New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2001), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918jab.001

New & Noteworthy

Conference of Directors of National LibrariesIssue Draft Resolution on the Preservation of Digital Heritage

The Committee on Digital Preservation of the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL) took the initiative to prepare a draft resolution on the preservation of the digital heritage for the 31st session of the General Conference of UNESCO, which began on 15 October 2001. The Dutch Government has now agreed to carry the draft resolution (DR) and has formulated a final version of the text, as an Amendment to the Draft Programme and Budget for 2002-2003 (31 C/5) (of UNESCO), see http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/news.html

The European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA) wishes to encourage institutions to gather support for the draft resolution. All those working in the heritage field are aware of the uncertain life span of digital materials and the extreme complexities involved in keeping born-digital materials accessible over decades or even centuries. This draft resolution is meant to state, loud and clear, what is really at stake and to encourage governments to take action now.

Therefore, if you can agree with the purpose and content of the draft resolution, we would ask you to inform your UNESCO representatives for instance at your national UNESCO Committee and/or Ministry of Culture of this initiative, to convey to them the importance of the issue, and to urge them to support the draft resolution at the UNESCO General Conference next October.

European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA): http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/

CHILDEWeb Site Goes Live

The CHILDE Web site, which is the culmination of the European Commission-funded CHILDE project, has now been launched. This site contains, among other things, a searchable library of over 1,000 digitised images from the project partners' collections of historic children's books. This is the first site of its kind in Europe, bringing together images, bibliographic and other data from various collections across the continent.

CHILDE Project: www.bookchilde.org

The Higher Education /British Library Task Forceon the Co-ordination of the Distributed National Collection of Research Resources

The report, Co-ordinating the Distributed National Collection of Research Resources: Report to the Research Libraries Group, is now available online.

Download the report from: http://www.bl.uk/concord/pdf_files/blhe-dnc.pdf

SafeWebStops Government Stopping You Viewing Web Sites

In this context, "safe surfing" does not mean protection from pornography, cookies, scripts, or sniffers. It means protection from governments (even employers and schools) that would prohibit you from viewing the sites you would like to view. You should be able to bypass their filters and, when you do, you should be able to evade detection and punishment. The more scientific and scholarly literature moves to the Internet, the more the freedom to surf will become a critical part of academic freedom. For non-academic sites and non-academic surfers, the freedom to surf is part of the freedom of inquiry, reading, and association.

SafeWeb is the leading provider of safe and anonymous surfing. PC World says nobody does it better and gave it a Best of the Web 2001 award. SafeWeb has been used to bypass government censorship in Afghanistan, China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries around the world. The Voice of America has just adopted SafeWeb to keep its Web site of news and digital radio accessible in China. In a September 10 interview, SafeWeb co-founder Steven Hsu estimated that SafeWeb transmits three million Web pages per day to users who would not otherwise have access to these pages.

Because SafeWeb is so effective at what it does, the governments of Bahrain, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates block access to it. Some corporations, schools, and libraries also block access to it. To thwart them, SafeWeb has launched Triangle Boy, a small desktop application run by volunteers in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network. (Yes, it is named after the artist on Seinfeld who painted triangles.) If government interference prevents you from accessing SafeWeb directly, then you can access it indirectly through the Triangle Boy network. If I am running Triangle Boy, for example, then you can access SafeWeb through me, and you can access prohibited sites anonymously through SafeWeb. SafeWeb sends the packets directly to your machine but disguises them so that they appear to come from me. If your censor decides I am pernicious and blacklists me, you jump to another Triangle Boy volunteer. The more volunteers in the P2P network, the harder it is for any censor to keep up.

If you access SafeWeb through me, you use my IP address more than my CPU. Only your requests for pages (URLs) pass through my system. Hence, there is only a negligible effect on my processor and bandwidth, and I can easily host many surfers at once.

To run Triangle Boy, you need an ethernet card and either Linux or Windows 2000. SafeWeb has made the code for Triangle Boy open source so that anyone can verify that it encrypts all its traffic, and protects both the surfer and the Triangle Boy host.

SafeWeb and Triangle Boy are free of charge, funded by non-tracking banner ads and by investors. One investor without equity is In-Q-Tel, the technology venture capital fund of the CIA.

(Report taken from the FOS Newsletter 9/21/01 by Peter Suber). http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/index.htm

SafeWeb: https://www.safeweb.com/

National Libraries of New Zealand and AustraliaReciprocal Access to Bibliographic Databases

The National Libraries of New Zealand and Australia have signed an agreement to provide customers of their respective national bibliographies – Te Puna and Kinetica – with reciprocal access. Te Puna users will have a gateway to Kinetica, and vice versa. Customers can copy records into their own databases, and this should reduce time spent on original cataloguing of materials.

Kinetica, which serves over 1,100 Australian libraries, contains more than 11 million records, over 2 million contributed by Australian libraries. More than 400 New Zealand libraries use Te Puna, a database with over 6 million bibliographic records from a variety of sources.

Te Puna: http://tepuna.natlib.govt.nz

National Science FoundationAwards $12-Million to Project for Sharing Science Resources Online

The National Science Foundation has awarded $12-million to a consortium of universities and non-profit education organizations to develop "middleware" that will allow scholars to share scientific instruments and data online, and to collaborate over the Internet.

Some of the applications envisioned by administrators of the project, known as the NSF Middleware Initiative, are sharing of supercomputing systems, telescopes, modeling software, databases, and other scientific resources.

The recipients are:

• •

  Educause, a non-profit association of colleges that are dedicated to furthering higher education through information technology.

• •

  The Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering.

• •

  Internet2, a consortium of more than 180 US universities working to develop the next generation of online technologies.

• •

  The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The center develops high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies.

• •

  The Southeastern Universities Research Association, a consortium of 59 universities in the southern USA.

• •

  The University of California at San Diego.

• •

  The University of Chicago.

• •

  The University of Wisconsin at Madison.

This item is taken from The Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com

National Science Foundation: http://www.nsf.gov/

The European CommissionCORDIS Focus Results Supplement

This supplement provides a selection of the most innovative and novel results and offers that have been developed by the projects under the Multimedia Content and Tools area of the EC research programme and a valuable insight of the broad range of activities accomplished or emerging from this area. It demonstrates a plethora of innovative ideas being turned into the multimedia products and services propelling tomorrow's digital economy and society. They provide an excellent basis for the knowledge-centred research in the future. You can find this publication at: ftp://ftp.cordis.lu/pub/focus/docs/res28.pdf

European Commission, DG Information Society, Cultural Heritage Applications: digicult@cec.eu.int

Contec Group InternationalLaunch .eLM Software system for Schools and Smaller Libraries

Contec Group International, long known in New Zealand and overseas for their Library Management software, has been head down for the last two and a half years on the development of a new system for schools and smaller libraries. With today's continuous march toward Internet functionality, CGI wanted to be able to offer a product that could be Web-friendly from the start, and have everything needed by the user built into the base software.

The .eLM generation is based on a fully integrated modern Windows development environment and is robust and more flexible than ever. It is a totally global product that offers more options and easy user configuration. It is fully MARC based, with a MARC cataloguer's input view that is completely unique; it can operate in MARC or non-visible MARC mode at will.

For organisations with multiple sites .eLM offers an integrated thin client facility from one central server and with access from all other sites via a LAN, WAN or Internet connection. This is very efficient in terms of network resource and requires no third-party software at all to provide full system functionality at remote sites. The Web OPAC makes the catalogue, borrower enquiries, reserve requests and other information available to anyone with a normal Web browser.

The system is completely multilingual, with languages other than English available as required. No software changes or different versions are necessary for other languages.

.eLM can be used in smaller academic or corporate or environments and can be configured with no re-programming to suit the organisation.

CGI 's .eLM suite is aimed at managing the organisation, distribution and retrieval of normal library materials as well as on-line multimedia, textbooks, sports equipment, science kits, musical instruments, furniture, conference rooms, projectors and any other resources. The system is available now, with development on-going.

Contec Group International: http://www.conlecds.com

Digital Object IdentifierFrankfurt Unveiling of "How to" Commercially Implement DOI

On October 10, 2001 9:30-12:00 p.m. in the Europa Room, Hall 4.0, three official DOI Registration Agencies demonstrated "how to":

• •

  register for a DOI Prefix and apply DOIs to content;

• •

  make every hyperlink a sales opportunity;

• •

  track usage of electronic content;

• •

  protect copyright using DOI with DRM technologies;

• •

  use DOIs to combine text, images and audio for e-books;

• •

  cross-link content on the Internet;

• •

  link to copies of publications on different servers;

• •

  point to different formats of a publication;

• •

  point to services associated with publications.

DOI Registration Agencies-CrossRef (USA), Content Directions (USA) and Enpia Systems (Korea) unveiled services that enabled publishers commercially to exploit digital intellectual property in a legal, controllable, and easy-to-manage way. The demonstrations focused on practical implementation. Publishers can now use a DOI to control, trade and sell their content electronically while protecting copyright. The DOI is a tool for digital commerce of content and has widening acceptance by the music, broadcast and film industries along with interest from online news and sports media services. Sharing information with partners in a value chain is essential to do business, but ownership of information, and location of electronic files, rights and related resources change frequently. Analogous to a bar code that identifies an object, a DOI permanently identifies a piece of intellectual property so it can be traded and sold independent from its physical location or URL address. Profiting from digital content is a risky business without a DOI. The DOI puts you in control of your content. You release a DOI to your partners, not the content. When you make a change to the content, immediately everyone everywhere accesses only the updated information. And when you decide to change third-party service providers or upgrade your internal systems, you can afford to do so, because all related resources, from the ISBN to the latest review, are accessible via the DOIs.

The DOI is a system for interoperably identifying and exchanging intellectual property in the digital environment. A DOI assigned to content enhances a content producer's ability to trade electronically. It provides a framework for managing content in any form at any level of granularity, for linking customers with content suppliers, for facilitating electronic commerce, and enabling automated copyright management for all types of media. The International DOI Foundation, a non-profit organization, manages development, policy and licensing of the DOI to registration agencies and technology providers and advises on usage and development of related services and technologies. The DOI system uses open standards with a standard syntax (ANSI/NISO Z39.84) and is currently used by leading international technology and content organizations.

For more information on the International Digital Object Identifier foundation contact info@doi.org

CrossRef. Contact: Amy Brand, abrand@crossref.org

Content Directions (CDI). Contact: David Sidman, info@contentdirections.com

Enpia Systems. Contact: Edward Ju, jcm@enpia.co.kr

McGraw-HillSelects ebrary as a Core Technology for Online eBook Courseware

ebrary, a leading provider of software and services for the online delivery of copyrighted content, has announced that McGraw-Hill Primis Custom Publishing has selected the ebrarian software solution as a core technology for its customized Primis Online eBook courseware delivered to students via the Internet. McGraw-Hill's Primis Online is leading the way with eBook customization, offering over 450 market-leading textbooks from which professors can create custom courseware. Students can access these customized course materials from a co-branded Web site hosted by ebrary, or download their custom eBooks directly from the Primis Online site. In addition, Primis Online's worldwide community of professors and students will benefit from research tools that make every word a learning object and from the ebrary collection of high-quality content.

Ebrary: http://www.ebrary.com

NISO and DCMIAnnounce Approval of Dublin Core Metadata Set

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) have announced the approval by ANSI of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (Z39.85-2001). DCMI began in 1995 with an invitational workshop in Dublin, Ohio that brought together librarians, digital library researchers, content providers, and text-markup experts to improve discovery standards for information resources. The original Dublin Core emerged as a small set of descriptors that quickly drew global interest from a wide variety of information providers in the arts, sciences, education, business, and government sectors.

Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use or manage an information resource. The Dublin Core was originally developed to be simple and concise, and to describe Web-based documents. The current standard defines 15 metadata elements for resource description in a cross-disciplinary information environment. These elements are: title, subject, description, source, language, relation, coverage, creator, publisher, contributor, rights, date, type, format, and identifier.

Commenting on the approval, Stuart Weibel, Executive Director of DCMI, said: "The approval of Z39.85 formalizes a long period of consensus building representing the efforts of hundreds of people, and all participants can take pride in what this community has built".

The standard is available for free downloading or hardcopy purchase at: http://www.techstreet.com/

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative: http://dublincore.org

NISO: http://www.niso.org