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ShelfLife, No. 111 (June 19 2003)
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Peter Suber
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Jun 19, 2003 11:30 PDT
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ShelfLife, No. 111 (June 19 2003) ISSN 1538-4284
http://www.rlg.org
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ShelfLife, a weekly executive news summary for information professionals,
is a free service of RLG, the not-for-profit membership corporation of more
than 160 universities, national libraries, archives, museums -- and other
institutions with remarkable collections for research and learning. RLG was
created in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group. ShelfLife provides context
for RLG's major initiatives, which celebrate the power of knowledge to
grow, to live, and to last.
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CONTENTS
Librarians Shift from Info Gatherers to Info Consultants
Paradigma Project
Archaeological Treasures Going Virtual
Complete U.S. House And Senate Documents Soon to be Available Online
Translation Software Pierces Language Barriers
Australia Seeks Better Ways to Provide Digital Access
Preserving Prehistoric Culture
NLM Defines Standards for Electronic Journal Publications
LIBRARIANS SHIFT FROM INFO GATHERERS TO INFO CONSULTANTS
New LexisNexis survey results presented at the annual conference of the
Special Libraries Association indicate that 69% of information
professionals now see themselves as significant contributors to
organizational strategy who are "adding value back to the organization to
meet its information goals." As for the tools of the trade, 85% of
librarians say they currently use intranets for managing and distributing
information, and see collaborative workspaces (55%), wireless (53%), and
portals (51%) as very important for the future of their profession.
(PRNewswire 10 Jun 2003)
http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/06-10-2003/0001962736&EDATE
PARADIGMA PROJECT
In RLG DigiNews, Carol van Nuys of Norway's National Library explains the
Paradigma Project, which was begun in August 2001 with the goal of
developing and establishing "routines for the selection, collection,
description, identification, and storage of all types of digital
documents." The project is one of about 15 European Web archiving projects
-- and one of only five based on "legal deposit legislation," which in
Norway's case goes back to the Legal Deposit Act of 1697. (Although
censorship played a large role in legal deposit legislation's early
development, since 1989 the main intent of the Act has been cultural
preservation.) The Act covers all generally available Norwegian documents
stored in any medium, both analog and digital, and the National Library
will start general harvesting of all generally available digital documents
from the Norwegian Web space (".no"); the scope of the project will
eventually be extended to documents found on other domains, such as .com,
.org, and .net. (RLG DigiNews Vol 7 No 2, 15 Apr 2003)
http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/v7_n2_feature2.html
ARCHAEOLOGICAL TREASURES GOING VIRTUAL
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the British Museum in London - the
world's oldest public, national museum. Since its founding in 1753, it's
become the home of countless archaeological treasures, including the
Rosetta Stone and the world's oldest glass, dating from 1460 BC. It also
boasts perhaps the world's largest collection of cuneiform tablets. These
4,000-year-old clay slabs bear writing from ancient Mesopotamia, now Iraq,
documenting the beginnings of civilization. Recently, the museum began
making digital replicas of some of these tablets, which could help restore
Iraq's looted cultural heritage, and bring the fragile tablets to a wider
audience via the Internet. Such plans are crucial to the future of museums,
says cuneiform expert Peter Damerow of the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science in Berlin. "Many think that museums will only survive if
they can interact with the public and scientists in a new way." Damerow is
director of a separate project to create digital images of the cuneiform
tablets in museums around the world and place them in a public online
database. The initiative is pioneering new ways to present, link and study
objects, he says: "Projects like this need a lot of cooperation between
scientific and museum people." (Nature Science Update 6 Jun 2003)
http://www.nature.com/nsu/030602/030602-13.html
COMPLETE U.S. HOUSE AND SENATE DOCUMENTS SOON TO BE AVAILABLE ONLINE
American history scholars and government researchers will soon have online
access to the complete text and images of all Records, Documents and
Journals of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, thanks to a new
product from the Readex Digital Edition. The collection, called the Serial
Set, will begin with the first session of the 15th Congress (1817) and
continue to the present day; it will also include the American State Papers
-- materials dating from 1789-1838, but not published until the second
quarter of the 19th century. Comprised of digital images of all such
documents -- including some 13,000 maps and color plates -- the set will be
accompanied by a detailed searchable OCR-generated ASCII text and full
bibliographic metadata for every publication. The set will be released in
regular monthly installments beginning September 23, with completion of the
pre-Civil War period scheduled by December 2004, and the entire 19th
century by June 2007. Pricing for the entire collection, which will be
matched to a library's mission and size, will range from $198,900 to
$442,000. Libraries will have access rights in perpetuity with the payment
of an annual maintenance fee. (Information Today 9 Jun 2003)
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb030609-2.shtml
TRANSLATION SOFTWARE PIERCES LANGUAGE BARRIERS
With the number of foreign-language documents, Web pages, advertising and
other material increasing exponentially worldwide, quick and inexpensive
translation capability becomes essential for scholars and others seeking
information. But users of the "instant translation" services offered by Web
sites such as AltaVista know that translation software still has a long way
to go in order to handle contextual complexity and idiomatic phrasing.
However, three basic approaches developed for natural language processing
are contributing to the development of better translation software. The
first -- knowledge-based machine translation -- relies on human programmers
to write extensive lists of rules that describe all possible relationships
between verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech for each language. The
software then consults those rules to find matching words and relationships
in the target language. The other two strategies -- example-based systems
and statistical techniques -- rely on raw computing power rather than human
diligence to crank out their translations. In example-based systems,
software algorithms scour through millions of words and phrases in
documents that have already been translated into the target language and
compare those translations with the current document. Each translation adds
to an enormous database of vocabulary and word relationships, building a
"knowledge base" for future translations. Statistical techniques select the
most likely translation of a phrase using sophisticated mathematical models
that evolve based on how many times they're deemed accurate. With accuracy
rates hovering around 70% to 80%, there's still a lot of room for
improvement, but analysts anticipate the market for translation services
will balloon, up to $13 billion by 2007. "There's so much more text than
anybody could hope to translate by hand," says a scientist at Microsoft
Research. (Technology Review Jun 2003)
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/walter0603.asp
AUSTRALIA SEEKS BETTER WAYS TO PROVIDE DIGITAL ACCESS
In this paper, Debbie Campbell of the National Library of Australia details
efforts to find better ways to provide users with access to the library's
considerable digital resources. A resource discovery service prototype has
been developed, with a goal of delivering services through collaborative
efforts between cultural and academic agencies. The prototype identified
several key areas for successful delivery, including interoperability,
trust, and the harmonization of technology, descriptive standards and
practice. One challenging issue, according to Campbell, is resolving ways
for non-academic researchers to find their way into the National Library's
resources via consumer-market search engines such as Google. She suggests
that can be accomplished if specialized services form a relationship with
search engines so that "searchers find the best examples of Australiana,
not just something that will suffice on the day or in the hour spent
searching." (National Library of Australia, 12 May 2003)
http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2003/dcampbell1.html
PRESERVING PREHISTORIC CULTURE
The University of Tennessee's McClung Museum, along with counterpart
museums at the University of Alabama and the University of Kentucky, has
received a two-year $245,772 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library
Services to create a digital archive of aging photographs dating back to
1934-1941, which document prehistoric Native American archeological sites
now submerged under Tennessee Valley Authority-created lakes and dams. The
7,500 photographs selected for digitization document village sites, burial
mounds and artifacts from Native American tribes living in those areas
between 1000 A.D. and 1600 A.D. The photographs are deteriorating, as are
their negatives, and digitizing the collection will enable anyone to access
the images online. "You don't want schoolkids pawing through the pictures,"
says project manager Lesli Rowan. (Scripps Howard News Service 6 Jun 2003)
http://www.thesunlink.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=DIGITALARCHIVE-06-06-03&cat=AN
NLM DEFINES STANDARDS FOR ELECTRONIC JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS
To meet a long recognized need of a standard model for electronically
archiving and exchanging journal articles, The National Library of Medicine
(NLM) has created two Document Type Definitions (DTDs) designed for that
purpose. Dr. David Lipman, Director of the Library's National Center for
Biotechnology Information (NCBI) says the DTDs "will simplify journal
publishing and increase the accuracy of the archiving and exchange of
scholarly journal articles." The Journal Publishing DTD defines a common
XML format for the content of journal articles, but the structures are
robust enough to support print publication as well. Built using the same
set of elements, the Archiving and Interchange DTD provides a common format
in which publishers, aggregators, and archives can exchange journal
content. These DTDs and the Tagset from which they were created are in the
public domain, with complete information and documentation available at
http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov. (U.S National Library of Medicine 9 Apr 2003)
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/press_releases/dtd_ncbi03pr.html
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