_Current Cites_
                           Volume 9, no. 6
                              June 1998
                             The Library
                  University of California, Berkeley
                     Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne
                           ISSN: 1060-2356
       http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1998/cc98.9.6.html

                             Contributors:

                Christof Galli, Kirk Hastings, Terry Huwe,
             Margaret Phillips, Richard Rinehart, Roy Tennant
                       Jim Ronningen, Lisa Yesson

 DIGITAL LIBRARIES

  Guthrie, Kevin. "JSTOR and the University of Michigan: An Evolving
  Collaboration" Library Hi Tech 16 (1) (1998): 9-14. -- This special
  issue of Library Hi Tech features the dynamic cultural and
  technological changes affecting the University of Michigan library
  arena. With the recent attention on scholarly communication and
  collaboration, it's timely to take a closer look at Michigan's
  relationship with JSTOR (short for Journal STORage, at
  http://www.jstor.org/), and their progress in making backfiles of
  selected journals available in electronic form. Originally a grant
  project of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with ten test journals and
  six test libraries, JSTOR is now an independent, not-for-profit
  organization with approximately 250 paying library participants and 70
  journals committed to contributing content. Guthrie, JSTOR's
  President, chronicles the history of this collaboration and notes that
  it provided the flexibility necessary to meet the administrative
  structures, organizational processes and physical plant requirements
  of a fast-growing entrepreneurial enterprise. While Guthrie
  acknowledges the challenges involved in a distributed organizational
  model, he believes that the benefits outweigh the costs. He expresses
  the organization's commitment to maintaining its close relationship
  with the university community to ensure that JSTOR remains responsive
  to user needs. Ideally their lessons can be applied not only to other
  digital library initiatives, but also to other areas ripe for
  self-sustaining enterprises. -- LY

  Payette, Sandra D. and Oya Y. Rieger. "Supporting Scholarly Inquiry:
  Incorporating Users in the Design of the Digital Library" The Journal
  of Academic Librarianship 24(2) (March 1998):121-129. -- Through a
  series of questionnaires and interviews with faculty and students, the
  Mann Library at Cornell University conducted a study to find out how
  users engage in research using its digital Gateway. The study sought
  to assess the effectiveness of the existing design, and to develop
  principles to be used in developing the next generation of the
  Gateway. Users, it seems, do not engage in scholarly research that is
  linear, highly structured and logical and therefore digital libraries
  need to be designed in a way that minimizes hierarchical, linear
  metaphors and that create features that can be customized to an
  individual's personal style and technical capabilities. The Gateway
  was designed with input from earlier focus groups but, interestingly,
  the more recent user survey showed that users were not, in fact,
  taking advantage of features developed in response to their expressed
  requirements! In addition to describing the experiences at Cornell
  University, the article provides an excellent review of the literature
  of user studies in the digital library context. -- MP

 ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

  Balas, Janet. "Copyright in the Digital Era" Computers in Libraries
  18(6) (June 1998) (http://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/jun/story2.htm) --
  The title doesn't offer a clue that this is a great annotated
  collection of sources for researching current issues in copyrighted
  information. You may be burying your head in the sand while chanting
  the "fair use" mantra (which is pretty hard to do with sand in your
  mouth), but aren't you curious what the United States Copyright
  Office, the American Library Association, the Digital Future
  Coalition, the Creative Incentive Coalition and others have to say
  about it? URLs are given for the relevant pages from each
  organization, along with commentary about the role each one plays in
  shaping copyright policy or depicting the current state of affairs
  (which might be analogous to a strobe-lit snapshot of a nighttime mob
  scene). Here's a shortcut to one document which is highly relevant for
  many of us: "Reproductions of Copyrighted Works by Educators and
  Librarians" (http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ21) which is
  U.S. Copyright Office Copyright Information Circular 21. Curl up with
  your favorite TV lawyer (surely preoccupied with other things) and
  have a good long read. -- JR

  Kasdorf, Bill. "SGML and PDF: Why We Need Both" Journal of Electronic
  Publishing 3(4) (June 1998)
  (http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/03-04/kasdorf.html). -- Discussions
  about appropriate digital file formats often degenerate to the level
  of a debate, in which advocates of one format slug it out with
  proponents of another. Thus this article is a refreshing perspective,
  in which the benefits of two very different publication formats are
  examined for their utility in different situations. The not
  unsurprising conclusion is that one format does not prevent
  publication in the other, and publishing in both is often beneficial.
  -- RT

 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY

  Digital Future Coalition (www.dfc.org) -- This is not an article per
  se, but a web resource and organization. DFC is an umbrella lobbying
  and information sharing organization concentrating on issues of
  intellectual property and copyright legislation and policy worldwide.
  Members include the American Library Association and the Society of
  American Archivists, etc. Their explicit aim is to lobby for balanced
  legislation that protects access to information as well as the ability
  to regulate and produce profit from information. Whether one agrees
  with their approach or not, the site is a useful place to get the full
  text of major new legislation and critical responses to everthing from
  the Conference on Fair Use to (U.S.) National Information
  Infrastructure (NII) bills to the international WIPO agreement. -- RR

  Dyson, Esther. "Privacy Protection: Time to Think and Act Locally and
  Globally" First Monday 3 (6) (1998)
  (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_6/dyson/) -- Noted social and
  technology critic Esther Dyson surveys the current state of privacy on
  the Internet, examining the interplay of cyberspace and local
  jurisdictions. While various, "non-central" groups advocate new types
  of encryption protocols to help us gain a semblance of privacy,
  different cultures around the globe--and the laws they
  promulgate--have little common ground. Therefore privacy on the Net is
  not only a technology issue, but a key issue for global society. -- TH


  Williams, Leonard. "Teaching Cyberian Politics" First Monday 3 (6)
  (1998) (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_6/williams/) --
  Williams describes his experience in teaching a college course on the
  "politics of cyberspace"--using Web-based syllabi and other dynamic
  tools. The close match between the course subject matter and the
  learning process students employed in using the Web was a powerful
  combination. Williams argues that the approach he took, with its
  emphasis on direct experience, boosted students' critical thinking
  skills about technology and society. -- TH

 MULTIMEDIA & HYPERMEDIA

  National Council on Disability. Access to Multimedia Technology by
  People with Sensory Disabilities. Washington: The Council, 1998. 86
  p. (http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS764) -- This report focuses on
  barriers to the use of computerized multimedia technology by people
  who have visual or hearing impairments. It's a good source for an
  overview of what types of problems are encountered and what remedies
  are in place or coming up. As with most government reports by
  committee, there's a bit of a lag regarding new technology, but it
  wasn't intended to be a list of what's cutting edge; rather, it's an
  attempt to enlighten about the uses of broader categories of
  technology, like under what circumstances audio description elements
  can be most appropriate. For policy-watchers, the relevant sections of
  the Rehabilitation Act and Telecommunications Act are discussed, with
  recommendations for specific areas needing stronger enforcement. -- JR


 NETWORKS & NETWORKING

  Boutin, Paul. "Browser Beware" Wired 6.06 (June 1998): 185.
  (http://www.wired.com/wired/6.06/) -- If you're trying to make the
  best of a 16-bit Windows computer or are fed up with the memory
  demands of your current browser, a 7-person engineering team from
  Norway may offer hope with Opera (in Wired's words, "a 1.2-Mbyte
  marvel"). Opera puts Microsoft and Netscape in their place when it
  comes to speed and HTML standards compliance. It is also adept at
  juggling multiple windows, and only requires a 386 with 6 megs of RAM.
  So have they built a better mousetrap? Well, there are no non-Windows
  versions currently available and Opera is weaker on support for
  Unicode 16-bit international character sets, but it does meet the need
  for speed. Opera 4.0 (with Java and CSS2 style sheet support) is due
  out this summer and for $35 (less for education customers) can be
  found at http://www.operasoftware.com/. -- LY

  Clark, Kathleen A., Priscilla C. Geahigan, Thomas R. Mirkovich, and
  Anita D. Haynes. "Internet Resources: Cruising for Travel Information"
  College & Research Libraries News
  (http://www.ala.org/acrl/resjun98.html) 59(6) (June 1998): 427-431. --
  Just in time for summer, this month's list of Internet resources looks
  at travel. Included in the list are addresses for sites that can give
  you information (mostly oriented to travel in the United States) about
  accommodations, restaurant guides and other mega travel sites (like
  Yahoo!'s travel page: http://www.yahoo.com/Recreation/Travel/). Also
  handy are sites for traveling abroad like the Centers for Disease
  Control (CDC) Travel Information (http://www.cdc.gov/) and the
  Intellicast World Weather guide
  (http://www.intellicast.com/weather/intl/). -- MP

  Khare, Rohit, and Rifkin, Adam. "Trust Management on the World Wide
  Web" First Monday 3 (6) (1998)
  (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_6/khare/) -- The authors
  describe a new concept for managing sensitive information on the
  Internet, which encourages open, decentralized systems that span
  multiple domains. The system, called "trust management," aims to
  disperse decision-making and analysis about how to protect sensitive
  data throughout organizations, asking "why" instead of "how." The
  basic elements of the system are "principles, principals, and
  policies." Document authoring and distribution is used as a concrete
  example of how the system would work. -- TH

  Mace, Scott. "DSL's Devilish Details" BYTE 23(7) (July 1998): 72-80.
  -- As any Internet user knows, you can never have too much speed. This
  is certainly true of home connections. Even with a 56K modem, Web
  pages never seem to come up fast enough. But now that Asymmetric
  Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), or xDSL, or now simply DSL, is on the
  horizon, at least some relief may be at hand. But as this article
  points out, what exactly is "at hand" is still very much an open
  question. Perhaps the most telling evidence of uncertainty in the
  marketplace is depicted in the chart " ADSL Trials and Service
  Deployments," which identifies no fewer than 19 companies worldwide
  offering or soon to be offering ADSL service to a particular region of
  the world. Virtually all of them are offering a different mix of
  upstream and downstream speeds, from 9.6 Kbps upstream (this is
  progress?) to 5.5 Mbps (Singapore) and 7Mbps (Nova Scotia) downstream.
  Hmmm...all of a sudden cable modems are looking real good to me. -- RT

  Sowards, Steven W. "A Typology for Ready Reference Web Sites in
  Libraries" First Monday 3 (5) (1998)
  (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_5/sowards/) -- "Librarians
  and non-librarians alike may overlook important lessons about
  information management if they misinterpret the lessons of
  librarianship as being confined to the realm of paper," the author
  argues. He embarks on a tour and analysis of how librarians are
  organizing their Web-based reference guides, so be prepared to add
  lots of URLs to your bookmark file when you review this article. He
  makes several conclusions that will surely influence your own thoughts
  about what works -- and what doesn't -- on the Web. Moreover, it's
  refreshing to see someone use blunt language to advocate for the
  common sense approaches that librarians employ to help people. Here's
  an example: "After the difficulties we meet in navigating relatively
  large Web sites remind us why libraries -- which deal with truly large
  numbers of elements, running into the millions -- rely on redundancy
  and alternative methods to manage content." -- TH

 GENERAL

  Bales, Susan Nall. "Technology and Tradition: The Future's in the
  Balance" American Libraries 29(6) (June/July 1998): 82-86. --
  Following up on their report Buildings, Books, and Bytes: Libraries
  and Communities in the Digital Age (see the December 1996 issue of
  Current Cites), the Benton Foundation has conducted and analyzed six
  focus groups aimed at the issues identified in that report. Their
  findings will be released in a publication scheduled for release in
  July 1998 (watch Current Cites for news of its availability).
  Meanwhile, Bales shares some of their findings in this article. Among
  them are: "1) Libraries must be portrayed as high touch and high tech,
  and in that order, 2) Root all discussions of technology in books and
  reading, 3) Teach the public that the librarian is an information
  navigator, 4) Emphasize that the library you trust can help you make
  the transition to technology, and 5) Recognize the powerful
  connections Americans make between libraries and effective parenting."
  Libraries are at a critical juncture between the past and the future.
  How well librarians meld the traditional with the technical and
  present themselves to the public will dictate the role of libraries
  in modern society for decades to come. My advice is to get the
  original Benton report, this article, the new report when it comes
  out, read them, and pay close attention. -- RT

  DeJesus, Edmund X. "Year 2000 Survival Guide" BYTE 23(7) (July 1998):
  52-62. -- In the thorough and authoritative manner in which BYTE
  readers have come to expect, DeJesus outlines the good, the bad, and
  the downright ugly aspects of the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem. The bad
  news is that even if you start right now, your large legacy systems
  will probably not be ready for the millennium in time. The good news
  is that you if apply triage strategies and contingency plans well
  enough, you may just make it. Out of all the press out there on this
  problem, this article cuts through the rhetoric with a hot knife and
  summarizes key information in tables, diagrams, and timelines. And
  it's the timeline that helps provide comic relief amidst the disaster.
  Just think, on January 1, 29602 the Microsoft Windows NT file system
  will fail. Better start planning now, Bill. - RT

  Smith, K. Wayne, ed. OCLC 1967-1997: Thirty Years of Furthering Access
  to the World's Information New York: Haworth Press, 1998. -- When
  library historians review the major milestones of the profession over
  the last thirty years or so, there will be three developments that
  will stand head-and-shoulders above the rest: the creation of the
  Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format, the codification of the
  Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2nd edition (AACR2), and the rise of
  the Ohio College Library Center (OCLC, since changed to the Online
  Computer Library Center). OCLC has evolved to become the hub of
  library cataloging records, interlibrary loan transactions, and many
  other essential services for thousands of libraries across the United
  States and beyond. Although anyone not curious about OCLC would
  probably not be interested in this volume (simultaneously published as
  the Journal of Library Administration, 25 (2/3 - 4) (1998), it serves
  as a useful chronicle of a good idea that helped to transform
  libraries and library services. -- RT
    _________________________________________________________________

  Current Cites 9(6) (June 1998) ISSN: 1060-2356
  Copyright 1998 by the Library, University of California,
  Berkeley. All rights reserved.
  http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1998/cc98.9.6.html

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