Digital Libraries: log file

(For me, a log file is a necessity (a) to keep track of my own activities and thoughts, and (b) to be able to find things again. I'm constantly experimenting with the medium, but the basic idea serves me well. An index or mapping or search utility would be a nice augmentation, but I haven't made the time to figure out how to construct such a thing. This one is chronological, but I sometimes make them in LIFO order.

(This file is continued in a 2003- log)

15 February 2001
Tom Whaley inquired if I'd be interested in team-teaching a Spring term seminar in Digital Libraries, and of course I am. A bit of preliminary trolling on 'global digital library' to get started --seems there was a flurry of interest in the late 90s, but it's been a bit quieter recently.
What does the term 'digital library' connote to a Computer Science major? 'Full text online' is one part, surely, but the more interesting and challenging questions are in the back end of searching and retrieving, and in the partitioning of information landscapes that librarians think of as 'indexing'.
If I think about outstanding projects that could serve as digital library examples, the most enormous and confusing of the moment has to do with the Human Genome Project. Vast amounts of essential but highly specialized "genetic cartography... [consisting of] the huge mass of base pairs that are coming out of the dozen or so genome-sequencing centres, and that are inexorably, and excitingly, accumulating towards the total of 3,000 million. Genes and computers are going to be an integral influence on our lives as scientists, patients, parents and citizens for many generations to come. " (Peter Little "Human genetics: A map for cyberspace" Nature 395, 842 - 843 [1998]). And how are we to make sense of this, make the trove accessible, teach the use of the resource? And who gets to think about such questions?
(See http://genome.wustl.edu/cgi-bin/ace/GSCMAPS.cgi for one on-ramp, and to get a sense for how the information is arranged hierarchically)
Another set of cases could be drawn from bibliographic databases which exemplify the essence of the Digital Library because they facilitate access to scientific literatures, notably PubMed, Web of Science, and SciFinder Scholar. Each handles an enormous task in access and retrieval, and all have developed very important added value (Related Records, linking to full text, linking to other data resources). JSTOR is another important project, centered on archiving of vast quantities of journal backfiles, and providing search capability in full text.

A resource to explore: Journal of the American Society for Information Science bridges at least part of the chasm between CompSci and InfoSci (unfortunately our subscription ended in 1994, but the link goes to the Search page for the journal).

Alexandria Digital Library Project at UC Santa Barbara houses the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT), and is the tip of the geodata iceberg that I've been exploring elsewhere.

6 March
Announcement of the  5th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries
 Dublin Core Initiative home page
Japan's  National Institute of Informatics

13 March
 DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries

I did some searches on EBSCO and came up with (and printed) a collection of articles that touch on different facets of digital libraries. Some might be on-ramps for projects:

Scriver and Nowacki
Genomics, mutations and the Internet: the naming and use of parts
J Inher Metab Dis 22:519530 (1999)

Berry, Drmac and Jessup
Matrices, vector spaces, and information retrieval
SIAM Review 41:335-362 (1999)

Lopes de Olivera, Goncalves and Medeiros
A framework for designing and implementing the user interface of a geographic digital library
Int Jour on Digital Libraries 2:190-206 (1999)

Goncalves and Medeiros
Constructing gerographic digital libraries using a hypermedia framework
Multimedia Tolls and Applications 8:341-356 (1999)

Jankowski, Jankowska and Stasik
A map browser for an internet-based GIS data repository
Transactions in GIS 5:5-18 (2001)

Frew, Freeston, Freitas et al.
The Alexandria Digital Library architecture
Int J on Digital Libraries 2:259-268 (2000)

Kim and Choi
XML: how it will be applied to digital library systems
The Electronic Library 18:183-189 (2000)

Jones, Cunningham, McNab and Boddie
A transaction log analysis of a digital library
Int J on Digital Libraries 3:152-169 (2000)

I also found some that are more general, from library journals:
Watstein, Calarco and Ghaphery
Digital library: keywords
Reference Services Review 27:344-352 (1999)

Sreenivasulu
The role of a digital librarian in the management of digital information systems
The Electronic Library 18:12-20 (2000)

Majka
The "great exchange": the economic promise and peril of the digital library
The Bottom Line 13:68-73 (2000)

Jantz
Providing access to unique information sources: a reusable platform for publishing bibliographic databases on the Web
Library Hi Tech 18:28-36 (2000)

It's interesting how much premium there is on recent dates, how very vieux jeu an article from 1997 can look.

16 March
 Bioinformatics diverted me for a few minutes...

 GenomeWeb ("...a collection of stuff that may interest those of you writing bioinformatics programs"), and  http://bioinformatics.org/

and

Medical libraries, bioinformatics, and networked information: a coming convergence?

                         By Clifford Lynch, Ph.D.
                         Executive Director

                         Coalition for Networked Information
                         21 Dupont Circle, Suite #800
                         Washington, DC 20036-1109

Libraries will be changed by technological and social developments that are fueled by information technology, bioinformatics, and networked information. Libraries in highly focused settings such as the health sciences are at a pivotal point in their development as the synthesis of historically diverse and independent information sources transforms health care institutions. Boundaries are breaking down between published literature and research data, between research databases and clinical patient data, and between consumer health information and professional literature. This paper focuses on the dynamics that are occurring with networked information sources and the roles that libraries will need to play in the world of medical informatics in the early twenty-first century.
                         Lynch C. Medical libraries, bioinformatics, and networked information: a coming convergence? Bull Med
                         Libr Assoc 1999 Oct;87(4):408-14.
29 March
A summary of advice on design of a library for Biosphere 2, in the wake of a site visit the previous week

2 April
 euGenes (Genomic Information for Eukaryotic Organisms) ...see  Preliminary data structure and start-up information

 Data and tools for Human Genome data from UVa

 NCBI Portal for Human Genome Sequencing

W. Jang, H.-C. Chen, H. Sicotte, G.D. Schuler.
Making effective use of genomic sequence data.
Trends Genet 15, 284-286 (1999).

 sunsite.berkeley.edu ("The Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE builds digital collections and services while providing information and support to digital library developers worldwide") and Collections --like  Mapping the Icelandic Genome (and see  For Sale: Iceland's Genetic History by Oksana Hlodan)

 Definition and Purposes of a Digital Library from sunsite

 DIGLIB ("A discussion list for digital libraries researchers and librarians")

 Archive of the XML4Lib Electronic Discussion

 Meta-Information Models for Georeferenced Digital Library Collections (Kate Beard, Terence Smith and Linda Hill)

 BioKleisli: A Digital Library for Biomedical Researchers --an example from CiteSeer ("ResearchIndex is a scientific literature digital library that aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of scientific literature, and to provide improvements in functionality, usability, availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness. Rather than creating just another digital library, ResearchIndex provides algorithms, techniques, and software that can be used in other digital libraries. ResearchIndex indexes Postscript and PDF research articles on the Web.")

 Raptor Information System from USGS

Playa Lakes and the Ogallala Aquifer (Environmental Digital Library Project, Bill Johnson and Marina Oliver)

 PubSCIENCE : A Cutting-Edge Component for a National Digital Library (Lowell Langford)

 BUILDING THE DIGITAL RESEARCH LIBRARY : PRESERVATION AND ACCESS AT THE HEART OF SCHOLARSHIP
(Peter S. Graham, Associate University Librarian Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey)

 Assembling the World's Biggest Library on Your Desktop (Science Volume 281, Number 5384 Issue of 18 Sep 1998, pp. 1784 - 1786)

3 April
Knowledge management
Agresti WW
ADVANCES IN COMPUTERS, VOL 53: 171-283 2000

Digital libraries: Social issues and technological advances
Chen HC, Houston AL
ADVANCES IN COMPUTERS, VOL 48: 257-314 1999
(QA76 .A24)

What exactly is a digital library? A good general definition is that it is an entity concerned with "the creation of information sources and the movement of [that] information across global networks" [Adam and Yesha 1996] specifically identifying and delivering relevant information to interested parties. A digital library could be characterized as "a collection of distributed autonomous sites (servers) that work together to give the consumer the appearance of a single cohesive collection" [Adam and Yesha 2996]. In practise, each site will most likely store a large amount of information in a wide variety of formats on a wide variety of storage media... Individuals accessing the information will have a wide range of expertise in key access-related areas such as computer literacy, collection navigation abilities, and domain knowledge.

Digitral libraries are characterized by "collaborative support, digital document preservation, distributed database management, hypertext, information filtering, information retrieval, instrctional modules, intellectual property rights, multimedia information services, question answering and reference services, resource discovery and selective dissemination of information" [Fox and Marchionini 1998]. They allow information to be accessed globally, copied error-free, stored compactly, and searched rapidly... (pp261-262)

 Taming MEDLINE With Concept Spaces (Science Volume 281, Number 5384, Issue of 18 Sep 1998, p. 1785) ...and see  Medspace (University of Illinois Digital Library project)

 Accessing Space Science Data Using the Internet ("a collaboration of the Radio Astronomy Imaging Lab (Astronomy) and NCSA", 1997-1999)

 Introduction to Data Mining (Andy Pryke) and  Data Mining Related Web Links from IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)

 Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2 and  National Coordination Office for Information Technology R&D

From the Advertising Supplement in Science 16 March 2001:

Handling the vast amounts of scientific data that emerge from high throughput systems and combinatorial chemistry experiments threatens to create its own roadblock in drug discovery. Here bioinformatics makes its appearance. Software specialists and the occasional life scientist have developed powerful computer programs to help researchers organize and analyze structural and functional data. Scientific teams mine the data to identify similarities and differences in the sequences of genes and proteins within individual species and between different species. (pg 2196)
...and an ad from the same issue:
Bioinformatics Scientist
AxCell Biosciences is offering a high-impact, high-profile position with excellent opportunity for advancement. Primary responsibilities include data mining (e.g. protein pathway and SNP analysis) and new target identification; other responsibilities will include designing and/or evaluation of new algorithms, implementing new computational tools, and computer PCR primer design. The successful candidate will also work closely with wet-bench scientists in analyzing public domain and in-house protein DNA.

Candidates should have 1-2 years experience in Bioinformatics and possess an MS or Ph.D. in the biological sciences or computational field. The position requires knowledge of advanced data mining techniques (e.g. HMMs, PSI-BLAST, Smith-Waterman). The candidate must be proficient in PERL, C++, and/or JAVA and be experiences with UNIX. Experience with SQL and visually oriented mining systems is also highly desirable.

Basic overview of BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) from NCBI, and Blast Tutorial

 Saccharomyces Genome Database at Stanford

 Using Computers in Molecular Biology (NYU Medical Center)

 Introduction to Human Genome Computing via the World Wide Web (Lincoln D. Stein)

from the Conclusion:
The Web has already revolutionized the way that biologists work and, to some extent, think. The next few years will see even more dramatic changes as the databases, analytic tools, and perhaps even the software used to acquire and manage primary data merge together. As large scale genomic sequencing swings into full gear, there will be a need for tools to allow physically distant collaborators to edit and annotate sequences, run analyses, share their results with the community, and take issue with other laboratories' findings. The Web will provide the essential infrastructure for those tools.


 http://bio.perl.org/ ("The Bioperl Project is an international association of developers of open source Perl tools for bioinformatics, genomics and life science research.")

 BUBL Link: Genome Mapping (and see  general BUBL page for "Selected Internet resources covering all academic subject areas" and  Digital Libraries page )

 Bioinformatics in the Human Genome Project, and  Computing the Genome (Ed Uberbacher) --but also look at  Human Genome -The Biggest Sellout in Human History (Mae-Wan Ho)

 Libraries in the Digital Future (A review by Michael A. Keller of Books, Bricks, and Bytes: Libraries in the Twenty-First Century [Stephen R. Graubard and Paul LeClerc, Eds.] Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, 1998)

What are digital libraries? Competing visions
Borgman CL
 INFORMATION PROCESSING & MANAGEMENT 35 (3): 227-243 MAY 1999

Abstract:
Research and practice in digital libraries (DL) has exploded worldwide in the 1990s. Substantial research funding has become available, libraries are actively involved in DL projects and conferences, journals and online news lists proliferate. This article explores reasons for these developments and the influence of key players, while speculating on future directions. We find that the term 'digital library' is used in two distinct senses. In general, researchers view digital libraries as content collected on behalf of user communities, while practicing librarians view digital libraries as institutions or services. Tensions exist between these communities over the scope and concept of the term 'library'. Research-oriented definitions serve to build a community of researchers and to focus attention on problems to be addressed; these definitions have expanded considerably in scope throughout the 1990s. Library community definitions are more recent and serve to focus attention on practical challenges to be addressed in the transformation of research libraries and universities. Future trends point toward the need for extensive research in digital libraries and for the transformation of libraries as institutions. The present ambiguity of terminology is hindering the advance of research and practice in digital libraries and in our ability to communicate the scope and significance of our work. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Now that we have digital collections, why do we need libraries?
 Borgman CL
 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ASIS ANNUAL MEETING  34: 27-33 1997
  Abstract:
We briefly examine the question, "If we have the Internet and digital collections, why do we need libraries?." The challenge begs several fundamental questions, such as "What is a digital collection?," "What is a library?," "What is a librarian?," and "Why do we need digital collections or libraries?" Digital collections are sets of information resources collected and organized on behalf of a community of users. Libraries are rapidly-evolving institutions that select, collect, organize, preserve, conserve, and provide access to information in many media, to many communities of users. Librarians are information professionals that support these activities, and they may work in units other than libraries and have job titles other than "librarian." The roles of information professionals are expanding as information institutions such as libraries, archives, museums, universities, and schools converge and partner with each other. The challenge for the digital age is to tailor information technologies to support the activities of individual communities of users, while creating a globally-distributed information infrastructure that enables systems and services to interoperate. Whether we need libraries and librarians is an open question that depends on the definition and scope of the institutions, functions, and professions involved. We need a new generation of information professionals with a blend of expertise in human behavior and technology to understand the relationship between collections, communities, and content. The present and future communities of educators and professionals must be articulate about these relationships if we are to address. the challenge that this seemingly-simple
question represents.
Digital libraries: Situating use in changing information infrastructure
Bishop AP, Neumann LJ, Star SL, Merkel C, Ignacio E, Sandusky RJ
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE 51 (4): 394-413 MAR 1 2000
Abstract:
How users meet infrastructure is a key practical, methodological challenge for digital library design. This article presents research conducted by the Social Science Team of the federally funded Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois, Data were collected from potential and actual users of the DLI test-bed - containing the full text of journal articles-through focus groups, interviews and observations, usability testing, user registration and transaction logging, and user surveys. Basic results on nature and extent of testbed use are presented, followed by a discussion of three analytical foci relating to digital library use as a process of assemblage: document disaggregation and reaggregation; information convergence; and the manner in which users confront new genres and technical barriers in information systems. The article also highlights several important methodological and conceptual issues that frame research on social aspects of digital library use.
Toward a worldwide digital library
Fox EA, Marchionini G
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM 41 (4): 28-32 APR 1998

Strategic directions in electronic commerce and digital libraries: Towards a digital agora
Adam N, Yesha Y
ACM COMPUTING SURVEYS  28 (4): 818-835 DEC 1996

Information retrieval in digital libraries: Bringing search to the net ***
Schatz BR
SCIENCE  275 (5298): 327-334 JAN 17 1997 (in an issue centered on  Bioinformatics )

Abstract:
A digital library enables users to interact effectively with information distributed across a network. These network information systems support search and display of items from organized collections. In the historical evolution of digital libraries, the mechanisms for retrieval of scientific literature have been particularly important. Grand visions in 1960 led first to the development of text search, from bibliographic databases to full-text retrieval. Next, research prototypes catalyzed the rise of document search, from multimedia browsing across local-area networks to distributed search on the Internet. By 2010, the visions will be realized, with concept search enabling semantic retrieval across large collections.
 Bioinformatics: How to Get Databases Talking the Same Language (Nigel Williams) Science Volume 275, Number 5298, Issue of 17 Jan 1997, pp. 301-302
and  Mathematical and Computational Challenges in Population Biology and Ecosystems Science (Simon A. Levin,  Bryan Grenfell, Alan Hastings, Alan S. Perelson) Science Volume 275, Number 5298, Issue of 17 Jan 1997, pp. 334-343.

 The Babel of Bioinformatics (Teresa K. Attwood) Science Volume 290, Number 5491, Issue of 27 Oct 2000, pp. 471-473

 Bioinformatics in the Information Age (Sylvia J. Spengler) Science Volume 287, Number 5456, Issue of 18 Feb 2000, pp. 1221-1223

 Bioinformatics--Trying to Swim in a Sea of Data (David S. Roos) Science Volume 291, Number 5507, Issue of 16 Feb 2001, pp. 1260-1261

4 April
 SDSC links on Digital Libraries which connects to  Data-intensive Computing at this supercomputer center:

The Data-intensive Computing thrust is building a national digital library that accelerates the publication of scientific data. This requires the integration of distributed persistent digital archives, hierarchical storage systems, databases, data-handling systems, and digital libraries into integrated scientific information repositories.
 Integrated Digital Libraries Will Change How Research Is Conducted

 WWW Virtual Libraries (directory) and  search utility

 Telesophy (Bruce Schatz, from his time at Bellcore) ...and see also Michael Caplinger's An information system based on distributed objects and Schatz's Keynote Plenary Lecture from ASIS 1995 meeting ("Information Analysis in the Net: The Interspace of the Twenty-First Century")

 Mouse Genome Informatics

 Social Informatics ("...refers to the body of research and study that examines social aspects of computerization -- including the roles of information technology in social and organizational change and the ways that the social organization of information technologies are influenced by social forces and social practices. [1] SI includes studies and other analyses that are labelled as social impacts of computing, social analysis of computing, studies of computer-mediate communication (CMC), information policy, "computers and society," organizational informatics, interpretive informatics, and so on.") ...and see  School of Informatics at Indiana University

 What is Informatics? (general statement from University of Edinburgh)

 Medical Informatics FAQ

 Introduction to Medical Informatics (electronic course notes from Columbia)

 Center for Biological Informatics of USGS

When information science encountered the capabilities of computers and telecommunications in the late twentieth century, the discipline of informatics came into being. As does information science, informatics addresses the collection, classification, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of recorded knowledge. Application of computers and telecommunications—especially the Internet and the World Wide Web — to these functions has created new opportunities and new challenges for information management and delivery. And in the natural sciences, information science and computing technology are joined by the relatively new technology of geographic information systems to allow for an even greater depth of knowledge to be stored and applied.
 Genome Informatics (outline of a Cold Spring Harbor course in Lincoln Stein's lab, summer 2000)

5 April
 Informatics and Family Medicine (Richard Rathe)

 Public Health Informatics (from NLM Current Bibliographies in Medicine)

 Herman Tolentino's Medical Informatics (definition, timeline, etc.)

 Data Mining Goes Multidimensional (Mark Hettler, Healthcare Informatics March 1997)

...online analytical processing (OLAP), in which servers store data in multiple dimensions, opening a world of opportunity for data-mining across the enterprise... OLAP refers to the ability to analyze data by viewing it in a multidimensional manner. The data is not arranged in two-dimensional arrays of rows and columns with each data attribute corresponding to a column in a table, as is the paradigm for the popular relational model. Rather, the OLAP model treats each attribute as a dimension in a  multidimensional structure, with each data element as the intersection of these dimensions.
 Eugene Garfield on 'informatics' (Current Contents, Jan 27 1986)

 What is Structural Informatics? (James F. Brinkley Department of Biological Structure University of Washington, Seattle)

 A Brief History of the Human Genome Project (George Cahill --chapter 1 from: Gert, Bernard et al. 1996. "Morality and the New Genetics: A Guide for Students and Health Care Providers.". Boston, MA: Jones and Bartlett)

 Bioinformatics Tools for Whole Genomes (Annu. Rev. Genomics Hum. Genet. 2000. 1:251-279)

It has been noted that "...genome sequencing risks becoming expensive molecular stamp-collecting without the tools to mine the data and fuel hypothesis-driven
laboratory-based research" (123). Such tools are emerging from the nascent science of bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary field that combines molecular biology with computer science and software engineering (143). As this review illustrates, bioinformatics is crucial to transforming the torrent of raw data into biological knowledge.
'future content':   M Fonstein Bioinformatics: Deciphering the Information Deluge Annu. Rev. Micrbiol. 2002

 Bioinformatics for Biodiversity issue of Science (29 Sept 2000)

6 April
Some definitions of Informatics:

M. Katherine Hayles:
By "informatics" (a term appropriated from Donna Haraway, who uses it in a somewhat different sense), I mean the material, technological, economic, and social structures that make the information age possible. Informatics includes the late capitalist mode of flexible accumulation; the hardware and software that have merged telecommunications with computer technology; the patterns of living that emerge from and depend upon access to large data banks and instantaneous transmission of messages; and changing habits of posture, eye focus, hand motions, and neural connections that are reconfiguring the human body in conjunction with information technologies. (from  "The Materiality of Informatics " Configurations 1992, 1.1:147-170 [http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/configurations/1.1hayles.html])
 Guide to Medical Informatics, The Internet and Telemedicine (Enrico Coiera) --"The Guide is written for healthcare professionals who wish to understand the principles of informatics, and the clinical applications of information and communication systems."

 Genome Informatics I: Community Databases (Report of the Invitational DOE Workshop on Genome Informatics, 26-27 April 1993) (from  Division of Biomedical Information Sciences at Johns Hopkins

Sheila D. Creth's "THE ELECTRONIC LIBRARY: Slouching Toward the Future, or Creating a New Information Environment (University of Ulster, 25th September 1996)

 Annie on 'informatics' and Annie on 'bioinformatics' and  Jeffrey Schulz' posting to a listserv (1994)

16 April
 Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (article in 1 Feb 2001 issue of Nature)

 http://www.knowledgecenters.org/  Data Warehousing Knowledge Center, containing text of articles (register to access)
library subjects, giving a sense of terminology in and around 'data warehousing':
      Accounting
      Application Development
      Business Intelligence
      Data Acquisition
      Data Analysis
      Data Back-Up & Recovery
      Data Delivery
      Data Management
      Data Mart
      Data Mining
      Data Modeling
      Data Quality
      Data Storage
      Data Visualization
      Data Warehouse Design
       DOLAP
       EIS
      Finance/Financial Analysis
     General
      Hardware
      Information Alerts
      Information Filtering
      Information Retrieval
      Knowledge Management
      Marketing
      MDBMS
      Metadata
      Middleware
      MOLAP
      OLAP
       Query
       Query Accelerators
       RDBMS
      Report
      ROLAP
      Scalability
      Statistical Analysis
      Supply Chain
      Web Functionality

 Data Warehousing Information Center ("A data warehouse is a copy of transaction data specifically structured for querying and reporting.")

 An Introduction to Data Warehousing
 The Chess Pieces (Excerpt from The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit : Expert Methods for Designing, Developing, and Deploying Data Warehouses)
 The Need for Text Mining in Business Intelligence (Dan Sullivan)

 Text Mining Technology (Daniel Tkach, 1998 [IBM White Paper])

23 April
 XML Image Standard (developing support for binary data formats, now not supported... consider what this could mean...)

24 April
In today's Science there's mention of a bibliography on Photonic & Sonic Band-Gap ("...latticelike structures, which transmit specific light or sound waves. The materials may someday be used for optical Internet networks or walls that can screen certain sounds...").

 Data Standards on the Horizon from the same issue of Science (managing genome sequencing data: "right now there is no standard format for transferring microarray data between scientists and no rules for how a microarray experiment should be described in a publication.")

Where does the term 'metadata' turn up? Only 3 occurrences in title/abstract for Science, 7 in full text.
Only ONE in Annual Reviews (in J.K. VanDyk Impact of the Internet on Extension Entomology Annu. Rev. Entomol. 2000 45: 795-802).
35 in PubMed, the earliest in 11986 (Long JM. The POSCH data processing experience. The problem of metadata. J Med Syst. 1986 Apr;10(2):173-83).
2 in JSTOR's General Science collection (1987 and 1988, both from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London)
4 in MathSciNet
39 in Lexis/Nexis 'News' in the last 6 months, and 147 throughout
...and 4 times in Annie (one of them Arms 2000; also  Introduction to metadata : pathways to digital information / edited by Murtha Baca
 Publisher[Los Angeles, Calif.] : Getty Information Institute, c1998 Science Library QA76.9.D3 I599 1998)

25 April
An essential site, found in class yesterday:  http://www.ifla.org/II/metadata.htm (this in the context of exploring ways to find out about metadata). Others:

 http://www.w3.org/Metadata/ ("Metadata is machine understandable information for the web...", which is just a fraction of what it are...), and  Metadata Activity and a USGS  USGS Metadata FAQ

 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/ ("Metadata is structured data about data. Increasingly the term refers to any data used to aid the identification, description and location of networked electronic resources...")

 http://www.blm.gov/gis/nsdi.html (MetaData and WWW Mapping Home Page), and   Metadata Tools for Geospatial Data ("...summaries of most of the known metadata tools used for documenting geospatial data and serving geospatial metadata...")

 http://www.fgdc.gov/metadata/contstan.html ("The objectives of the standard are to provide a common set of terminology and definitions for the documentation of digital geospatial data...") and Metadata Primer from NSGIC (National States Geographic Information Council)

 Dublin Core Metadata InitiativeMetadata for the Masses , and  Dublin Core Metadata Template ("If you use the metadata created by this form and follow our examples, term lists and recommendations, your HTML documents will carry high quality metadata...")

 http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/ (IMS Global Learning Consortium Meta-data Specification... XML connection...

 Reggie, the Metadata Editor (an applet: "If the resource to be described has a web page, enter the URL. Reggie will extract the META tags from the page and attempt to add them to the most appropriate fields for the chosen schema. For example, if you choose the Dublin Core schema and the page contains a GILS Title META tag, this metadata will be added to the Dublin Core Title field...")

 http://www.mdcinfo.com/ ("The need for such standards arises as metadata, or the information about the enterprise data emerges as a critical element in effective data management. Different tools, including data warehousing, distributed client/server computing, databases (relational, OLAP, OLTP...), integrated enterprise-wide applications, etc... must be able to cooperate and make use of metadata generated by each other...")

 Metadata: The Foundations of Resource Description (Stuart Weibel D-Lib Magazine, July 1995:

The explosive growth of interest in the Internet in recent years has created a digital extension of the academic research library for certain kinds of materials. Valuable collections of texts, images and sounds from many scholarly communities -- collections that may even be the subject of state-of-the-art discussions in these communities--now exist only in electronic form and may be accessible from the Internet. Knowledge regarding the whereabouts and status of this material is often passed on by word of mouth among members of a given community. For outsiders, however, much of this material is so difficult to locate that it is effectively unavailable... indexes are most useful in small collections within a given domain. As the scope of their coverage expands, indexes succumb to problems of large retrieval sets and problems of cross disciplinary semantic drift. Richer records, created by content experts, are necessary to improve search and retrieval. Formal standards such as the TEI Header and MARC cataloging) will provide the necessary richness, but such records are time consuming to create and maintain, and hence may be created for only the most important resources.  An alternative solution that promises to mediate these extremes involves the creation of a record that is more informative than an index entry but is less complete than a formal cataloging record. If only a small amount of human effort were required to create such records, more objects could be described, especially if the author of the resource could be encouraged to create the description. And if the description followed an established standard, only the creation of the record would require human intervention; automated tools could discover these descriptions and collect them.
 RDF and Metadata (Resource Description Framework) from xml.com

 Standardized Handling of Digital Resources: an annotate bibliography from the Networked Resources & Metadata Committee Standards Subcommittee of the American Library Association

 Technical Metadata for Images Workshop
 

From Tom Whaley:  Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Roanoke this June...

26 April

What's middleware all about? To be sure, it's a jargon term ("a word that could win the jargon-of-the-year award if there was such a thing... "the intersection of the stuff that network engineers don't want to do with the stuff that applications developers don't want to do" [http://www.localbusiness.com/Story/Print/0,1197,NOCITY_477915,00.html]), but no less important to grasp for all that, since it turns up a lot in The Industry. I did a search in google.com for 'middleware concept' and what follows is some of the harvest:

 Sorting Out Middleware (DBMS Online, Jan 1998: "...software that allows an application to interoperate with other software while eliminating the need to understand and code the low-level operations of the various parts")

 general description ("The idea is to extend an existing programming language by introducing a new layer ``in the middle,'' between the application
and the network, that hides the complexity of communication and data transfer.")

 What is middleware? ("If we listen to the vendors, middleware is anything that helps developers create networked
  applications. This includes the proverbial kitchen sink.")

 defined and diagrammed

...a centralized communication mechanism that shields applications from the details of inter-process communications and drastically simplifies interfaces within the system... a software layer residing between the application and the network infrastructure of multiple protocols. One of its purposes is to shield the application programmer from the complexities of the network
 Reflective Middleware: From Your Desk to Your Hand
The base level of a reflective middleware addresses the functionality of the application program while the meta-level designates collections of components that form the internal architecture of the middleware platform. Reflection can inspect and modify these components and change the behavior of the middleware.
 Merging Mobility and Middleware (in the Internet-enabled PDA world)

 'middleware' in Byte (107 occurrences)

 The Jargon File (a.k.a. The Hacker's Dictionary) and  my collection of dictionary links

 Computer software for research in historical linguistics review

 Indexing Large Collections of Pathology Images Using the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)

 most common 50 words in English?

 Library of Congress Classes and  Classification décimale Dewey and  ditto, abridged, in English

 SSG-FI Metadata

 Current use of classification schemes in existing search services

1 May
 Northwestern University Digital Library Committee (an example of a DL development process underway, from which we might be able to infer lots of useful things about the general phenomenon) Chris had linked one document from this, so I backtracked and found the site --an example of a discovery process that often pays off, given the branching structure of the medium of the Web page: once you've got a page thanks to a search engine, go up a level or two, see what the starting place was for that linked page.

from Alison Simmons' search:  Virginia Tech Courseware

8 May
Digital Libraries issue of Communications of the ACM: table of contents and link to text

22 May
 XML Linking from ACM Computing Surveys 31(4), December 1999, which I got to via  Linking and Gathering : Automatic Hypertext in the Perseus Digital Library (David A. Smith) --this started out with a search for ' digitizing "digital library" ' on behalf of Ivan, and led to  Digitizing historical collections is different (a section in a 1996 D-Lib article).

16 Jan 2002

"Harvard University Library has just released its , E-JOURNAL ARCHIVE DTD FEASIBILITY STUDY, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The study utilized the content from ten publishers, including commercial publishers Blackwell Science, Elsevier Science, Nature, and John Wiley & Sons, to determine the feasibility of creating a common structure capable of successfully archiving significant digital content."

I've tucked the 65-page report away here.

26 Feb
The Universal Library (Hosted by Carnegie Mellon University)

Professor Raj Reddy, of the Carnegie Melon University (USA), said that "the information technologies are going to revolutionise the three legs of higher education: the lecture, the laboratory and the library. We are already moving from special rooms to computer-based systems very rapidly." But he predicted that the most dramatic change might well concern the creation of virtual libraries. His university is actively working on a project for a "universal digital library" which, within 15 to 20 years, should contain every book, piece of writing, art and music available, and be accessible in most languages.
(from http://www.idn.org/news/1098/df101298-69.htm)<

A Step Toward Universal Digital Library Services (Terence Smith et al., UCSB and elsewhere, part of the Digital Library Interoperability Project)

The Role of a Digital Librarian in the Management of Digital Information Systems (V. Sreenivasulu)

Untangling the Web: Applications of the Internet and Other Information Technologies to Higher Learning (David McArthur and Matthew Lewis, 1998)

27 Feb
Interaction Spaces for 21st Century Computing Terry Winograd, Stanford University, Aug 2000 --see also Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project and Metadata Architecture

A Task-Oriented Interface to a Digital Library (Steve B. Cousins)

The Event Heap: An Enabling Infrastructure for Interactive Workspaces (Brad Johanson, Armando Fox, Pat Hanrahan, Terry Winograd CS Tech Report CS-2000-02) (see full text)

ComMentor (Scalable Architecture for Shared Web Annotations --an early development ca. 1994)

24 June
Annotated Bibliography of Digital Library Related Sources (found via kartOO)

Software Agent-Oriented Frameworks Meet Georeferenced Digital Library Interoperability (Zakaria Maamar, Bernard Moulin, Yvan Bédard, and Gilbert Babin)

DIGITAL LIBRARY CONSTRUCTION TOOLS: STANDARDS from British Columbia Digital Library

SDSC Supports ADEPT, DLESE, and NASA in Educational Digital Library Collaboration

DIGITAL LIBRARIES: Metadata Resources from IFLANET

Controlled vocabularies, thesauri and classification systems available in the WWW. DC Subject

Metadata visualization for digital libraries: interactive timeline editing and review (Vijay Kumar, Richard Furuta, Robert B. Allen)

MetaViz: visual interaction with geospatial data libraries (Volker Jung)

(This file is continued in a 2003- log)