Abracadabra! From a Web Site to a MARC Record (Laura Bayard)
The pre-conference is scheduled to conclude with presentations and a panel discussion by Clifford Lynch (CNI) (Vision for the Future: Accessing Webpages), Michael Gorman (CSU-Fresno) (Metadata: Hype and Glory) and Vivian Bliss (Microsoft) (Metadata, A View from the Trenches).
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Training
ACM Digital Libraries ‘00
Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Working Group
Annual Workshop
June 7, 2000
San Antonio, Texas
http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/DL00workshop.htm
The Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Work Group will hold its third annual workshop during the ACM Digital Libraries meeting in San Antonio Texas on June 7, 2000. Knowledge Organization Systems include thesauri, controlled vocabularies, subject heading lists, authority files, ontologies, gazetteers, etc. NKOS is an ad hoc working group of more than 80 members from 10 countries interested in the implementation of vocabulary resources in networked environments. This year’s workshop organizers are: Gail Hodge (Information International Associates (IIa), Joseph Busch (Metacode Technologies, Inc.) and Linda Hill (Alexandria Digital Library Project, University of California, Santa Barbara).
The program will include a discussion of NKOS member efforts to network distributed thesauri, including draft metadata and protocol standards. There will be formal presentations from members who are working on innovative vocabulary efforts, including the development of ontologies. In addition, there will be informal announcements from attendees on their current activities. Registration details and the tentative program for the workshop are available from the its Website (http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/nkos/DL00workshop.htm).
NKOS maintains an organizational Website (www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~lhill/ nkos/index.html) which includes the programs of the previous two workshops, links to available abstracts and PowerPoint presentations, a list and profile of participants, and selective participant’s notes. Plans call for the posting of workshop notes from this year’s workshop after its conclusion.
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CIMI INSTITUTE AND THE CANADIAN HERITAGE INFORMATION NETWORK
"Helping People Find What They Want:
Implementing the Dublin Core in Museums"
March 29-20,2000, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
April 27-28,2000, Amstelveen, The Netherlands
May 31-June 1, 2000, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
http://www.cimi.org/cimi_institute/index.html
This two-day workshop focuses on information access and management issues in museums and cultural heritage organizations through the use of the CIMI recommendations for the Dublin Core metadata standard. Several key concepts will be introduced and discussed during the workshop, including:
· Integrated information management
· Metadata
· Syntax
· Structure
· Semantics
· Consistent Vocabulary
· Resource Discovery
In addition, the workshop is designed to:
· Demonstrate the benefits of implementing the Dublin Core standard for the museum community
· Provide insight into making the business case for the use of the Dublin Core standard
· Share experiences from the CIMI Testbed project, an on-going effort to explore the usability, simplicity, and technical feasibility of Dublin Core for museum information
· Introduce the Guide to Best Practice: Dublin Core (http://www. cimi.org/documents/meta_bestprac_final_ann.html) as a resource for implementers
This workshop covers a variety of issues at various levels of complexity. Museum professionals with an introductory level of familiarity, as well as those having extensive experience with interoperability and resource discovery issues are encouraged to attend. Technical expertise is not required.
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PROJECTS
CEDARS (CURL Exemplars for Digital ArchiveS)
http://www.curl.ac.uk/projects/cedars.html
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/
Under the overall direction of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL), Great Britain (http://www.curl.ac.uk/), and with funding from the eLib, the Electronic Libraries Programme, the CEDARS project aims to address the strategic, methodological and practical issues and provide guidance for libraries in best practice for digital preservation. The project is currently based across three university sites: Oxford, Leeds and Cambridge, but as it develops it will extend its scope through focus groups, workshops and managed electronic discussion lists. The three-year project officially began April 1, 1998.
The project will focus on some of the existing categories of digital resources and intends to identify techniques that can be generalized and extended to the full range of digital materials. Among CEDARS goals are:
· The preparation of guidelines for developing digital collection management policies which may ensure the long-term viability of any digital resources included in a collection
· The creation of demonstration projects to test and promote the technical and organizational feasibility of the chosen strategy for digital preservation
· The preparation of recommendations of appropriate storage media and back-up strategies and data formats for digital preservation
·
The analysis of the cost implications of digital preservation
The development of a national strategy for digital preservation, and
The lead sites will be responsible for the project's work at both the practical and strategic level. Agreements are in place for a number of digital data providers to deliver digital resources for inclusion. A number of stakeholders within and beyond the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) community provided significant input and included UK national data centers and services, other UK higher education institutions, the Research Libraries Group (RLG), and commercial publishers.
A draft specification developed by the CEDARS Project Team, Metadata for Digital Preservation: The Cedars Outline Specification (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ cedars/OutlineSpec.htm), was made available for review and public comment. This draft, due to be finalized by June 2000, describes the complete set of metadata elements that address a variety of functions, namely acquisition, management, storage, searching, retrieval, access, delivery, and preservation.
Kelly Russell (k.l.russell@leeds.ac.uk) is the CEDARS Project Manager and is based at the Edward Boyle Library, the University of Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK.
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Isaac Network
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/research/index.html
The Isaac Network is a new initiative of the Internet Scout Project, a NSF-funded program that seeks to identify, promote, and organize quality Internet resources for the higher education community. The Isaac Network initiative is co-sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), a joint program of the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE. The Isaac Network links together selective collections of high quality Internet resources from providers that have hand-chosen their resources and who have developed metadata for them. Using the latest directory protocols and the Dublin Core metadata set, the Isaac Network provides a search interface to multiple, distributed collections of metadata. The overall goal is to allow users to submit a single query to search geographically distributed and independently maintained metadata collections and to return the combined results to the user.
The primary audience of the Internet Scout Project is the higher education community, and therefore the first priority of the Isaac Network will be to include collections of interest to researchers and educators. These may include collections developed by organizations from higher education, government, public libraries, the non-profit sector, or commercial content providers. They may be collections that focus on a particular topic or discipline, or that cover a broad subject range. Content providers who already have metadata for the Internet resources in their collection have the highest potential to be early collaborators in the Isaac Network. However, any provider of high-quality content are encouraged to join discussions about the project in preparation for possible participation later in the network's development.
The primary goals of the Isaac Network Project are:
· To utilize metadata to provide a useful resource discovery service for quality information sources
· To permit collaborators to continue to develop, maintain, and manage their own collections. Isaac provides a method to link the collections and will not subsume any of the individual collections. Content providers retain ownership of, control over, and credit for the metadata records shared through the network
· To experiment with metadata standards, such as the Dublin Core, in order to provide a common set of attributes with which to catalog and subsequently search collections of Internet resources
· To develop of a collaborative laboratory in which research topics of interest, such as indexing algorithms and alternative user interfaces, can be explored
· To develop a set of guidelines for connecting selective collections within the Isaac Network, and between Isaac and similar international efforts
The Isaac Network's infrastructure uses standard Internet protocols, such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the Common Indexing Protocol (CIP) to distribute queries, return results, and exchange index or centroid information. The Isaac Network project is the first to use an LDAP directory for metadata records about resources and to combine LDAP with CIP in a distributed index-sharing and query-routing architecture.
The Isaac Network will link geographically distributed metadata collections into a single, virtual metadata collection. Highly authoritative collections of Internet resources that have been hand-selected by librarians or information specialists are of primary interest. Collections may focus on a particular topic or discipline, or cover a broad subject range. These may be developed by organizations from higher education, government, public libraries, the non-profit sector, or commercial providers. The metadata in each repository should be of high quality and preferably provided by professional catalogers or information specialists using a minimum of descriptive fielded data. The Scout Report Signpost (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/ signpost/) database of metadata is an example of such a repository.
Organizations interested in participating in the Isaac Network can contact Susan Calcari (scal@cs.wisc.edu), Project Director. Additional general and technical information about the Isaac Network is available from the project homepage (http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/research/index.html).
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UK Interoperability Focus
UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
University of Hull
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/
In recent years, providing access to resources beyond the physical holdings of a single institution has become increasingly important for libraries, museums, data archives, and other information providers. Numerous initiatives have sought to enable users to discover and access resources drawn from different sources from any location. The importance of seamless and concurrent access to information from multiple repositories is demonstrated by distributed query protocols as Z39.50 and the enhancement of local solutions such as the ROADS software employed by a number of ‘hubs’ of Internet resource subject gateways within the Resource Discovery Network (http://www.rdn.ac.uk/). In January 1999, the UK Office of Library and Information Networking (UKOLN) began to host the UK Interoperability Focus, an activity that seeks to explore, publicize, and mobilize the benefits and practice of effective interoperability across diverse information sectors, such as libraries, and the cultural heritage and archival communities. The UK Interoperability Focus works closely with other UKOLN staff on such issues as metadata, distributed library systems, and public library networking.
‘Interoperability’ is a broad term that encompasses many issues that relate to the ability of different computer-based systems to exchange and make use of data. These issues are many and varied and include:
· Technical interoperability
Communication, transport, storage, and representation standards
· Semantic interoperability
Variant naming conventions and vocabularies
· Political interoperability
Organizational coordination and cooperation
· Inter-community interoperability
Organizational collaboration
· International interoperability
Language considerations
The activities of the UK Interoperability Focus include a significant degree of information dissemination to advertise its activities and to promote cross-fertilization of ideas and knowledge within the information community. In addition to regular updates on its Web page (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/), the UK Interoperability Focus offers an electronic mailing list for discussion of issues that relate to the design, construction, and ongoing operation of interoperable services in an international cross-domain digital environment (http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/interoperability/). In addition, there are regular articles in the e-journal Ariadne (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/) which are intended to provide an introduction to interoperability issues for a broader audience.
For additional information about the UK Interoperability Focus contact Paul Miller, UK Interoperability Focus, UKOLN, c/o Academic Services: Libraries University of Hull, Kingston upon Hull HU6 7RX, UK or P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk.
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RENARDUS: THE CLEVER ROUTE TO INFORMATION
http://www.renardus.org/
Several major European institutions responsible for a variety of major Internet subject gateways have joined together to develop and build a fully operational and documented single interface for searching and browsing their collective specialized Web collections. Known as Renardus, the project will seek to improve access to existing Internet-accessible collections of cultural and scientific resources across Europe. Among the participant gateways are DutchESS, the Dutch Electronic Access Service; SSG-FI (Special Subject Guides / SSG fachinformation); GENRES, Information System on Genetic Resources; the RDN, the Resource Discovery Network; the Finnish Virtual Library; and EELS, the Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden. Renardus partner organizations include national and research libraries, national resource discovery network organizations, library-related technology centers, and university computer centers. Among them are the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek); the National Library of France (Bibliothèque Nationale de France); the National Library of Germany (Die Deutsche Bibliothek), Finnish Virtual Library Project, Jyväskylä University Library, Finland; NetLab, Lund University, Sweden; and UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath, United Kingdom (UKOLN).
Among the anticipated benefits of the project are improved access routes to Internet-accessible through aggregation and improved consistency of collections, multilingual support, broader understanding of academic user needs, and the improved economies of scale for metadata creation, and abstracting and indexing by service providers. As a collaborative endeavor, the project provides an opportunity to explore and test models for sharing metadata, to develop mutually agreeable technical solutions, and to foster standardization activities.
Renardus is funded through the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme, an activity managed by the European Commission, under the IST 'Promoting a User-friendly Information Society' initiative - a major theme of the European Union's 5th Framework Programme. The project has received support from January 1, 2000 through June 30, 2002.
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ResearchIndex: Autonomous Citation Indexing on the Web
http://www.ResearchIndex.com/
Nearly fifty years ago Eugene Garfield developed and applied a method of citation indexing to enhance access to the scholarly scientific journal literature. Developed in response to inadequate and inappropriate subject characterization of journal articles typical of many conventional print indexes of the time, citation indexing today has become a standard technique by which conceptually-related publications can be easily identified. One key advantage of citation indexing over conventional indexing is that in such a process human indexers do not interpret the subject content of an article or assign terms or phrases believed to represent its subject coverage. Citation indexing not only overcomes the inherent limitations of indexer judgement and indexing vocabularies but also reduces the time and effort needed to prepare an index.
While traditional citation indexes have enhanced access to conceptually-related works, their production, though less laborious than non-citation indexes, does require significant preparation and editing. ResearchIndex is a recently announced service that can identify and index citations found within Web-based electronic publications without human intervention. In addition to indexing electronic journals, ResearchIndex can automatically index non-journal literature including reports, conference papers, and preprints, among other types of gray literature. It offers users the opportunity to view the textual context of a candidate cited work and provides access to the full-text of any incorporated source document. Access to related and similar work in the ResearchIndex corpus is also available.
The ResearchIndex database of Internet-accessible computer science publications is available free-of-charge from the project homepage (http://www. ResearchIndex.com/). A bibliography of key works, which offers a detailed description of the project as well as system features and functions, is also provided.
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PUBLICATIONS
Article
"Metadata Projects & Standards”
By Jessica Milstead and Susan Feldman
Online 23(1), 32 – 38, 40, January 1999
(ISSN 0146-5422 )
http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL1999/milstead1.html#projects
The last five years has seen the rise of conflicting standards and projects for standardizing electronic resources. Some have come from the library and research communities, which has developed such standards by extending their well-established policies and practices, while others have emerged from groups that recognize the need for standards, but believe that such standards must be newly created. A major difference between the library-proposed standards and those of others focuses on the responsibility of applying the metadata to an information resource. Since it is not possible for all electronic resources to be cataloged professionally, the focus outside the library community has been on enabling the creators of electronic resources to create the metadata fields for these resources. In their article, Jessica Milstead, principal of the JELEM Company, and Susan Feldman, principal of Datasearch, have prepared an excellent overview of current and emerging metadata standards, metadata systems, and metadata projects for the novice and experienced specialist alike.
Their discussion of the efforts of international and national standards organizations includes a concise review of the metadata activities of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For metadata systems they offer an outline and brief discussion of their formats and frameworks. They provide a concise description of the Dublin Core and its use in major national, transnational, and institutional projects and services. Among these are: the Resource Organisation and Discovery in Subject-based Services (ROADS) in the United Kingdom; the MetaWeb Project in Australia; the Nordic Project; the metadata testbed project of the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI) Consortium; and the metadata dictionary project of International Management Systems (IMS), Educom (now EDUCAUSE), and the Information Technology Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
In addition, the authors provide a summary of major geospatial and biological metadata projects. These include a brief description of the Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM) developed by the Federal Geographical Data Committee (FGDC), an initiative by the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey to extend the geospatial metadata standard for use in documenting biological resources data and information as part of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) and the Alexandria Project based at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Brief profiles of several other major metadata projects are also provided and include the Government Information Locator Service (GILS) used in the identification of U.S. government information resources; the Art, Design, Architecture, and Media (ADAM) information gateway in Britain; the Channel Definition Format (CDF) developed by Microsoft and partners for defining groups of digital objects that can be “pushed” or “pulled” as a unit; and the Warwick Framework developed as an outcome of the second Dublin Core Workshop in 1996.
The article concludes with a review of major efforts to manage address changes of Internet-accessible resources, notably the Handle system of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI); the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) developed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in collaboration with CNRI to provide an identification system for digital media using the Handle system; the Uniform Resource Name (URN); and the Persistent URL (PURL) developed by OCLC.
In addition to a list of cited references, the article provides links to major resources for information about metadata, as well as a listing with links to metadata projects and resources profiled in the article.
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Guides
""Creating Digital Resources for the Visual Arts: Standards and Good Practice”
Visual Arts Data Service: Catherine Grout, Phill Purdy, and Janine Rymer
Technical Advisory Service for Images: Karla Youngs,
Jane Williams, Alan Lock, Dan Brickley, Oliver Moss
Visual Arts Data Service, Surrey Institute of Art and Design, UK
(Guides to Good Practice in the Creation and Use of Digital Resources)
http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/guides/creating_guide/contents.html
This guide provides an introduction and offers practical guidance on creating and developing digital resources for the visual arts, with image-based resources as the primary focus. It includes coverage of the following subjects:
· Overview and objectives
· Copyrights and rights management
· Creating digital images
· Standards for data documentation in the Visual Arts
· Project and collections management
· Resource delivery and user issues
· Storage and preservation
· Specialized digital formats to create and enhance Visual Arts resources
Among the topics covered are: the laws and copyright issues relating to digital resources; the selection of equipment, hardware and software for digital imaging; terminology standards and controlled vocabularies; database choice and structure; user interface design; storage media for digital resources; and advanced digital applications (e.g., virtual reality, computer-aided design (CAD), multimedia).
In addition, the guide includes a section devoted to working with the Visual Arts Data Service and the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI), three appendices, a glossary, and a bibliography of key works relevant to each of the work’s sections.
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""A User Guide for Simple Dublin Core”
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, User Guide Working Group
(User Guide Working Draft 1998-07-31)
http://purl.org/dc/documents/wd-guide-current.htm
The term "meta" comes from a Greek word that denotes something of a higher or more fundamental nature. One common conceptualization of ‘metadata’ is that it is data about other data. While it is now commonly used to refer to the descriptive information about Web resources, metadata can also serve a variety of purposes, from identifying resources that meet a particular information need, to evaluating their suitability for use, to tracking the characteristics of resources for maintenance or usage over time. A typical metadata record consists of a set of attributes, or elements, necessary to describe the resource in question. For example, a metadata system common in libraries -- the library catalog -- contains a set of metadata records with elements that describe a book or other library item: author, title, date of creation or publication, subject coverage, and the call number specifying location of the item on the shelf.
Although the concept of metadata predates the Internet and the Web, worldwide interest in metadata standards and practices has exploded with the increase in electronic publishing and digital libraries. The Dublin Core element set has become one of the more metadata standards and has grown in use and application by librarians and other information specialists since its creation in 1995. This guide discusses the layout and content of Dublin Core data elements and how these are used to compose a complete Dublin Core metadata record. It is intended to assist non-specialists in understanding the Dublin Core to create simple descriptive records for information resources. In addition, the guide is intended to promote ‘best practices’ in application of the metadata elements.
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Magazine
Ariadne
UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
University of Bath
(ISSN 1361-3200)
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/
Ariadne magazine is aimed at both librarians and information science professionals in academic libraries, and also to interested lay people in the UK Higher Education community. Its principal geographic focus is the UK, but it is widely read in the US and worldwide.
The magazine has two major aims:
· To describe and evaluate sources and services available on the
Internet, and of potential use, to librarians and information
Professionals
· To report to the library community at large on progress and developments within the UK Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), on JISC-funded and other information services, and on digital libraries in general
UKOLN, the UK Office for Library and Information Networking, publishes Ariadne every three months. The current editor is Philip Hunter and may be contacted at ariadne@ukoln.ac.uk.
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Specification
" Open eBook Publication Structure Specification 1.0"
Open eBook (OEB) Authoring Group
http://www.openebook.org/faq.htm
http://www.openebook.org/oebpsdownload.htm
In September 1999, the Open eBook (OEB) Authoring Group released the final 1.0 version of the Open eBook Publication Structure Specification. Their specification defines the format that content takes when it is converted from print to electronic form. The purpose of the Open eBook Publication Structure is to provide a specification for representing the content of electronic books. Members of the Open eBook (OEB) Authoring Group include eBook pioneers, publishers, and major hardware and software firms, and include representatives from NuvoMedia, Softbook Press, Simon & Schuster, R.R. Donnelley & Sons, Co., and Microsoft.
The specification is intended to give content providers (e.g., publishers, and others who have content to be displayed) and tool providers minimal and common guidelines which ensure fidelity, accuracy, accessibility, and presentation of electronic content over various electronic book platforms. The specification seeks to reflect established content format standards. The goal of this specification is to provide the purveyors of electronic-book content (publishers, agents, authors, etc.) with a format for use in providing content to multiple reading systems.
The specification is based on HTML and XML, the same core languages that define the World Wide Web, and is designed to allow publishers and authors to deliver their material in a single format. The Open eBook Publication Structure Specification is available in several formats (http://www.openebook.org/oebpsdownload.htm). An associated FAQ document (http://www.openebook.org/faq.htm) and samples (http://www. openebook.org/samples.htm) are also accessible.
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Reports
"Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries:
Beyond Traditional Authority Files"
Prepared by Gail Hodge for the Digital Library Federation (DLF)
Council on Library and Information Resources
(ISBN1-887334-76-9)
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub91abst.html
A new report from the Digital Library Federation (DLF), Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries: Beyond Traditional Authority Files by Gail Hodge, examines the use of knowledge organization systems and schemes for organizing information to facilitate knowledge management in the digital environment. Knowledge organization systems serve as bridges between a user's information needs and the material in a collection. Examples include term lists, such as dictionaries; classification schemes (e.g., Library of Congress Classification schedules); and relationship lists, such as thesauri (Ei Thesaurus). It is believed that these and other types of knowledge organization systems of varying complexity, structure, and function can improve the organization of digital libraries and facilitate access to their content.
The report provides examples of how knowledge organization systems can be used to enhance digital libraries in a variety of disciplines in a variety of ways. Among these are linking digital resources to related material - directly or indirectly, providing more descriptive records for entities in the digital resource, and offering access not only to a descriptive record, but also to location information about a relevant physical object. It also discusses how knowledge organization systems can be used to provide disparate communities with access to digital library resources, and how such systems can provide alternate subject or multilingual access, support free-text searching, or add new modes of access, such as visual or geographic, to the digital library. The report concludes with a discussion of considerations for using knowledge organization systems with digital libraries, and provides a framework for the design, planning, implementation, and maintenance of these systems in digital library environments.
Systems of Knowledge Organization for Digital Libraries is available electronically (http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub91abst.html). Print copies may be ordered for $15, prepaid, from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Checks should be made payable to CLIR and mailed to CLIR Publication Orders, 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 500, Washington, D.C., 20036-2124. Credit card orders may be placed by phone (202-939-4750), by fax (202-939-4765), or by e-mail (info@clir.org).
This is the fourth published report by the Digital Library Federation, a partnership of research libraries dedicated to creating, maintaining, expanding, and preserving a distributed collection of digital materials accessible to scholars and to a wider public, and operates under the umbrella of CLIR. The author, Gail Hodge, has extensive experience in the areas of database production, metadata and bibliographic record analysis, and the application of technology to cataloging and indexing. She currently is Senior Information Specialist with Information International Associates, Inc. (IIa), an information resource management service specializing in scientific and technical information and business information services.
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Software
XMLMARC
Lane Medical Library, Stanford University
http://xmlmarc.stanford.edu
http://xmlmarc.stanford.edu/download1.html
In late December 1999, the Lane Medical Library of Stanford University released XMLMARC, a free, non-commercial Java client/sever program for converting MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) records to XML, the eXtensible Markup Language. The XMLMARC software is the result of the library’s Medlane Project, an experimental program to explore alternative methods of utilizing cataloging information. The software is based on flexible maps and simplified Data Type Definitions (DTDs) for bibliographic and authorities formats. The DTDs reflect a simplification of MARC without a loss of significant content.
XMLMARC was designed to accommodate changes in MARC and mapping decisions without the need for reprogramming. The Lane Medical Library has used the program to convert more than 250,000 MARC records to XML. The Medlane team believes that there is a need for an appropriate new standard for bibliographic data and hopes that the availability of XMLMARC will encourage further consideration of the use of XML for a web-oriented version of MARC. The XMLMARC software is available at the Medlane site (http://xmlmarc. stanford.edu/) as are applicable DTDs and maps, and sample records. Links to a PowerPoint slideshow and associated text that describe the project and software are also provided.
For more information, contact Dick R. Miller, Head of Technical Services & Systems Librarian Lane Medical Library, L109 Stanford University Medical Center Stanford, CA 94305-5123 or dick@stanford.edu.