New & Noteworthy

Citation

(2001), "New & Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918dab.001

New & Noteworthy

JSTOR and MIMASRelease General Science Collection in the UK

JSTOR, a digital archive of scholarly journals, and MIMAS, Manchester Information Association Services, which maintains the UK JSTOR Mirror Service at the University of Manchester on behalf of the JISC, have recently announced the release of the General Science Collection. This is the second journal archive collection to be included in JSTOR, which includes complete runs of many journals, many of which date from the 1800s. The Arts and Science 1 collection, which is already available, contains 117 journals in a range of fields, approximately 4.6 million pages of journal literature and 199,873 full-length articles. The new General Science Collection contains seven publications and approximately 1.4 million journal pages from the complete runs of journals that include Scientific Monthly, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and four Royal Society of London titles. As well as current reference it will also be useful to science historians as, for instance, Sir Isaac Newton's earliest published papers are made available.

Access to these collections is made separately and is available to participating UK higher education institutions through the Web. Participation information is available from http://www.jstor.ac.uk/about/gensci.html

JSTOR: http://www.jstor.ac.ukMIMAS: http://www.mimas.ac.uk

University of Nevada LibraryIntroduces 3M Digital Collection Management

After a $55.3 million building programme, the most expensive public works project ever in Nevada, the Lied Library at the University of Nevada recently opened its new building where it will be among the world's first libraries to manage its collection digitally with 3M Digital ID Collection Management, based on radio frequency identification technology. The system is integrated with the library's 3M Materials Flow Management system and optimises collection management to improve efficiency and service levels. It also integrates the automated system with the existing Tattle-Tape technology and works by the 884,523 items in the library's circulating and open stacks being marked with digital identification tags. The system also employs digital self-check systems, digital staff workstations, digital library assistants and a digital data manager.

Staff had been testing the system for months before opening and found the digital library assistant particularly useful; it is a hand-held, portable collection management tool, which they found allowed them to perform tasks such as weeding items from the collection, or from a portion of it, in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously.

3M Library Systems: http://www.3M.comUniversity of Nevada, Las Vegas: http://www.unlv.edu

IFLAOffers Student Affiliate Membership

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has introduced a new special category of membership, especially for students, for a reduced annual fee of 50 euros. The IFLA Student Affiliate scheme is being run on a trial basis for four years to determine the level of student interest in joining the Federation and is open to students in both full- and part-time education for a maximum of two years, after which they can transfer to Personal Affiliate membership.

Benefits of this new type of membership include subscription to the IFLA journal and access to discounted publications, free registration to one of the Federation's 35 professional sections and discounted registration fees for the annual general conference. The scheme will give students the opportunity of participating in the international library and information community and of becoming involved in the Federation's activities at the beginning of their professional lives. It will also enable them to receive the most up-to-date information about issues facing the library community, as they will be a part of an organisation with over 1,700 library association members in over 150 countries.

IFLA: c/o The Membership Manager, IFLA Headquarters, PO Box 95312, 2509 CH, The Hague, The Netherlands. E-mail: membership@ifla.org

Resource Discovery Network (RDN)First Phase of Subject Portals Development Project under Way

The RDN's Portal's Development Project aims to improve the way the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) resources are presented to the user. The project is part of a set of initiatives that aim to address business issues such as branding and rights management, and integrate content from different sources and present it in a form best suited to user communities. Three prototype, faculty-level subject portals will be developed at the RDN hubs BIOME, EEVL and SOSIG, which will enable users to search an extended range of databases from the JISC's content collection. The BIOME hub covers the health and life sciences, the EEVL hub concentrates on engineering resources and SOSIG is the hub for the social sciences, business and law, and each of these hubs will determine to which collections access will be provided and also analyse how these relate to its own database.

The software for this distributed cross-searching across many protocols and metadata standards will need to be developed at each hub, and completion of the project will provide users with a consistent interface with different types of resources from a range of content providers.

DNER/RDN: c/o Paul Davey, Information Officer, King's College London, Strand Bridge House, 138-142 The Strand, London WC2R 1HH. E-mail: paul.davey@kcl.ac.uk

Public Record Office Victoria, AustraliaReports on Electronic Records Archiving

The public records office of Victoria, Australia has published the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy Final Report online. The report details the findings of the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) project, which investigated the problems of archiving electronic records and preserving them for the long term, and proposed a framework for managing these records in local government. The report describes the project demonstrator system, gives full details of the VERS long-term electronic record format and the metadata schema used by the project and also detailed costings of the necessary system implementations. The strategy outlined is particularly concerned with providing the flexibility necessary to allow government agencies to implement electronic records management practices, which will be compatible with their existing business processes and will also aid the identification and preservation of government records.

The report, which is available in three formats, and the earlier research document Standard for the Management of Electronic Records, can be downloaded from http://www.prov.vic.gov.au

Ingenta and CatchWordMerge to Expand E-Content Service

Ingenta, a research gateway that receives over 3 million visitors a month, has merged with CatchWord, an online service that hosts and distributes e-journals of professional and research information. Catchword's existing linking and data conversion technologies complement the online services already provided by Ingenta, enabling a full integration of the two operations. The merger will benefit current users, as Ingenta will now be able to offer linking to over 4,500 publications from over 140 publishers, and libraries, research organisations and individual researchers will be able to use the interlinked collection from a single source. It will also enhance the hosting, distribution and e-publishing services already provided to eight of the world's top ten journal publishers and two of the world's three largest reference publishers.

Ingenta: c/o Mark Rowse, CEO, mrowse@ingenta.comCatchWord Ltd: c/o Simon Inger, Managing Director; simon.inger@catchword.com

CAMiLEON ProjectEstablished to Preserve Digital Materials

A project called Creative Archiving at Michigan and Leeds: Emulating the Old on the New (CAMiLEON), has been established by joint funding, from the National Science Foundation in the USA and from the JISC in the UK, to investigate emulation as a strategy for the long-term preservation of and continuing access to digital materials. Whereas migration involves moving digital material from an obsolete environment to a current one, emulation recreates the old software on a platform currently in use, and then runs the original software on that emulator. The project, which will develop emulation tools and use cost-benefit analysis and user evaluation, is being implemented by a partnership between the University of Leeds in the UK and the University of Michigan in the USA. Both migration and emulation will be studied and theoretical and practical recommendations will be made. To help with the process three working papers have been made available for public consultation at the CAMiLEON Web site.

CAMiLEON: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/CAMiLEON

UK Serials GroupLaunches New Dissertation Awards

The United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG), which aims to encourage the exchange and promotion of ideas on printed and electronic serials and the process of scholarly communication, has introduced a new sponsorship programme for students producing dissertations on a particular aspect of scholarly communication. There are two £1,000 awards, and the winners will also receive a free place at the group's annual conference and will be asked to write an article for Serials, the group's journal, based on their dissertation.

The UKSG is a national and international interest group which takes an active interest in the training of students in librarianship and information science, running a "Roadshow" seminar programme and providing free places for many students at its annual conference. It feels that this dissertation project is well-timed because this is a transitional period for the rapidly changing field of scholarly communication and there is currently a great deal of information available to any student interested in the field.

UKSG: c/o Paul Harwood, UKSG Education Officer, Swets Blackwell Ltd, 32 Blacklands Way, Abingdon Business Park, Oxfordshire OX14 1SX. E-mail: pharwood@uk.swetsblackwell.com

Unesco, IFLA and ICAEstablish Guidelines for Digitization Programmes

Unesco has joined the IFLA and the International Council on Archives (ICA) in a project to establish guidelines for digitization programmes for collections in the public domain, particularly those held by libraries and archives. Unesco is concerned to provide universal access to global information and to ensure that as many people as possible benefit from the knowledge-sharing opportunities provided by new technologies. As libraries and archives are the main depositories of this information Unesco aims to use virtual gateways to link activities they are developing at national and international level to build a virtual repository for relevant information in the public domain and so strengthen this domain of information.

The guidelines to facilitate this process are expected to be published at the end of 2001 and will be aimed at library archive managers worldwide. They will include a list of completed and ongoing digitization projects and will include reports on selection and conversion policy, metadata and legal issues, budgeting and quality control.

Unesco: A. Plathe, Information and Informatics Division. E-mail: a.plathe@unesco.org

IFLA: http://www.ifla.orgICA: http://www.ica.org