New & noteworthy

Citation

(2003), "New & noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920jab.001

New & noteworthy

RedLightGreenRLG's New Web-Based Union Catalog Debuts on the Web

RLG's RedLightGreen (formerly known as the Union Catalog on the Web) is now online. The immediate goal for RLG's "RedLightGreen" is to offer rich, reliable library information that is unique in the Web environment and to deliver that information in ways that meet the expectations of Web-savvy users.

This union catalog searches bibliographic records from RLG's member libraries, archives, and museums around the world. RedLightGreen is home to over 40 million descriptions of books, maps, films, recordings, and manuscripts from 300 countries, in over 370 languages – a tremendous potential resource for an enormous Web audience. To simplify record retrieval for Web users, RLG has adapted the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) established by the International Federation of Library Associations and the Library of Congress, which distinguishes between a work, an expression, a manifestation, and an item. Data manipulation using this approach will aggregate what can be an overwhelming number of editions into a manageable set of works that match a user's search terms.

To take advantage of the RLG Union Catalog's depth and breadth of content, RLG is also using Recommind Inc.'s MindServer technology to find more subject correlations between works and increase retrieval. Through subject heading variations, relationships, frequency in collections, international content, and searching assistance, users will discover information that has been difficult or impossible to find.

http://www.redlightgreen.comProject home page: http://www.rlg. org/redlightgreen/Recommind, Inc.: http://www. recommind.com/

SMEALSearchSearch Engine Focused on Business Documents Is Now Available on the Web

SMEALSearch is a niche search engine that searches the Web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business. The search engine crawls websites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts. For certain documents, the database only stores the hyperlinks to those documents. SMEALSearch performs a citation analysis of all the academic articles accessed and lists them in order of their citation rates in academic papers (the most cited articles are listed first). Articles available through the SMEALSearch engine can be downloaded (for fair use) without any charges. However, some articles may have only the abstracts listed, and may have to be purchased directly from the appropriate sources. SMEALSearch is the only search engine focused on Business that can:

• •

  automatically gather and index specific research information such as author, title, abstract, and citations;

• •

  perform key-word searches on the full content of all documents selected;

• •

  conduct citation searches to identify the most influential articles;

• •

  accept article submissions from users, ensuring the most complete and current database in the Business world.

SMEALSearch is based on the CiteSeer technology from NEC Laboratories, Princeton, New Jersey (http://www.nec-labs.com/); http://smealsearch.psu.edu/index.html; http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/

IFLA-CDNLAlliance for Bibliographic Standards (ICABS) Established

A new alliance between International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and national libraries was established in August 2003 to continue and expand the coordination work formerly done by the IFLA UBCIM and UDT Core Programme Offices. The National Library of Australia, the Library of Congress, The British Library, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and Die Deutsche Bibliothek have agreed to participate in a joint alliance together with the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, IFLA and CDNL to assure ongoing coordination, communication and support for key activities in the areas of bibliographic and resource control for all types of resources and related format and protocol standards. This new alliance is known as "IFLA-CDNL Alliance for Bibliographic Standards (ICABS)."

The focus of the alliance is strategic and offers a practical way to improve international coordination and to steer developments in these key areas. The alliance aims to maintain, promote, and harmonize existing standards and concepts related to bibliographic and resource control, to develop strategies for bibliographic and resource control, and to advance understanding of issues related to long-term archiving of electronic resources, including the promotion of new and recommended conventions for such archiving. More specifically, the objectives of this new alliance are:

1. 1.

   To coordinate activities aimed at the development of standards and practices for bibliographic and resource control, including metadata, persistent identifiers, and interoperability standards.

2. 2.

   To support the international exchange of bibliographic resources by supporting, promoting, developing, and testing the maintenance of metadata and format standards.

3. 3.

   To ensure the promotion of new conventions.

4. 4.

   To act as a clearinghouse for information on all IFLA endeavours in these fields.

5. 5.

   To organize and participate in seminars and workshops.

6. 6.

   To enhance communication within the community.

These objectives will be realized through the "Goals and Actions" agreed to during the IFLA Berlin Conference. Each of the partners in this alliance has agreed to be the lead support agency for one or more of the actions.

More information: http://www.ifla.org/VI/7/icabs.htm

TEL Interim ReportOn Metadata Development Available

The European Library (TEL) has announced the availability of its Interim Report on Metadata Development in TEL as well as two other metadata related reports: Metadata – Review of Current Practices and State of the Art and Report on Functionality of TEL Metadata.

The Interim Report on Metadata Development in TEL outlines the whole metadata development process that should lead to the following objectives step by step. The main objective of the metadata work package of TEL is to find out which metadata are needed for providing the desired TEL functionality and how this should be implemented or encoded to obtain an integrated, consistent presentation of data obtained from inhomogeneous sources. A second objective is to keep the barrier low for participants to enter collections into TEL.

http://www.europeanlibrary.org/tel_results.htm

New Internet DraftFor an Informational RFC

The Internet Engineering Taskforce announced a new Internet-Draft for an Information RFC, to allow commonly used identifiers to be part of the Web: The "info" URI Scheme for Information Assests with Identifiers in Public Namespaces. This document was authored by Herbert Van de Sompel – Los Alamos National Library, Tony Hammond – Elsevier, Eamonn Neylon – Manifest Solutions, and Stuart L. Weibel – OCLC Online Computer Library Center.

The "info" URI scheme will facilitate the referencing of information assets that have identifiers in public namespaces that are not referenceable by URI schemes such as: Library of Congress Control Numbers (LCCN) and Open Archives Initiative (OAI) identifiers among others. The "info" scheme is based on a Registry that invites the registration of public namespaces used for the identification of information assets, by the parties that maintain the namespaces.

The effort to create the "info" URI scheme emerged from the NISO process to standardize the OpenURL Framework for context-sensitive services, which requires the ability to describe resources by means of globally recognizable identifiers. The Draft Standard for Trial Use released for Public Comment introduced a "proprietary" naming architecture which allowed information assets to be referenced by means of widely used non-URI identifiers wchih would be registered under the OpenURL Framework.

Public feedback led to the decision to fundamentally revise the naming architecture, and to base all resource identification requirements within the OpenURL Framework on URIs alone. Because it was deemed unrealistic to expect that all namespaces required in the OpenURL Framework would be registered within the URI allocation by the respective namespace authorities, the "info" URI effort was launched. This work is being conducted under the auspices of NISO, and with active involvement and consultation from the IETF and the W3C.

Draft: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-vandesompel-info-uri-00.txtNISO Committee AX: http://www.niso.org/committees/committee_ ax.html

OIA and Project RoMEOInitiate OAI Rights

The Open Archives Initiative and Project RoMEO announced the formation of OAI-rights. The goal of this effort is to investigate and develop means of expressing rights about metadata and resources in the OAI framework. The result will be an addition to the OAI implementation guidelines that specifies mechanisms for rights expressions within the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

The area of rights expressions is wide-open with many organizations proposing languages and mechanisms. Therefore, the OAI-rights effort will aim to be extensible, providing a general framework for expressing rights statements within OAI-PMH. These statements will target both the metadata itself and the resources described by that metadata. In the context of this broader framework, OAI-rights will use Creative Commons licenses as a motivating and deployable example. OAI-rights work will begin in September 2003, with completion of specifications planned for second quarter 2004.

White paper describing the scope and issues in OAI-rights: http://www.openarchives.org/documents/OAIRightsWhitePaper.htmlOpen Archives Initiative: http://www.openarchives.orgProject RoMEO: http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Creative Commons: http://www.creativecommons.org/

NFAISReleases Guiding Principles on Reference Linking

The National Federation of Abstracting and Information Services (NFAIS) has released a set of Guiding Principles to encourage widespread linking of bibliographic and full text databases. The ultimate objective is to support the flow of scholarly communication and research through an acceleration of the information discovery process, facilitated by seamless navigation from indexes and pointers to the complete documents. The Principles were developed by the NFAIS Information Linking Committee, which seeks to further collaboration around reference linking among all parties in the scholarly publishing process in order to improve the experience of the end user.

Guiding Principles: http://www.nfais.org/2003_Guiding_Princ_Ref_ Linking.htm

Syracuse UniversityReceives Grant to Create Nation-wide Digital Library Tools

The Information Institute of Syracuse (IIS), a research center of Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, has received a $250,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Studies to create a nationwide digital reference education initiative. The grant, led by co-principal investigators and SU assistant professors Abby Goodrum and R. David Lankes, with Joseph Janes of the University of Washington, will help prepare librarians, students and paraprofessionals to deliver high-quality reference service on the Internet.

The grant will be used to educate librarians, students and para-professionals in digital reference and build a Web portal for them to access training materials, online courses, and hands-on experience with digital reference software. The portal will also provide a common place for posting digital reference job and internship opportunities.

The project will begin with meetings at this year's Virtual Reference Desk Conference (http://www.vrd2003.org/index.cfm), to be held November 17-18 in San Antonio.

Information Institute of Syracuse: http://iis.syr.edu/

NSF AwardsGrant to Develop Digital Library for Archaeology

A research team from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and Case Western Reserve University has received a National Science Foundation grant to develop a digital library for archaeology. Virginia Tech professors Edward Fox, professor of computer science, and Weiguo "Patrick" Fan, assistant professor of accounting and information systems, will serve as the technical sub-contractors on the project, which has received an initial one-year grant of about $56,000 from the NSF, with another $330,000 expected over the next two years.

Archaeological data are currently scattered across various intranet and web sites, and new information is constantly being unearthed from active excavation sites. The proposed digital library will, for the first time, enable archaeologists, humanists, and social scientists to gather, preserve, and publicize historical and real-time data for research, education, and public information in a timely and universally accessible fashion. The library will focus on ancient Near Eastern studies and will have as its core components two electronic tools that the researchers will develop: DigKit and DigBase.

DigKit would be a field tool for collecting and recording data during surveys and excavations. Details from the primary records compiled on a site, for example, could be shared immediately among excavations via a laptop, says Fan. "It would turn any dig site into an open repository, part of a growing network of archaeological archives."

Data from various sources, whether excavation sites or Web sites, would be collected and archived in DigBase. DigBase would be an enormous catalog, Fan says, with "one-stop shopping" services that would allow users to not only search and browse, but eventually to also query primary records, rate and review artifacts, and receive responses tailored to the user's particular interests, much like with consumer product web sites such as Amazon.com or Epinions.com.

During development, the digital library will be housed in a server at Case Western Reserve's University Library. When completed, the digital library will move to Vanderbilt University's Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives, which is supported by an academic consortium that includes Virginia Tech.

www.technews.vt.edu/Archives/2003/Sept/03574.htm

Timeline of Art HistoryNow Extends from Prehistory to ad1800

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has recently announced the expansion of The Timeline of Art History up to ad1800 The Timeline of Art History is a chronological, geographical, and thematic exploration of the history of art from around the world, as illustrated especially by The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection. The Museum's curatorial, conservation, and educational staff – perhaps the largest single corps of art experts anywhere in the world – research and write the Timeline, which is an invaluable reference and research tool for students, educators, scholars, and anyone interested in the study of art history and related subjects.

In addition to the 4,000+ new pages on world art history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new features include:

• •

  Special Topics Index;

• •

  Subject Index with over 1,200 terms;

• •

  Artist Index;

• •

  Index by Accession Number;

• •

  Additional Resources: Online and Print; and

• •

  Search.

The Timeline will continue to grow in scope and depth, eventually spanning art history through the present day. The final phase 5, comprising art history from 1800 to 2000, will launch on October 1, 2004.

www.metmuseum.org/toah/

Wilbur and Orville WrightPapers Online

The Library of Congress has announced the release of the online collection of the Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers available at the American Memory Web site. The online presentation of The Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers at the Library of Congress, comprising about 10,121 library items or approximately 49,084 digital images, documents the lives of Wilbur and Orville Wright and highlights their pioneering work which led to them making the world's first powered, controlled, and sustained flight. Included in the collection are correspondence, diaries and notebooks, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and other documents, as well as the Wrights' collection of glass-plate photographic negatives. The Wright Brothers' letters to aviation pioneer and mentor Octave Chanute, from the Octave Chanute Papers, were also selected for this online collection. The Wright Papers span the years 1881 to 1952 but largely cover 1900 to 1940.

This online presentation of the Wright Papers contains the most significant and best portions of the original collection. The Wrights' diaries and notebooks are among the most important of the papers because they record many of their glides and powered flights at Kitty Hawk and elsewhere, as well as their scientific experiments and data. Because Wilbur and Orville corresponded extensively with their family, especially their father, Bishop Milton Wright, and their sister, Katharine, the Wright family correspondence is included. Also found in the online collection are letters from many correspondents who are significant in the field of aeronautics, including Octave Chanute, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart. Charts, drawings, scrapbooks, printed matter, and other materials covering the Wrights' research, work, and business pursuits were also were selected for digitization.

As noted, the Wrights' letters to Octave Chanute in the Chanute Papers are also included in this online collection. Chanute, a civil engineer and aviation pioneer, was the Wrights' mentor and friend. These letters give a first-person account of their problems and progress in inventing the airplane.

Among the Wright Papers acquired by the Library of Congress were 303 glass plate negatives, most taken by the Wright brothers themselves between 1896 and 1911 to document successes and failures with their new flying machines. The collection provides an excellent pictorial record of the Wright brothers' laboratory, engines, kites, gliders, powered machines, flights, and even their accidents. The collection also contains individual portraits and group pictures of the Wright brothers and their family and friends, as well as photos of their homes, other buildings, towns, and landscapes.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wrighthtml/

LCAnnounces Release of American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920 Web Site

The Library of Congress has announced the release on the American Memory Web site of American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920. The Web site is comprised of 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the USA and their observations and opinions about American peoples, places, and society from about 1750 to 1920. Also included is the 32-volume set of manuscript sources entitled Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, published between 1904 and 1907 after diligent compilation by the distinguished historian and secretary of the Wisconsin Historical Society Reuben Gold Thwaites. All items are from the general collections of the Library of Congress. Although many of the authors represented in American Notes are not widely known, the collection includes works by major figures such as Matthew Arnold, Fredrika Bremer, William Cullen Bryant, François? René de Chateaubriand, William Cobbett, James Fenimore Cooper, J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sir Charles Lyell, William Lyon Mackenzie, André Michaux, Thomas Nuttall, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The narratives in American Notes therefore range from the unjustly neglected to the justly famous, and from classics of the genre to undiscovered gems. Together, they build a mosaic portrait of a young nation.

American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the USA. The site offers more than 8 million digital items from more than 120 historical collections.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lhtnhtml

American Folklife Center at the Library of CongressTo House the Storycorps Archive

The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress has announced that it will house the recorded archives of StoryCorps, a groundbreaking oral history project launched on October 23 in New York City.

StoryCorps is a national initiative to instruct and inspire Americans to record one another's stories in sound. The project is the brainchild of MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay and his award-winning nonprofit documentary company, Sound Portraits Productions (SPP). It has the potential to become one of the largest documentary oral history projects ever donated to the Library of Congress, and it will be one of the first "born-digital" collections to come to the American Folklife Center.

The Archive of Folk Culture will be the repository for the StoryCorps collection. The Library's folklife specialists will be responsible for ensuring that the collection is preserved in digital form, appropriately indexed and cataloged, and then made accessible to the public at the American Folklife Center and on the Library's Web site at www.loc.gov. In this way, the StoryCorps collection will be available to future generations of researchers and family descendants.

StoryCorps will build soundproof booths across the country where, for a nominal charge, Americans can bring relatives or friends to conduct broadcast-quality oral history interviews with the guidance of a trained facilitator. The facilitator will help create a list of questions and handle all of the technical aspects of the recording. At the end of the 40-minute session, the participants will be able to keep a CD of their interview. With their permission, a second copy will become a permanent part of the American Folklife Center's archives at the Library of Congress.

The American Folklife Center was created by Congress in 1976 and placed at the Library of Congress to "preserve and present American folklife" through programs of research, documentation, archival preservation, reference service, live performance, exhibition, public programs and training. The center incorporates the Archive of Folk Culture, which was established in the Library in 1928 and is now one of the largest collections of ethnographic material from the USA and around the world.

American Folklife Center: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/Archive of Folk Culture: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/archive.htmlStoryCorps: http://storycorps.net/

UK Central GovernmentWeb Archive Launched

The National Archives of the UK has announced the launch of a new archive of UK Central Government Web sites.

Over half of all interaction between the government and the public is now carried out online. For example, the Hutton Inquiry Web site (http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/) has been hugely popular, documenting every stage of the proceedings and making them available online. It is therefore important that this historic online information be preserved for future generations.

The new initiative will collect and preserve 50 government websites, including the Hutton Inquiry, 10 Downing Street and the Northern Ireland Office. Sites are being collected as weekly or six-monthly snapshots, using a specially-modified version of the Internet Archive's Web crawler. The complete archive is being made available on the Web and in the National Archives' public search rooms at Kew. A copy of each snapshot is also being accessioned for long-term preservation by the Digital Preservation Department of the National Archives, UK.

The Web archive is freely available at: www.pro.gov.uk/webarchive.