A Word (or Two) of Welcome
Welcome to D-Lib Magazine, a magazine about digital library issues for researchers, developers, and the intellectually curious. In the following pages, you will find discussions of current research, news about projects, pointers to useful sites, and an invitation to participate in ongoing debates. As a rule, we expect to be short on editorial opinions and long on content, and believe that we will best serve our users by describing work that is actually underway.
D-Lib Magazine is sponsored by the Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA) task group of the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) program, and is produced by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) . The magazine is itself an experiment in electronic publishing, which fulfills its communication function for the Digital Library Forum by testing the limits of writing in and for a wholly networked environment. We have no -- and propose no -- print analogue, and we will be most intrigued by substantive articles that take advantage of the power of hypermedia while retaining the strengths of traditional, print publishing.
Permission is hereby given for the material in D-Lib Magazine to be used for research purposes or more general non-commercial purposes. We are still constructing formal guidelines for our contributors and users of D-Lib Magazine materials. In the meantime, we will ask readers to conform to current standards of professional behavior with respect to citing, downloading, further disseminating, and otherwise sharing materials in D-Lib for non-commercial use. We hope to promote community spirit and responsible use of materials in digital formats. Out of professional courtesy to the authors and editors, we ask that you observe the following conditions:
Any commercial use of these materials requires explicit, prior authorization from CNRI.
In addition to encouraging our authors to explore the potential of the networked environment, D-Lib Magazine will be used as a testbed for experiments in electronic publishing and advanced research in digital libraries. In the future, you can expect to find two forms of this magazine. The standard version will contain the basic stories, editorial material, and pointers; it will employ the standard identifier, URL, as used by the World Wide Web. The advanced edition, which will debut in August, will contain an experimental "playpen" for advanced technologies in addition to the material contained in the standard version. The advanced version, moreover, will identify items with handles, which are location independent names. (For more information about handles, see the summary article included under the discussion of the Computer Science Technical Reports Project, cited on CNRI's home page.)
The on-line community is neither shy nor reticent. We hope you will watch and participate in the "To the Editor" column where each month, we will present comment from the community. This month, we have solicited opinions from experts on issues that current programs and projects seem to ignore or underestimate -- the wallflowers, so to speak, at the digital library dance. Next month, we will give you a selection of responses. Please send your comments as well as messages on any topic of digital library research, news of your activities, and announcements of your seminars and workshops to the editor at dlib@cnri.reston.va.us.
Amy Friedlander
Editor
hdl:cnri.dlib/july95-friedlander