New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2004), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 21 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2004.23921cab.001

New & Noteworthy

IRIDESCENTNew Computer Application "Reads" Medical Literature, Finds Data Relationships

Bioinformatics researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas have developed a computer application that can "read" medical journals and scientific literature and make relevant associations so they can be summarized and scored for their potential relevance. The proprietary software, the basis for a new company called etexx Biopharmaceuticals (www.etexxbio.com), has already helped predict new uses for existing drugs to combat cardiac disease. The UT Southwestern researchers' work with this computer application appears in the journal Bioinformatics, Vol. 20 No. 3, and is available online.

The software, called IRIDESCENT, constructs a network of related objects starting with their co-occurrence within MEDLINE abstracts. To identify and evaluate what biomedical objects (such as genes, phenotypes, chemicals and diseases) have in common, most researchers read volumes of published scientific literature and papers using the MEDLINE database. IRIDESCENT aids researchers by allowing object sets within this network to be queried to identify shared, statistical relationships by comparing how frequently the sets appear relative to random probability.

MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's prime database covering medicine, nursing, dentistry, healthcare and the preclinical sciences. Indexed MEDLINE articles are growing exponentially, reflecting an explosion of information driven by technological improvements in generating data. The database currently contains more than 4,600 journals and a total of 12.7 million records written during the past 35 years, with another 500,000 abstracts added annually, the researchers said.

IRIDESCENT can identify general themes, along with statistically exceptional groupings within the list (such as drugs affecting the activity of a group of genes). Researchers also can infer how cohesive an experimental grouping is based upon relationships documented in the literature and identify missing members in a set by their relationship to the group as a whole.

The computer application is unique because it "emulates the scientific thought process" in researching data, said Dr Harold 'Skip' Garner, professor of biochemistry and internal medicine, who with former graduate student Dr Jonathan Wren developed the system.

www8.utsouthwestern.edu/utsw/cda/dept37389/files/144957.html

IBMWebFountain Software

IBM's new analytical software tool called WebFountain is designed to sift through very large amounts of data to discover patterns and extract data to assist with drawing conclusions about associations between words or different entities, similar to what librarians do, utilizing natural language processing. For a primer on WebFountain, Introduction to WebFountain: Very Large Scale UnCommon Sense for Text is available on the IBM Almaden Research Center Web site, as well as other information and documents.

IBM Almaden Research Center: www.almaden.ibm.com/webfountain/

Introduction to WebFountain: www.almaden.ibm.com/webfountain/resources/WebFountain_12.03.pdf

Polymer VisionVenture Advances Flexible Display Screen Technology

Flexible, lightweight display screens that can be rolled up into a small-sized housing when not actively used are now being produced by Polymer Vision, a division of Royal Philips Electronics of The Netherlands. The displays combine active-matrix polymer driving electronics with a reflective "electronic ink" front plane on an extremely thin sheet of plastic. Polymer Vision has been able to make organics-based QVGA (320 240 pixels) active matrix displays with a diagonal of 5in, a resolution of 85dpi and a bending radius of 2cm. The displays combine a 25 micron thick active-matrix back plane, containing the polymer electronics-based pixel driving, with a 200 micron front plane of reflective "electronic ink" developed by E Ink Corporation. Electronic ink-based displays are thin and flexible by construction, and are ideal candidates for reading-intensive applications because of their excellent, paper-like readability and extremely low power consumption. The resulting display screen represents the thinnest, and most flexible, active-matrix display reported to date. Philips publishes the current status of its technology in the 1’February issue of the scientific magazine Nature Materials.

The Polymer Vision venture is focused on the development of large-area displays so flexible that they can be integrated into everyday objects like a pen. The availability of such displays would greatly stimulate the advance of electronic books, newspapers and magazines.

http://polymervision.nl/

ERMDLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative

Electronic Resource Management (ERM) systems are well along in their development. Innovative Interfaces offers a module that is available as a standalone product or fully integrated into its Millennium system. There are open source developments in the works. It would appear to be the next "Big Thing".

The need for ERM systems grew out of a desire by libraries to manage their collections of electronic resources more effectively and efficiently. E-resources and especially e-journals require integrated management systems that can manage the ever-changing, complex interactions between libraries and content providers, including licensing agreements, and serving that content up to the users in as seamless an electronic environment as possible, including maintenance of linking mechanisms. Existing integrated library systems' acquisitions modules, designed for non-networked resources, did not have the required capabilities to effectively handle e-resources.

The Digital Library Federation, through its ERM initiative has been working on administrative metadata standards for use with ERMs. The Web site for this group offers an outline of the work of the group; working documents on functional requirements, entity relationship diagrams, a data element dictionary and more; a vendor product scan; and annotated links to related local projects and initiatives.

A Web Hub for Developing Administrative Metadata for Electronic Resource Management: www.library.cornell.edu/cts/elicensestudy/

Innovative Interfaces: www.iii.com/mill/digital.shtml

Internet-FirstPublishing Project Launched at Cornell

A new "open access" publisher, known as Internet-First University Press, launched recently with a catalog announcing original manuscripts, monographs (new and out-of-print), and, eventually, an online scholarly journal. The project will also publish multimedia materials, including videos and collections of photographs. Full texts of the books will be available free on the Web. J. Robert Cooke, Cornell professor of biological and environmental engineering and former dean of the faculty, is principal investigator for the project. Other leaders of the project are Kenneth M. King, former Cornell vice provost for information technology, and Ross Atkinson, associate university librarian for collections.

The Internet-First University Press is powered by DSpace, a groundbreaking digital institutional repository that captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes the intellectual output of a university's research faculty in digital formats. Developed jointly by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard (HP), DSpace is freely available to research institutions worldwide as an open source system that can be customized and extended. DSpace is designed for ease-of-use, with a Web-based user interface that can be customized for institutions and individual departments.

Among the universities building DSpace repositories are Columbia University, Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Ohio State University, the University of Cambridge, the University of Rochester, the University of Toronto, the University of Washington and many other institutions all over the world.

Inter-First University Press: http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/62

DSpace Federation: http://dspace.org/

LibDBLibrary and Asset Management System based on and inspired by FRBR

Morbus Iff has recently announced his latest project, LibDB, a free, open sourced, Perl/MySQL library and asset management system based on and inspired by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). Iff is designing LibDb to make it possible to "smartly and easily catalog your movies, books, magazines, comics, etc. into your own computerized 'personal library'." The project is being developed to support three different user profiles, as described in the LibDB Project Goals:

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  A casual user will care more about getting their data into the database, and less about how well the data respects formatting rules, uses proper and standardized subject headings, or whether their synopsis is spelled or punctuated correctly (or even exists, for that matter). Such users will rather edit the title of a book to reflect their copy, then add an alternate title to complement the one from the Library of Congress or OCLC. This user profile assumes they "know what they're doing", and any attempt by LibDB to teach them otherwise is an "error". A typical search from this user will be "show me all the horror movies I own."

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  A discriminating user wants to learn the "right way to do things", and they're more tolerant to learning new terms, definitions, and concepts if they believe it will make their database better, stronger, faster, harder. This profile is willing to enter as much data as possible (either manually, or by accepting aggregated data that LibDB provides), in an attempt to create a "personal Amazon" or ''personal IMDB" and reap the benefits thereof. There's a fine line here, of course: they probably won't be willing to remap their personal genres or subjects to the thousands of possible options from something like the Library of Congress. A typical search from this user will be "show me all the horror movies I own that were catered by Pizza Hut" (or possibly "had Alan Smithee as a cast or crew member").

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  A librarian or cataloger will probably want to know and select the granularity of whether data lives in a manifestation or expression, and they may require additional display fields that allow selection of in-use Library of Congress subject headings or similar topic map. On the other hand, they probably won't need as much inline help regarding what data to put in which fields, or the best way to format the entry according to the AACR or local style rulings. They'll likely need a higher level of acquisition management: allowing them to see which items have been loaned to patrons or other libraries, which items have broken bindings and are under repair, etc. A typical search will be "show me all the horror movies we have that are currently available for loaning, have been loaned more than ten times in the last fiscal year, and have been formally reviewed by Roger Ebert."

Art Rhyno, author of Using Open Source Systems for Digital Libraries and systems librarian at the University of Windsor called his initial look at LibDB "really impressive", and says Morbus Iff is "the only developer working on FRBR from a practical systems perspective right now".

Morbus Iff is the better-known alter ego of Kevin Hemenway, prolific writer on computer programming and technology, author of Spidering Hacks and coauthor of Mac OS X Hacks, and creator of disobey.com, which bills itself as "content for the discontented."

www.disobey.com/noos/LibDB/?HomePage

XreferPartners with Talis and Ex Libris to Integrate xreferplus

xrefer, provider of online ready reference services to academic, public and corporate libraries, announced that its xreferplus service has been fully integrated with Ex Libris' SFX and MetaLib systems. Mutual customers of both companies will benefit, as these libraries will be able to seamlessly incorporate xreferplus into their online offerings, providing easy access to online ready reference content while searching library holdings.

Boston College and St Joseph's University are just two of the companies' mutual customers who will integrate xreferplus into their MetaLib-facilitated library portals and SFX-enabled context-sensitive linking capabilities. Patrons at these institutions can search xreferplus' online ready reference content in addition to other resources in the library catalog under one, unified metasearch function. Further, while searching in any OpenURL-enabled database – full-text articles, abstracts or other resources – users can quickly link to a definition or other ready reference content.

xreferplus features 1.3 million authoritative, full-text entries that cover a wide range of subjects, including art, medicine, science, literature and more. The content is linked by a unique network of cross-references that cut across topics, titles and publishers, as well as text, image and sound files.

xrefer also announced that xreferplus has now been made fully compatible for use with TalisPrism, the resource discovery from the Talis Information Environment. This means that library users at any library operating the TalisPrism system and holding an xreferplus subscription will be able to view xreferplus content seamlessly via the TalisPrism interface.

Talis, whose customer base comprises major public libraries throughout the UK and Ireland, provides a number of simple and seamless services aimed at helping libraries to integrate digital resources into their holdings catalogue for better search and retrieval.

www.xrefer.com/home.jsp

Talis Information Environments: www.talis.com

Ex Libris: www.aleph.co.il/

UK National ArchivesAnnounces PRONOM System

The National Archives of the UK has announced that the PRONOM system is now available. PRONOM is a database of information about the technical dependencies upon which access to electronic records may rely. It contains information about the file formats in which electronic records may be stored, the software products required to create, render and migrate these formats, and the vendors who develop these products. It includes product support life cycle information, to facilitate technology watch within digital archives. The PRONOM database can be searched online, and reports produced in a variety of formats. The system currently holds details of c. 550 file formats, 250 software products, and 100 vendors, and records are being added on a regular basis. They also actively encourage the submission of new information for inclusion on PRONOM, and an online submission form is provided for this purpose.

The website also includes details of their plans for significant future developments to both the content and the functionality of the system.PRONOM was developed by The National Archives' Digital Preservation Department, as a tool to support TNA's own digital archive. However, they hope and anticipate that PRONOM will also provide a valuable resource for the wider digital preservation community.

PRONOM: www.records.pro.gov.uk/pronom

TASIReleases Two New Public Resources

Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) has added two new public resources to its existing list of resources. Searching the Internet for Images is a detailed guide to finding image resources on the Internet.

The first half provides general tips and advice on finding images; the second, specific pointers to: stock photographs, historical images, art images and scientific images. It contains more than 100 links that lead on to thousands of other image resources. Controlling Your Language: Links to Metadata Vocabularies provides links to more than 60 formal metadata vocabularies, most of which are available via the Internet. Brief introductions are given to the different types of vocabularies (e.g. classifications, subject headings, thesauri) and their uses.

TASI Resource Page: www.tasi.ac.uk/resources/resources.html

Digital LibraryPlanning Document Available

The Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues has made available a linked set of documents on Planning Digital Collections. The documents include an annotated list of examples of digital collections, organized by category, an annotated list of Web-based resources for planning digital collections, and a list of questions for planners of digital collections. Questions, suggestions and comments may be directed to Dr Elizabeth R. Blackmer (blackmere@wlu.edu).

http://home.wlu.edu/~blackmere/NSDL/Planning_Digital_collections.htm

Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage ProjectAnnounces New Interactive Exhibit

The Enoch Pratt Free Library and Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage Project have announced the release of an interactive exhibit commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 (www.mdch.org/fire). The Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 interactive exhibit includes historical photographs, video clips and contemporary views of the city. One can navigate through the stages of the fire, each stage textually and visually illustrating its development. The exhibit juxtaposes historical and contemporary photographs, offering a sense of Baltimore before the fire, the destruction that followed and Baltimore of today. Approximately 1,000 photographic prints, maps, clippings and published documents relating to the fire of 1904 have been digitized from the Enoch Pratt Free Library's extensive collections. Digital versions of this larger body of materials, along with the materials contributed by otherinstitutions, will be available at www.mdch.org/

The Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage Project Web site also contains list of links to digitization resources and documents related to guidelines and models used for digitization projects.

Maryland Digital Cultural Heritage Project: www.mdch.org/

Database of Virtual ArtNow Publicly Available

The Database of Virtual Art has been developed to specifically document digital installation art. This type of art has rapidly evolved over the last decades and is emerging as a contemporary art form. In close cooperation with established media artists, researchers and associated institutions, a complex overview of the immersive, interactive, telematic and genetic arts is being developed. This new documentation instrument, appropriate to the needs of processual art, is built in Open Source Technology. It is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Science (BMBF).The Database of Virtual Art is both an evolving research instrument and a work in progress, changing according to the ongoing development of the field. Its documentation system will also serve as a predecessor for the systematic preservation of this art. It is a fact that virtual art is totally dependent upon storage media, which presents preservation challenges.

Considering the fundamental dif-ferences of virtual art, the documentation system reaches beyond traditional data by especially focusing on information about technical requirements, installation settings, blueprints, software-hardware configurations, interface and displays. Video documentation has strategically been given a core role, due to its ability to show the processual nature of these works with more than 100 videos created by the artists. Institutions displaying media art and media theory researchers also hold a prominent place in the database. The web interface allows the artists, researchers and institutions to post the information themselves, so that gradually an elaborate information network and communication platform grows.

http://virtualart.hu-berlin.de (Web site chiefly in German; best viewed under mozilla)

UCLAInternational Study of Internet Use Finds High Levels of Trust in Online Information

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) World Internet Project, the first survey of its kind to produce international comparison data on the social, political and economic effects of Internet use and non-use, has recently released its first findings. Among many major findings, the study reveals:

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  That the "digital divide" exists in many countries around the world, and is especially apparent in the gap between the number of men and women who use the Internet.

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  Surprisingly high levels of online use among the poorest citizens in all of the survey countries – in spite of major divisions in Internet use between the richest and the poorest.

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  That information on the Internet is viewed as generally reliable and accurate by a large percentage of users in most countries.

The World Internet Project, created and organized by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, which also analyzed the international comparisons, includes studies that were conducted primarily in 2002 and 2003 by universities and research institutes in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the USA.

The study found that in several technologically developed countries, the gender gap of Internet use in the countries surveyed is surprisingly large – in some cases almost twice as many men as women use the Internet. The gap was as high as 20.2 percent in Italy (men, 41.7 percent; women, 21.5 percent) to as low as 1.6 percent in Taiwan (where 25.1 percent of men are Internet users, compared to 23.5 percent of women). In the USA, 73.1 percent of men use the Internet compared to 69 percent of women – about half the average gap of countries in the UCLA World Internet Project.

In most of the countries surveyed, more than half of Internet users say that "most or all" of the information they find online is reliable and accurate. Users in Korea have the highest level of trust in online information, with 69.7 percent saying that most or all of the information on the Internet is reliable and accurate. In the USA, 53.1 percent of users say that most or all of the information they find online is reliable and accurate, while 7.1 percent say that none or only some of the information is reliable and accurate.

Findings from Year Four of the UCLA Internet Project will be released in the spring. To download the findings of the first World Internet Project, visit www.ccp.ucla.edu

Grunwald AssociatesTwo Million American Children have their own Web sites, New Survey Finds

According to data recently released from "Children, Families and the Internet," a survey by Grunwald Associates, more than two million American children ages 6 -17 have their own personal Web sites today. This figure represents fully 10 percent of the 23 million kids who have Internet access from home today – a threefold increase since 2000. The study further reveals that girls are significantly more likely than boys to have their own sites today: 12.2 percent of girls online from home have sites today, versus only 8.6 percent of boys. Four in ten children online from home say they either have or plan to build their own sites. With the majority of kid site planners saying they will build within the next year or sooner, the researchers project that more than six million American children – more than one in four of kids online from home – will have their own personal Web sites by 2005.

When American children go online from school, "Children, Families and the Internet" shows that many children are disappointed in the experience. Of children with broadband Internet access at home, 76 percent say that their home connection is faster than their school connection.

Grunwald Associates has been collecting longitudinal data on American children's computer and Internet usage since 1995, and the research has consistently shown children are getting increasingly sophisticated about how they use the medium in every way.

http://grunwald.com/surveys/cfi/overview.html

Information SchoolFor the Twenty-furst Century

The University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences (SIS) has announced that–with the help of a $50,000 grant from the AT&T Foundation – it will launch "Information School for the 21st Century," a study to evaluate how emergent information, technology, and societal factors will shape information schools for the foreseeable future.

The SIS will undertake the strategic study with the purpose of producing a description of what it believes the "Information School for the 21st Century" should be. It also will recommend the best possible alignment of future educational programs and curriculum innovations with the emerging realities of the information economy.

Full text of press release: www2.sis.pitt.edu/updates/news/01_26_2004.html