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Current Cities Volume 11 Number 12
[1]Current Cites (Digital Library SunSITE)
Volume 11, no. 12, December 2000
Edited by [2]Roy Tennant
The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720
ISSN: 1060-2356 -
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.12.html
Contributors: [3]Terry Huwe, [4]Michael Levy, [5]Leslie Myrick , Jim
Ronningen, Lisa Rowlison, [6]Roy Tennant
Editor's Note: The well-reviewed Handbook for Digital Projects: A
Management Tool for Preservation and Access from the Northeast
Document Conservation Center (see the [7]Current Cites review) is
[8]now available online.
_________________________________________________________________
Chapman, Stephen and William Comstock. [9]"Digital Imaging Production
Services at the Harvard College Library" [10]RLG DigiNews 4(6)
(December 15, 2000)
(http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-6.html#feature1). -
Given the fact that many libraries are now considering establishing
in-house digitization capabilities, this is a timely piece. Chapman, a
well-known author (e.g., Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives)
and speaker on digitization topics, and his colleague William
Comstock, take us through the process Harvard followed to setup their
own digitization shop. In addition, they include a number of specific
details and descriptions of how they scan material and the standards
to which they adhere. Articles such as this provide an essential
source of authoritative and specific information for libraries lacking
the resources to develop these procedures on their own. But even those
libraries that have established such procedures would do well to study
Harvard's decisions. - [11]RT
Chepesiuk, Ron. "JSTOR and Electronic Archiving" [12]American
Libraries 32(11) (December 2000): 46-48. - [13]JSTOR was funded by the
Mellon Foundation in August 1995 as a pilot project to investigate the
requirements of storing journals in digital form. Since that early
pilot, JSTOR has seen success in a number of areas. This article
serves as a useful overview and summary of the project, including the
challenges that remain. One such challenge is to add enough
institutional subscribers to reduce the fees that some (particularly
at smaller institutions) believe to be too high. - [14]RT
Crawford, Walt. [15]Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large 1(1) (January
2001) (http://cical.home.att.net/). - Walt Crawford, a well-known and
widely published library commentator has launched his own free
self-published serial in Adobe Acrobat format. Readers of the likely
monthly 16-page periodical can look forward to being regaled with
Crawford's no-holds-barred commentary as well as timely bits on the
latest PCs and other technologies. Each issue contains a section of
annotated citations from mostly MS Windows-centric sources like PC
Magazine, PC World, The Industry Standard and others. One of the most
useful sections is one that tracks current PC values, in which
Crawford picks the top systems in three categories (budget, midrange,
and power) and notes the increase in value for dollar from previous
benchmarks. The publication of each issue is announced on a variety of
library listservs, including [16]Web4Lib and [17]PACS-L, or you can
sign up to be notified directly. This deserves a spot on your reading
list as one of the most useful current awareness resources available
for microcomputer related technologies. - [18]RT
Dale, Robin and Noel Beagrie. [19]"Digital Preservation Conference:
Report from York, UK" [20]RLG DigiNews 4(6) (December 15, 2000)
(http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-6.html#feature2). -
Dale and Beagrie summarize the proceedings of the recent (December
2000) Preservation 2000 conference, as well as a preceding one-day
workshop. The meeting was sponsored by CEDARS (CURL Exemplars in
Digital Archives), the Joint Information Systems Committee, the
Research Libraries Group (RLG), and OCLC. Speakers from Austria,
Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and the US
demonstrated that the challenge is international in scope and that the
response must be as well. One of the main outcomes of the meeting was
the promulgation and eager acceptance of the idea of creating a
Digital Preservation Coalition. The [21]full proceedings of both
meetings have just become available on the RLG web site. It should
serve as a rich resource for learning about the challenges of this
issue and how particular projects are attempting to address them. -
[22]RT
Severiens, Thomas, et.al. [23]"Physdoc -- A Distributed Network of
Physics Institutions Documents: Collecting, Indexing and Searching
High Quality Documents by using Harvest" [24]D-Lib Magazine (December
2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/severiens/12severiens.html). -
One would not usually look to a project that is more than five years
old for a model of cutting-edge technology, but the [25]PhysDoc
project is not your normal case. By either luck or skill, they began
where others have eventually arrived, using a piece of software that
is ancient in Internet terms, [26]Harvest, to gather metadata and
indexing information from over a 1,000 institutions in order to
construct a union catalog of freely-available physics research. Now
the [27]Open Archives initiative is promulgated the same model, albeit
with altered and enhanced technology. What is old is new again, it
seems. This piece describes the missiont, history, services, usage,
and possible future of the project. An appendix includes advice to
authors, web managers, heads of insitutes, and national physics
societies about how best to participate in the project. - [28]RT
Sirapyan, Nancy. [29]"In Search of..." [30]PC Magazine (Dec 5, 2000):
187.
(http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/reviews/0,6755,2652815,00.html). -
In a series of capsule reviews of 20 search engines Sirapyan gives a
good overview of the state of Internet search tools. She starts out
with a clear discussion of the types of search tools available, the
availability of advanced features such as Boolean queries and
differences between directories, regular search engines and metasearch
engines. It is unclear from the article whether the author and other
testers used the same searches across all of the 20 tools but each
review clearly outlines perceived strengths and weaknesses, gives tips
on the advanced features, if any, of the search tool in question and
suggests the types of searches that are most successful. The tools
which receive top honors are [31]Google, [32]Northern Light,
[33]HotBot and [34]Oingo. Finally, there is an extra sidebar the
discusses meta and specialized search tools such as Infozoid and
FirstGov. I can't help thinking that the usefulness of this article is
related to the fact that Sirapyan is PC Magazine's librarian and goes
into greater depth on those features that are of interest to
information professionals. - [35]ML
Stoffle, Carla, et.al. "Predicting the Future: What Does Academic
Librarianship Hold in Store?" [36]C&RL News 61(10) (November 2000):
894-897. - Anyone interested in the present and future of academic
libraries should read this brief piece. It is simultaneously
challenging and encouraging, informative and inspiring. Despite the
promise of the title, as Stoffle puts it, "I am optimistic about our
future, but I don't have much of a concrete sense of what libraries
and librarians will be doing even ten years from now, except that it
will be radically different." A number of the challenges faced by
academic libraries are laid out, as well as some strategies that can
be used to help meet those challenges. Some specific initiatives that
epitomize the best of our response to these challenges are identified.
One highlighted development is the creation of the [37]Keystone
Principles a year ago by 80 academic library leaders, and described as
exemplifying the "kind of actions we must take to create the libraries
our customers need." The piece ends with Jerry Campbell's ten axioms,
which includes the admonition "Whoever acts will create the future."
Stoffle, et.al. clearly believe that to be true, and if you agree,
then consider this your wakeup call. - [38]RT
Weibel, Stuart L. and Traugott Koch. [39]"The Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative: Mission, Current Activities, and Future Directions"
[40]D-Lib Magazine (December 2000)
(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/weibel/12weibel.html). -
Long-time readers of Current Cites know that we've been following the
development of the Dublin Core metadata standard since the beginning.
This latest piece on the initiative brings us up to date with the
latest developments in this draft standard for describing digital
objects. It provides a brief history of the effort, reviews the year's
milestones, enumerates all the working groups and their status, and
ends with the workplan for 2001. The lengthy list of references
identifies all the key working documents as well as related web sites.
- [41]RT
_________________________________________________________________
Current Cites 11(12 (December 2000) ISSN: 1060-2356
Copyright © 2000 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley.
All rights reserved.
Copying is permitted for noncommercial use by computerized bulletin
board/conference systems, individual scholars, and libraries.
Libraries are authorized to add the journal to their collections at no
cost. This message must appear on copied material. All commercial use
requires permission from the editor. All product names are trademarks
or registered trade marks of their respective holders. Mention of a
product in this publication does not necessarily imply endorsement of
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[42]listserv@library.berkeley.edu, replacing "[your name]" with your
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[43]Copyright © 2001 UC Regents. All rights reserved.
Document maintained at
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2000/cc00.11.12.html by
[44]Roy Tennant.
Last update January 5, 2001. SunSITE Manager:
[45]manager@sunsite.berkeley.edu
References
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8. http://www.nedcc.org/digital/dighome.htm
9. http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-6.html#feature1
10. http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/
11. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/
12. http://www.ala.org/alonline/
13. http://www.jstor.org/
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15. http://cical.home.att.net/
16. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Web4Lib/
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19. http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews4-6.html#feature2
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21. http://www.rlg.org/events/pres-2000/
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23. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december00/severiens/12severiens.html
24. http://www.dlib.org/
25. http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/PhysNet/physdoc.html
26. http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/harvest/
27. http://www.openarchives.org/
28. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/
29. http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/stories/reviews/0,6755,2652815,00.html
30. http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/
31. http://www.google.com/
32. http://www.northernlight.com/
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34. http://www.oingo.com/
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42. mailto:listserv@library.berkeley.edu
43. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Admin/copyright.html
44. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/
45. mailto:manager@sunsite.berkeley.edu
