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Cross Currents No 14 March 2003 

A digest of cross sectoral information management events, issues and ideas in organisations, libraries, archives and museums, with special emphasis on arts and the humanities.

 


ARTS & CULTURE. Australian Library, Archive & Museum Alliance | Australian Performing Arts Special Interest Group Conference | Australian Regional Cultural Alliance | Collaboration between Digital Museums & Digital Libraries | Computing Science and the Humanities Seminar | Cultural Heritage Photograph Charging Models | Cultural Heritage Language Technologies | European Cultural Policies | European Arts Library & Museums Cooperation | MOAC | Moving Image & Sound Archives

E-LEARNING. Articles | Digital Libraries in the Classroom | Moving Pictures Online in the UK

KNOWLEDGE, INFORMATION & LIBRARY MANAGEMENT. E-LIS | Library Finances | LC Digital Plan | LC Sound Archive | Library Portals | Science & Education Cyberinfrastructure | Wiki Websites

 

MUSEUMS. Museums As Educators | CIMI New Directions

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION & TRAINING. Archivists & Records Managers| Librarians

STANDARDS, GUIDES & TECHNOLOGIES

Archiving Scholarly E-Publications | Content Management Systems | Cultural Heritage Digitisation | Defence Technologies } Dublin Core | Institutional Repositories | Knowledge Management Standard | Microfilming to Support Digitisation | Music Information Retrieval | Music Listening Systems | Music Document Standards | Metadata | Open Access Publishing | Science & Metadata Gateway Metadata | Virtual Reality | Web based Management of Subject Guides | XML | zetoc 

USERS & USAGE. Digital Cultural Resources User Evaluations

 

ARTS & CULTURE  

 

Australian Collections Sector National Industry Body. 

The Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, on behalf of the National Collections Advisory Forum, has called for tenders for a consultancy on the  feasibility of establishing a national industry body to advance common interests of Australian archives, galleries, libraries and museums. The consultancy is being conducted to support the concept of the Distributed National Collection, to promote effective, viable joint action to ensure that public collections are preserved and accessible to the Australian community and accessible internationally in support of increasing knowledge and awareness of Australian culture.

Australian Library, Archive and Museum Alliance

Four Australian associations - Museums Australia, the Australian Institute of Cultural Materials, the Australian Society of Archivists and the Australian Library and Information Association – at a meeting in Sydney on 22 November 2002 - agreed to develop a statement of joint purpose, work towards furthering a collaborative approach to advocacy, policy and programs affecting the collections sector and consider a range of reciprocal membership benefits. [Source: Museums National]

Australian Performing Arts Special Interest Group Conference

Museums Australia’s Performing Arts Special Interest Group (PASIG) will hold a meeting as part of Museums Australia’s conference in Perth, 25-30 May 2003. The PASIG meeting will be in the Downstairs space of His Majesty’s Theatre. The program includes presentations on AusStage and Australia Dancing by Jenny White and Dr Michelle Potter, Australian musicals by John Thomson, the Mander-Mitcheson collection by Nigel Rideout and performing arts heritage resources in Perth. Registration and further details: Richard Stone, Chairman, PASIG, (02) 62812679. Email – randj@webone.com.au

Australian Regional Cultural Alliance

A Regional Cultural Alliance was formed in October 2002 to ‘achieve positive social impact in regional communities through a strategic approach to cultural development’. The Alliance comprises Museums Australia, Regional Arts Australia, the Council of National Trusts, the Australian Library and Information Association and the Federation of Australian Historical Societies. [Source: Museums National]

Collaboration Between Digital Museums and Digital Libraries

Abby A. Goodrumin Visual Resource Reference: Collaboration Between Digital Museums and Digital Libraries (D-Lib Magazine February 2003) discusses a project by the Information Institute of Syracuse, Syracuse University, aimed at building collaborative digital museum and digital library reference services, based upon a successful model for digital reference that has been widely embraced in the digital library community. The article presents an overview of the project and discusses the challenges involved in helping users find appropriate images on the Web. http://www.dlib.org/

Computer Science and the Humanities

Humanities scholars, museum administrators, librarians, publishers, computer and information scientists, technologists, and engineers explored common ground in Transforming Disciplines: Computer Science and the Humanities, an invitational conference in Washington, DC, 17-18 January 2003, sponsored by CNI, the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, American Council of Learned Societies, National Academies, and Princeton and Rice Universities.

William Wulf from the National Academy of Engineering suggested that humanists and engineers shared the problem of creating macro scale systems out of billions of minuscule components with unpredictable results. If humanists could resolve this problem for themselves and for engineers, they would usher in a revolution ‘comparable to the development of Einstein's theories and quantum mechanics at the beginning of the twentieth century’. Among issues discussed: the problem of inertia within disciplines, the inadequacy of  training in technology for graduate students, and lack of adequate cooperation with university libraries and librarians. Resisting general assumptions about cross-discipline collaboration, Michael Joyce urged a focus on traditional disciplines and promoted the need to explore all that is not known within them, rather than ‘suffocating in knowingness’. Janet Murray argued that maybe lack of total understanding between computer specialists and humanists is useful, ‘creating a space of play and adaptation in which both are able to formulate overly ambitious and creatively valuable projects’. The seminar produced a wish list of new tools, training and cooperation, but recognised that the desire to experiment creatively needs to balanced against the constraints of existing tools and models, limited departmental support, and looming cuts in federal, state, university, and foundation budgets. Web: http://www.ninch.org. [Source: CNI].

Cultural Heritage Photograph Services Charging Models

Simon Tanner and Marilyn Deegan in Exploring Charging Models for Digital Cultural Heritage (Ariadne 34) report on the results of a study to investigate underlying financial and policy assumptions being made in the move from previously analogue photographic services into the realm of digital capture and delivery. They conclude that many institutions have not undertaken clear commercially led business planning; digital items will continue to become cheaper for the consumer to purchase than the analogue equivalent; and institutions need to account for the sale of rights as part of their operation in order to operate at a surplus. Web: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/

Cultural Heritage Language Technologies

Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox in Cultural Heritage Language Technologies: Building an Infrastructure for Collaborative Digital Libraries in the Humanities describes the work of the Cultural Heritage Language Technologies consortium, a research group funded by the European Commission Information Society Technologies Program and the United States National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative, which is working to (1) to adapt discoveries from the field of computational linguistics and information retrieval and visualization in ways that are specifically designed to help students and scholars in the humanities; (2) to establish an international framework with open standards for the long-term preservation of data, the sharing of metadata, and interoperability between affiliated digital libraries; and (3) to lower the barriers to reading Greek, Latin, and Old Norse texts in their original languages. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/

European Cultural Policies

In Cultivate Interactive no 8 (November 2002), Gosa Buttner and Joerg Torkler discuss Cultural Policies in Europe: A Compendium of Basic Facts and Trends, a website aimed at giving administrators, decision-makers, researchers, politicians, journalists and the general public easy access to up-to-date facts, statistics, trends, strategies, and current debates. The Compendium is a joint venture of the Council of Europe Culture Committee and Secretariat and the European Research Institute for Comparative Cultural Policy and the Arts. The Compendium website is http://www.culturalpolicies.net. The Cultivate Interactive article is available at http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/compendium/ [Source: Shelflife no 89].

European Arts Library & Museum Cooperation

Art Library Journal Vol 28 no 1 (2003) carries articles on a number of European collaborative initiatives between libraries, archives and museums, including Creating a Union Catalogue of the Libraries of the French National Museums (Christan David, Catherine Granger and Nicole Picot), The Virtuaeller Katalog Kunsgeschichte as a Tool for International Cooperation  (Rudiger Hoyer), Find it in London: a Unique Cooperative Venture across Libraries Archives and Museums (Jean Sykes), Frances’s Archires Network and the Potential for a Partnership with the Schools of Art (Anne Dufoung and Clair Dubos and Tillsammans: Cooperation Among Art Libraries in Sweden (Sonia French and Tom French)

In Cross-sectoral Working, Backstage, Claire Hudson and Stephen Holland describe Backstage, a major resource discovery project for the performing arts, which aims to create a single portal for information on performing arts holdings across the UK. Its content will combine directory-style information for individual institutions with more details collection level and item level records. The main players in the project are a group of universities led by Kent and Bristol, the Theatre Museum and the Institute for Learning & Research Technology.

MOAC

Richard Rinehart;s article MOAC: A Report on Integrating Museum and Archive Access in the Online Archive of California, in D-Lib Magazine January 2003, discuss a collaborative project of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Japanese American National Museum, Bancroft Library, Online Archive of California, Cantor Art Center, California Museum of Photography, Oakland Museum of CA, Grunwald Center, Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and Fowler Museum. The Museum of Paleontology and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are expected to join the project. Web: http://www.dlib.org/ [Source: Diglib]

Moving Image & Sound Archives

Philip Hunter, in Hidden Treasures: the impact of moving image and sound archives in the 21st Century, reports in Ariadne 34 on a one day meeting on multimedia objects in the British Library, London, October 2002. Web: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/

E-LEARNING

Articles

Recent articles on the subject of e-learning and educational resources include

  • Burgstahler, Sheryl. Distance Learning: the Library's Role in Ensuring Access to Everyone in Library Hi Tech Vol 20, no 4 (2002): 420-432.

  • Chambers, Sally. Supporting Teaching and Research in an Online Environment: Developing the University of London Library Model in LIBER Quarterly Vol 12, no 4(2002): 381-392. The LIBER Quarterly is available via http://www.saur.de

  • Clark, Judith. Digital library Initiatives for Academic Teaching and Learning: Towards a Managed Information Environment for Online Learning in International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2002/2003; 208-235. International Yearbook of Library and Information Management is available via: http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/index.shtml

  • Harrison, Laurie. Access to Online Learning: the Role of the Courseware Authoring Tool Developer in Library Hi Tech Vol 20 no 4 (2002): 433-440.

  • Johnson, AnnMarie and Sean Ruppert. An Evaluation of Accessibility in Online Learning Management Systems in Library Hi Tech Vol 20, no 4 (2002): 441-451. Library Hi Tech: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/lht.htm

  • Lippincott, Joan and Brown, Malcolm. Learning Spaces: More than Meets the Eye, an article evolving the authors’ work in developing a website of resources about collaborative facilities on college and university campuses, in EDUCAUSE Quarterly. Web:  http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eqm0312.pdf. Collaborative Facilities website: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~collab/ [Source CNI]

  • Richardson, Steve and Powell, Andy. Exposing Information Resources for e-learning: Harvesting and Searching IMS metadata using both the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and the Z39.50 Protocol in Ariadne 34. Web: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/

Resources

[Digital Libraries in the Classroom]. The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) have agreed to fund a program which will provide new content and a range of benefits to education sectors on both sides of the Atlantic. The five-year program, called Digital Libraries in the Classroom, will cost around US$9.5million and consists of four projects: The Spoken Word; Teaching and Learning Anthropology; Digital Libraries in Support of Innovative Approaches to Teaching and Learning in Geography; and Accelerating Globally Distributed Team Innovation (which will enable students to take part in global team-based design engineering projects in which they directly experience different cultural contexts. Further information, Rachel Bruce (JISC) rachel.bruce@kcl.ac.uk  and Stephen Griffin (NSF) sgriffin@nsf.gov

[Moving Pictures Online in the UK]. Education Media OnLine offers access to collections of non-fiction films to some 6.5 million students, scholars, teachers and lecturers in the UK to support teaching, learning and research. Using Britain’s Joint Academic broadband Network, and its high-speed backbone, SuperJANET, authorised users from licensed institutions can download and play footage from the film collections via computers in lecture theatres, classrooms, libraries or seminar rooms. Access is also available to bona fide users off-campus. The URL http://www.emol.ac.uk will take clients, using ATHENS authentication, to film collections such as Films of Scotland, Educational and Television Films, Sheffield University Learning Media Unit and Anglia Television Library. Education Media OnLine is hosted and delivered by EDINA, a JISC national data centre at the University of Edinburgh, which also designed and developed the online service. [Source  AHDS]. Web:  http://www.bufvc.ac.uk/maas/press_release_emol.pdf

KNOWLEDGE, INFORMATION & LIBRARY MANAGEMENT  

E-LIS: Open Archive for Library and Information Science

E-LIS: an Open Archive for Library and Information Science has been established to encourage the deposit of documents on Library and Information Science. The free-access archive, the first international e-server in this area, is an extension of the RCLIS (Research in Computing, Library and Information Science) project at http://rclis.org and the DoIS (Documents in Information Science) server at http://dois.mimas.ac.uk/.  Promoted by the Hispanic Ministry of Culture and hosted on machines of the CILEA Italian Interuniversities Consortium for Automation and Elaboration of data, the archive is in line with the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) movement and with the Eprints movement and is based on the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) standards and protocols  E-LIS uses GNU Eprints (v.2.1.1), the most part built with CGI scripts in Perl, working on an Apache http server and MySQL relational DBMS <http://www.eprints.org/>. and a simple classification schema, resulting from the fusion and rearrangement of the NewsAgentTopic Classification Scheme (maintained by Mike Keen at Aberystwyth, UK, until March 1998) and of the RIS Classification Scheme, conceived originally by Donald Soergel (University of Maryland) for the (now ceased) Review of Information Science. Registered users can deposit documents and enjoy the alerting service To deposit articles visit the help page at http://eprints.rclis.org/ [Source: FOS]

Library Finances

Part 2 of Peter Brophy’s article Institutional Models and Finance: New Models of the Library in a Digital Era has been published in International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2002/2003:47-67. Web: http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/index.shtml

Simon Tanner’s The Economic Opportunities and Costs of Developing Digital Libraries and Resources has also been published in International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2002/03: 68-88. Web: http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/index.shtml

Library of Congress Digital Plan

The US congress has approved a Plan for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, which charges the Library of Congress with raising up to US$75 million in private funds and in-kind contributions, to be matched dollar-for-dollar by Congress. The plan proposes that LC will work with federal entities such as the Secretary of Commerce, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Archives and Records Administration, National Library of Medicine, National Agricultural Library, National Institute of Standards and Technology and other federal, research and private libraries and institutions with expertise in telecommunications technology and electronic commerce policy. The goal is to build a network of committed partners working through a preservation architecture of defined roles and responsibilities. The complete text is available at <http://www.digitalpreservation.gov>. 

Library of Congress Sound Archive

The Library of Congress will preserve over 2.5 million historic voice and sound recordings in its new National Recording Registry. The Registry, along with the library's enormous photo archive, will move to a new 41-acre complex southwest of Washington. Anything stored there will also be accessible via computer at the library's Madison Building on Capitol Hill. In conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, the library has embarked on a pilot project called Save Our Sounds which seeks to preserve historic recordings. The Library acquires about 100,000 recordings a year. Web: http://www.loc.gov/

Library Portals

Richard W. Boss has written How to Plan and Implement a Library Portal for the Library Technology Reports series (Chicago: ALA, 2002). Web: http://www.techsource.ala.org/

Science and Engineering Cyberinfracture

The National Science Foundation has released the final version of Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastrucure recommending that funds of US$1 billion per year be made available to achieve an internationally-coordinated Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Program to improve data archiving and accessibility, application development and computer resource sharing. [Source Current Cites and NINCH]. Web: http://www.communitytechnology.org/nsf_ci_report/).

Wiki websites

Wiki websites are websites that are open for everybody to edit, such as www.wikipedia.org. Lars Aronsson’s paper Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website, presented at the Elpub 2002 conference in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, is available at http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html

MUSEUMS

Museums As Educators

A study by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has found that the percentage of annual operating budgets spent by US museums on K-12 educational programs has increased four-fold since 1996. The study also calculates that America's museums commit more than 18 million instructional hours every year on programs for K-12 schoolchildren and that, increasingly, museums use new technologies to bring their resources into the lives of American school children. Seventy-two percent of museums use websites for educational programming; 58% communicate with teachers via e-mail, and 24 % e-mail students. Web: http://www.imls.gov/ [Source: NINCH]

CIMI New Directions

CIMI, the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information, has changed its direction to make it possible for more museums and related organizations to take part in and benefit from the work of CIMI. These changes are summarised at http://www.cimi.org/public_docs/reinvig_public_announce.html

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Archivists and Records Managers

The Australian Society of Archivists and the Records Management Association of Australasia will facilitate an Archives and Records Education Stakeholders Forum in Melbourne in mid 2003. The forum aims to develop an action plan which will sustain professional education which is valued by all stakeholders. Educators, consultants, professional associations and employers from Australia and New Zealand will be invited to attend. Invitations to provide papers for the meeting will be issued around March and invitations to attend will be issued by April. Contact for further details: Jill Caldwell Convenor ASA Education Committee jcaldwell@naa.gov.au [Source: aus-archivists]

Librarians

The Outsell/OCLC Training & Education Market Needs Assessment Study 2002 on the education and training needs of library workers indicates that Web-based training is an option that will become increasingly important to the library community. The survey indicates that while classroom training, conference participation and self-directed learning are all more popular than distance learning, Web-based training is the No. 1 form of distance learning among library workers, and almost half of respondents expect that they or someone from their institution will participate in Web-based training in the next 12 months. Driving that trend will be the library community's need for continuing professional development, particularly among library workers in government, non-university academic, and special and research libraries. The survey found that 22% of respondents had a written personal development plan, with technology/computers heading the list of topics to be addressed (86%), followed by sources/tools (75%) and library service/quality/evaluation (74%). The average total training budget for surveyed library employees is US$12,067, or about US$531 per person, but respondents said a reasonable amount would be higher, about US$692 per person. Web: http://www5.oclc.org/downloads/community/osoclcreport.pdf. [Source: Shelf Life 94]

STANDARDS, GUIDES & TECHNOLOGIES

Archiving Scholarly E-Publications

A JISC study on long term archiving scholarly e-publications is being undertaken by consultant Maggie Jones and will deal with the transition from purchasing print journals to licensed access to content controlled by publishers. The study evaluates previous licences; explores with publishers and other stakeholders archiving and access provisions; and evaluates future options for archiving of licensed e-journals and access arrangements. Interim deliverables from the study are available from the JISC Website at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation/e-pub.html. [Source JISC]

Content Management Systems

Stephen E. Arnold in Content Management's New Realities (Online vol 27 no 1 Jan/Feb 2003:.36-43) comments on content management systems as the new hot topic –‘now that knowledge management's gone sour’. Web http://www.onlinemag.net/Jan03/arnold.htm [Source: Current Cities]

Cultural Heritage Digitisation

NINCH has made available a PDF version of the NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials, first published online in November 2002. Web http://www.ninch.org/guide.pdf. [Source NINCH]

Defence Technologies

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has published a 26-page strategic plan outlining its future investment in a wide variety of advanced and speculative technologies. The Agency will emphasise research in eight strategic areas: counter-terrorism;  assured use of space; networked manned and unmanned systems; robust, self-forming networks; detect, identify, track and destroy elusive surface targets; characterization of underground structures; bio-revolution; and cognitive computing.

To develop robust, self-forming networks, the Agency continues its pursuit of ‘secure, assured, multi-subscriber, multi-purpose networks’ - ‘better brains to create a more agile and effective brawn’.

It will draw on the vision of JCR Licklider - people and computers working together symbiotically. ‘Computers have grown ever faster, but they remain fundamentally unintelligent and difficult to use. Something dramatically different is needed.’ In response, DARPA’s Information Processing Technology Office is working to develop enhanced computing reasoning capability by focusing on six core research areas over the next few years: computational perception; representation and reasoning; learning, communications and interaction; dynamic coordinated teams of cognitive systems; and robust software and hardware infrastructure for cognitive systems. ‘If DARPA succeeds in this strategic thrust, then in another 10 to 20 years, much of Licklider’s vision may finally be realized, sparking a second powerful revolution in information technology.’

Driven by this Cognitive Computing strategy, DARPA’s information technology research is expected to result in a new class of computational systems that ‘will be responsible for their own operation and able to cope with unforeseen events. These systems will possess the ability to reason in a variety of ways, using substantial amounts of appropriately represented knowledge; they will learn from experiences and improve performance using accumulated knowledge; they will be able to explain themselves and accept naturally expressed guidance and direction; they will be aware of their own behaviour; and most importantly, they will respond in a robust manner to surprises’. And, they will ‘possess imagination - the ability to invent interesting scenarios and plan for and predict novel futures’. 

IT programs include: Software for Distributed Robotics (SDR), to allow human operators to control robot ‘swarms’ without having to consider what each individual robot may be doing; High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS), focusing on the productivity or value of a system, instead of its raw, theoretical computing speed, in order to improve by a factor of 10 to 40 the efficacy of high performance computers for national security applications; Augmented Cognition, which looks to directly (but non-invasively) measure human cognitive load so that information can be presented to the warfighter or commander in a way that does not overload human cognition when mental processes are pressed to the limit, and that takes advantage of spare mental ‘processing power’; Enduring Personalized Cognitive Assistant (EPCA) to launch the creation of intelligent personalized assistants who will learn about preferences and procedures by observing their partner humans, but will also accept direct, naturally-expressed guidance, and anticipate human needs and prepare materials to be ready just in time for their use. [Source: CNI]  Web  http://www.darpa.mil/body/strategic.html 

Dublin Core

DIS 15836 The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set has been approved by the member bodies of ISO TC46 SC4 as an international standard and will be published in the near future. [Source: JISC]

Institutional Repositories

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, has made available a new SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist and Resource Guide, a manual to help institutions define and establish digital collections that preserve the intellectual output of a university or group of universities. The Guide, which complements SPARC's recent position paper, The Case for Institutional Repositories (http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html), includes sections on: securing administration support; securing faculty participation; addressing faculty objections; impact of discipline-specific practices; benefits and challenges to librarians; repository management and policy issues; technical and system Issues; and other topics of interest. The publication is available from http://www.arl.org/sparc/ and may be printed out and distributed freely. [Source: FOS]

Knowledge Management Standard

Standards Australia has published Interim Standard AS 5037 (Int) Knowledge Management to supersede the handbook HB 275  on knowledge management. The target audience of the Interim Standard are individuals, organisations and communities embarking on KM. Feedback will guide the development of the final Standard due out in 2004. Web: www.standards.com.au. [Source Aus-archivists].

Microfilming to Support Digitization

The RLG Preservation Microfilming Handbook (1992) and RLG Archives Microfilming Manual (1994) have been updated. Lars Meyer and Janet Gertz have created RLG Guidelines for Microfilming to Support Digitization, a Web-based publication to provide advice on how to create preservation microfilm amenable to effective and efficient scanning to produce high-quality digital images. The new guidelines are available at http://www.rlg.org/preserv/microsuppl.pdf. [Source: DIGLIB]

Music Information Retrieval

Stephen Downie has written a chapter called Music information retrieval in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 37 (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2003): 295-340. Available also: http://music-ir.org/downie_mir_arist37.pdf [Source: IAML– L]

Music Listening System

Borders, the US-based book and music retail chain has installed a ’queue-free digital music system’ in its stores. This enables customers to listen to 45-second snippets of tracks on all CD’s in the shop by scanning the CD barcode into listening stations. The system components include a JCD Jukebox Player, a data server running on Linux and recording and scanning modules running with Windows 98. [Source: SMH 11 March 2003 and personal experience]   

Musical Document Standards

Dr. Nicola Tangari has written Standard e documenti musicali. I numeri, i modelli, i formati [Standards and Musical Documents. Numbers, Models, Formats] Milan, Bibliografica, 2002. The book covers three categories of standards used in music documentation: standard numbers to identify documents and works, standard models to describe musical documents, new standard formats of digital musical documents and is available from http://www.internetbookshop.it/

Metadata

Monash University, the National Archives of Australia, State Records New South Wales and the ASA Descriptive Standards Committee have recently won a three year Australian Research Council grant totalling $192,000 for a research project titled: Create Once, Use Many Times - The Clever Use of Metadata in eGovernment and eBusiness Recordkeeping Processes in Networked Environments. The project will address problems of implementing recordkeeping metadata standards, inadequate tools for automatic metadata creation, and deficiencies in current systems environments that generally do not support the sharing of metadata between business systems. The project will develop a proof of concept prototype to demonstrate how standards-compliant metadata can be created once in particular application environments, then used many times to meet a range of business purposes. The research team will include Professor Sue McKemmish from Monash, Associate Professor Anne Gilliland-Swetland from UCLA, Mr Adrian Cunningham from NAA, a Research Associate and a Programmer. Expert representatives from NAA, State Records NSW and the ASA Descriptive Standards Committee will also provide extensive research assistance and advice. Contact: Fiona Ross, School of Information Management and Systems, Monash University  fiona.ross@sims.monash.edu.au [Source: aus-archivists]

Open-access publishing

The Budapest Open Access Initiative has just released two guides, both written by Raym Crow and Howard Goldstein: Guide to Business Planning for Converting a Subscription-based Journal to Open Access at  http://www.soros.org/openaccess/oajguides/business_converting.pdf. and Guide to Business Planning for Launching a New Open Access Journal http://www.soros.org/openaccess/oajguides/business_planning.pdf [Source: FOS]

Science & Medicine Gateway Metadata

David Little in Sharing History of Science and Medicine Gateway Metadata Using OAI-PMH: outlines the resource sharing arrangements between the MedHist gateway and the Humbul hub, using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and some of the issues it has raised. Ariadne 34. Web: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/

Virtual reality

The Arts & Humanities Data Service has released Creating and Using Virtual Reality: A Guide for the Arts and Humanities, edited by Julian Richards and Kate Fernie. The Guide is geared to the needs of the creators of virtual reality (including artists, illustrators and computer scientists) and organisations who are commissioning virtual reality (including museums, galleries, heritage agencies and university-based projects). It covers the history, philosophy and theory of virtual reality and provides an introduction to the methods and techniques used and to good practices in planning virtual reality projects. Web: http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/guides/vr_guide/ [Source: AHDS]

Visualising Information Resources

In Visualization of Information Resources for Professionals (Information Outlook Vol 6 no 12 (2002)28-30, Tim Bray speculates on the use of maps as the basis for the next generation of visual interfaces. ‘Instead of guessing what’s in the controlled vocabulary and how the taxonomy lays out, you [will] point and click, drilling your way through a half dozen maps to get to the forensic accounting materials. Instead of doing a search and seeing 1 through 12 of 315,073 results, you [will get] a map of your search results, so you can point and click straight into the 45 matches in the organics chemistry section of the database. Instead of sitting down in front of a complex, uninvited query screen for a database you’ve not used before, you start with a colourful visual overview of more or less what’s in it and where.’ Web: http://www.sla.org/content/shop/information/ioarticles/index.cfm/ [Source: Fos]

Web-based management of subject guides

ResearchGuide 0.5: Web-based Management of Subject Guides for Libraries is an open-source application, implemented using PHP/MySQL, to help librarians make subject guides and specialist information pages using Web forms. Project page http://researchguide.sourceforge.net/. [Source: FOS]

XML

Eric Lease Morgan has written Getting Started with XML: A Manual and Workshop (2003), a 73-page pdf explaining Extensible Markup Language (XML) and related standards and  highlighting XML tag sets of particular importance to libraries (XHTML, TEI, EAD, DocBook, RDF and OAI-PMH). [Source: Current Cites] Web: http://www.infomotions.com/musings/getting-started/.

zetoc

zetoc: the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents now supports SFX and other OpenURL resolver software (eg 1Cate, ZPortal, LinkFinder), enabling users to go from the zetoc full record to the range of services defined by their institution. For more information; http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk. [Source zetoc] 

USERS & USAGE

Digital Cultural Resources User Evaluations

The Cultural Content Forum is a recently-formed international group which exists to harness expertise and forge consensus amongst agencies worldwide engaged in setting policy for the digitisation and online delivery of global cultural heritage. The Forum is undertaking a research project to synthesize results from existing surveys of user expectations and experiences with the digitised cultural heritage. Cultural organizations worldwide are requested to submit existing published or unpublished material relating to the evaluation of digital cultural resources for review and analysis. In collocating information about evaluation work the CCF aims to inform the wider cultural community about existing user research and evaluation and to inform the development of evaluation and user research strategies in the future. Web: www.culturalcontentform.org. The Cultural Content Forum is facilitated by: CIMI Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (www.cimi.org); Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries (www.resource.gov.uk) and UKOLN's Interoperability Focus (www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/) [Source NINCH]

This issue of Cross Currents compiled by Paul Bentley

FEEDBACK

The Wolanski Foundation would be grateful for feedback on the scope, format and content of this bulletin..

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