Program announcement: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1998/nsf9863/nsf9863.htm
Information on briefings: http://www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/dli/start.htm

On February 6, 1998, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) provided to the heads of executive agencies guidance about GILS (see <http://www.usgs.gov/gils/omb98-05.html>). Agency responsibilities for GILS were reaffirmed, as provided under authority of the law (Paperwork Reduction Act, Federal Records Act, and Freedom of Information Act) and policies such as OMB Circular No. A-130. The memorandum also noted that agencies are now describing their GILS progress in annual reports to OMB.

Agencies were also reminded that implementations of GILS are to follow the GILS Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS). This standard, FIPS 192-1, was re-issued this year by the National Institute of Standards and Technology to update from GILS Profile version 1 to version 2. Paper copies of FIPS 192-1 are available from the National Technical Information Service, telephone 703-605-6000. Version 2 of the GILS Profile is available on the Internet at <http://www.usgs.gov/gils/prof_v2.html>.

OMB noted the initiative and leadership of several agencies in implementing GILS: the Department of Defense, the Department of Treasury, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Government Printing Office. Roles for the Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council in GILS were also outlined. These include: training agencies in GILS best practices; further developing the U.S. Federal GILS guidelines, search standards and subject keywords; coordinating "one stop" access to multi-agency government services; and coordinating with intergovernmental and other related initiatives.

Geoffrey Samuels
President
Museum Digital Licensing Collective
1 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
samuels@inx.net

URL: http://www.museumlicensing.org

The Museum Digital Licensing Collective, Inc. (MDLC) is a Delaware non-profit, non-stock corporation formed to provide technical and financial assistance for digitizing museum collections, and to manage the storage, distribution, and licensing of digitized materials and related software to educational institutions, libraries, commercial companies, and the public. The MDLC will be organized and run in conjunction with museums to serve the entire American museum community.

The MDLC has a close affiliation with the American Association of Museums, which will always appoint a majority of the MDLC Board's museum, university, and library association directors. Computer services will be performed under contract with major academic research libraries, and the initial contracts will be with the University of California at Berkeley and Cornell University. Sun Microsystems will also be an initial technology provider for the MDLC.

Most of the 8,200 American museums do not have the funding or technical resources to digitize large or important portions of their collections, develop related database and learning technology software, or manage an Information Technology department. There are also varying standards for digital documentation and imaging. No central and efficient licensing administration exists today to manage the distribution of large amounts of digitized museum collections to hundreds, and potentially thousands, of higher educational institutions, libraries, and K-12 school systems.

The MDLC will solve these problems by helping to fund the necessary technical services to handle all aspects of safely storing and distributing digitized museum materials, and licensing these images. The MDLC will help finance the digitizing by museums of significant museum holdings through grants and donated funds, then license these collections to build a stream of licensing income to fund continuing digitization projects and become self-supporting. A mutually-beneficial relationship will be negotiated between a very large set of potential users -- educational institutions, who are already seeking access to digitized content -- and museums with their vast repositories of cultural, artistic, historical, and scientific collections, but limited financial resources.

The first-year Organizing Phase will be devoted to: developing and negotiating the MDLC's structure and operating policies; defining procedures to digitize and document museum collections; testing computer and network systems to store, distribute, and display digitized museum materials; and furthering relations with appropriate museums, educational institutions, and associations. Task Forces of museum professionals, technical specialists, educational representatives, and consultants will research, review and negotiate the issues identified in this document.

The Organizing Phase will produce: a refinement of the MDLC's charitable and educational mission; a detailed business plan of on-going costs, needs, revenue projections, and timetables; appropriate operating plans, income and expense formulae, and licensing agreements; the development and testing of relevant technologies; computer services contracts with providers; rules of governance; and twenty founding museum members.

Future plans for the MDLC include the possible creation of for-profit subsidiary organizations. A subsidiary might handle the licensing of digitized museum materials to commercial entities, such as multimedia publishers, and gift and product manufacturers. Another subsidiary might propose and develop multimedia and other commercial productions.

The initial organizing meeting will be held in early June in Washington, DC. The MDLC has received recognition of tax-exemption under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. The budget for the 9 - 12 month Organizing Phase is $650,000. The budget for financing the digitization of core collections and operating the MDLC over the following five years is estimated at $10 million.

Organizing Museum Participants

The following museums and original materials collecting institutions, selected for diversity in size and type, have agreed to help organize the Museum Digital Licensing Collective. They will work to develop the MDLC, but are under no obligation to join the MDLC. Formal invitations to museums to join as members will be issued only after the Collective¹s policies and rules have been set by the organizing participants.

• Amon Carter Museum
• Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art
• Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh
• Chicago Historical Society
• Cornell University
• Harvard University Art Museums
• Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village
• Library of Congress
• Museum of Science and Industry
• The National Museum of American History
• North Carolina Museum of Art
• Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
• The Children's Museum of Indianapolis
• The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum
• The Heard Museum
• The Historic New Orleans Collection
• The Historical Society of Washington, D. C.
• The New York Public Library
• University of California at Berkeley
• Worcester Art Museum

MDLC Board Members

The founding Board members are:

Edward H. Able, Jr. President & CEO, American Association of Museums Washington, D. C.	Gerald R. Singer General Counsel, The American Museum of Natural History New York, New York
Barbara Franco Executive Director, The Historical Society of Washington D. C. Washington, D. C.	Susan Rosenblatt Deputy University Librarian, University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, California
Douglas Greenberg President & Director, Chicago Historical Society Chicago, Illinois	Sarah E. Thomas Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, Cornell University Ithaca, New York
Lyndel King Director, The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum Minneapolis, Minnesota	Duane E. Webster Executive Director, Association of Research Libraries Washington, D. C.
	Geoffrey Samuels President, MDLC New York, New York

In Print

• Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 17, April 10, 1998

  This selective bibliography, authored by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., University of Houston Libraries, presents over 600 articles, books, electronic documents, and other sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet and other networks. The HTML document is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file and contains live links to sources available on the Internet. The bibliography is searchable using Boolean operators, and includes hyperlinks to Web sites related to scholarly electronic publishing issues. There are also Word and Acrobat files of the Bibliography that are designed for printing.

  • HTML version http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
  • Acrobat version http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.pdf
  • Word version http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.doc

• The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) Cataloging and Intellectual Access Committee (VIVACAT) Revised Cataloging Guidelines Draft, March 5, 1998

  The Subcommittee on Cataloging and Intellectual Access has created guidelines to assist libraries in linking to electronic resources from Web OPACs and campus Web sites. They offer statewide standards and local options as well as illustrate MARC-based cataloging with examples from Web OPACs at VIVA institutions with a variety of systems software. This version includes examples of how records appear in different OPACS (III, VTLS, Sirsi, DRA, and Notis). There are canned and live examples. This is intended to assist public services librarians in seeing how cataloging decisions impact what the public sees.

• AsianDOC Electronic Newsletter

  The first two issues (March and June 1998) of the Electronic Newsletter are experimental and are designed to test the ability of a web e-newsletter to support scholars, librarians, and researchers world-wide who are developing text and image databases in the various fields of Asian/EurAsian Studies or who are incorporating materials in Asian languages into larger databases, and to promote better communication among them. This is a "full-service" site with sections devoted to databases, technologies, conferences and meetings, and interest groups in addition to the newsletter itself.

Point-to-Point

• A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation; A Project of the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program and the Law Library of Congress

  Part of the American Memory Collections of the Library of Congress, this initial release of a longer-term effort includes the records of the First and Second Congresses, 1789-1793; the House and Senate Journals; the Senate Executive Journal; the Annals of Congress; and the Journal of William Maclay, Senator from Pennsylvania in the First Congress, comprising approximately 4,400 pages. The Journals are available both as digital facsimile images and as searchable texts. The Annals of Congress are available as digital facsimile images accompanied by searchable page headings (subject terms) and indexes.

  Future releases will include: the Journals of the Continental Congress; the records of the Constitutional Convention, and the subsequent debates over the adoption of the Constitution; the records of the U.S. Congress up to 1873, when the Government Printing Office began publication of the proceedings of Congress in the Congressional Record; the United States Statutes at Large from 1789 to 1873; and the Amercan State Papers, 1789-1838.

• New Horizons in Scholarly Communication

  This publication was created by the Librarians Association of the University of California to track developments in information technology. It identifies trends in the processes of creating, disseminating, retrieving, and using information to support university-based instruction and research. The site is searchable and offers links to related resources in: teaching, research, publishing, access, academic freedom, citation, copyright, disabled users, publications, meetings, organizations, related projects, and programs in the University of California system. A forms-based interface enables users to nominate other resources for inclusion in the site.

Goings On

• CHI'98: ACM Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, April 18 - 24, 1998, Los Angeles, California USA

  This is a week-long meeting consisting of tutorials, workshops, panels, consortia, demonstrations, working group meetings, and poster sessions. Major topics include:

  3-D Interfaces Children Collaborative Work Computer Mediated Communication Design Techniques Education Empirical Studies Entertainment Evaluation Graphic and Visual Design HCI Education Health Care Information Retrieval Input Devices Intelligent Systems

  Interaction Technology and Design Introduction to HCI Metaphors Multimedia Multimodal Interaction Organizational HCI Psychology of HCI Social Issues Task Analysis Usability Engineering User Studies Virtual Community Virtual Reality Visualization World Wide Web and Internet

  Advance registration is closed. On-site registration opens April 18, 1998 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

• Library and Information Services in Astronomy (LISA III), April 21 - 24, 1998, Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, Spain

  Library and Information Services in Astronomy (LISA III) will provide an opportunity for librarians, publishers, and scientists to examine the current state of the art of information maintenance, delivery, and preservation, as well as to learn from invited experts the directions in which our profession is moving. The conference includes invited and contributed presentations, panel discussions and a poster session. Among the topics to be covered are: information discovery, thesaurus development, electronic publishing, and use of historical materials. The proceedings will be published in the ASP (Astronomical Society of the Pacific) Conference Series (http://www.aspsky.org/html/confser/forthcoming.html) and in electronic format on the World Wide Web. Further information about the LISA III conference as well as registration and accommodation forms are available at:

  http://www.iac.es/biblio/lisa/

  The conference is partially supported by the European Union under its programme of "Euroconferences" and will be hosted by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC).

• Solving Electronic Records Management (ERM) Issues for Government Websites, April 22, 1998, Washington, DC USA

  Presented by the Federal Internet Institute, Syracuse University School of Information Studies, and Council for Excellence in Government, and organized by Charles R. McClure, Distinguished Professor, Syracuse University, and J. Timothy Sprehe, President, Sprehe Information Management Associates, this one-day seminar addresses current legal issues, policies, practices and practical strategies, and will enable participants to exchange ideas and information, and contribute to ERM recommendations in the McClure/Sprehe research report to the National Archives and Records Administration. For details and to register, see:

  http://www.federalinstitute.com/

• ACM Policy 1998 Conference, May 10 - 12, 1998, Washington, DC USA

  This conference proposes to provide a multidisciplinary forum to invite computing professionals to contribute to the making of public policy. Each issue is chaired by a moderator who plans to develop a discussion intended to build consensus around a particular issue. The conference structure includes keynote speakers, technical panels, Critical Action Working Groups, and workshops. The conference is divided into two components: Ethics and Social Impact Component, and Computing Policy Component, which encompasses universal service, electronic commerce, intellectual property, and learning online.

• ASIS Midyear '98; Collaboration Across Boundaries: theories, strategies, and technology, May 16-20, 1998, Orlando, Florida USA. Early registration discount deadline, April 24, 1998.

  This conference proposes to explore issues associated with collaborative work environments and their inforamtion requirements. Topics include:

  • Technologies that Support Collaboration
  • Theories of Collaboration
  • Collaboration in Education
  • Collaborative Work
  • Information Seeking as a Collaborative Process
  • Collaboration in Society

  The format of the meeting includes plenaries, panel sessions, and demonstrations, as well as continuing education courses. For additional information, see the Preliminary Program at http://www.asis.org/Conferences/MY98/my98pp.html

• AMIA 1998 Spring Congress, Bringing Knowledge to the Point of Use, May 27 - 30, 1998, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA

  The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) is a professional membership organization devoted to the promotion of research, development, education, and progress in medical and health care informatics in the United States. Medical libraries are being replaced by "virtual libraries", and as a result, medical informaticians, librarians, and other information specialists are challenged to provide access to useable and relevant information, whenever and wherever clinicians may need to address patient needs. The AMIA 1998 Spring Congress addresses these concerns with the theme, Bringing Knowledge to the Point of Use.

  The 1998 Spring Congress will be conducted in collaboration with the Medical Library Association (MLA), and in conjunction with the Partnerships for Networked Consumer Health Information (Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services). It will feature paper presentations, panel discussions, theater-style demonstrations of knowledge-based systems, speaker sessions, and tutorials. Topics include those such as:

  • Consumer Access to Information
  • Knowledge Systems: A Health Informatics Research Agenda for the Twenty-First Century
  • Research Issues to Achieve the Virtual Library
  • Indexing Clinical Literature
  • Cataloging in the Virtual Library
  • Virtual Access and Evaluation

  For information about other topics and complete registration information, see the Preliminary Program information at http://www.amia.org/s98pptoc.htm.

• HT'98: The Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, June 20 - 24, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA

  Hypertext '98 offers a setting for researchers and practicing professionals to share experiences and to compare notes about hypermedia authoring, publishing, system construction, human-computer interaction, digital libraries, and electronic literature. Attendees at earlier conferences have come with backgrounds in computing, psychology, literature, sociology, engineering, law, medicine -- many different fields. The structure includes: papers, panels/perspectives, short papers, demonstrations, posters, courses, and workshops.

  Topics include but are not limited to:

  Collaborative hypermedia technology and applications Empirical studies and hypermedia evaluation Hypermedia in education and training Hypertext rhetoric and criticism Hypermedia and time -- narratives and storyboarding Hypertext writing -- fiction, scholarship, and technical Innovative hypertexts and novel uses of hypertext and hypermedia Integration and open hypermedia architectures Large-scale distributed hypermedia (including WWW applications) Structuring hypertext documents for reading and retrieval

  Techniques for generating, recognizing, navigating and visualizing structure Theories, models, architectures, standards, and frameworks Hypermedia user interfaces (link marking, composition, browsing, consistency of open hypermedia interfaces, representing traditional databases) Hypermedia storage technologies (persistent object stores, link services, distributed databases, information retrieval, versioning, access control) Object-oriented hypermedia (data models, distributed architectures, component architectures, application design and re-use) Workplace deployment and industrial applications of hypermedia WYSIWYG hypermedia authoring Hypermedia and 3D spaces Hypermedia for the Internet -- WWW and beyond

  Further information is available at the conference web site:

  http://www.ks.com/ht98/

• DL '98: Digital Libraries '98, June 23 - June 26, 1998, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA

  This conference offers a setting for researchers and practicing professionals to share experiences and compare notes about issues related to digital libraries (DLs). Attendees at earlier meetings have come with backgrounds in computing, library science, psychology, literature, sociology, engineering, law, medicine. The structure of the presentations include: papers, panels, short papers, demonstrations, posters, tutorials, and workshops.

  Topics for the conference are defined broadly to encompass almost any subject of relevance to the field of Digital Libraries. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: DL projects, user experience, DL technologies, search engines, name spaces, indexing, collection development and management, user support, digital librarianship, requirements for DLs, economics of DLs, lessons learned, collaborative libraries, information summarization and visualization, metadata issues, multimedia collections and many others.

  For further information, see the conference's web site:

  http://www.ks.com/dl98/

• Reference Service in a Digital Age, June 29 - 30, 1998, Library of Congress, Washington, DC USA

  This seminiar addresses digital libraries, metadata, data mining, collection development, licensing, cataloging, preservation, digital object identifiers, access management, and remote reference from the perspective of a reference librarian based in a library, classroom, or information center. It poses the following questions: What kind and level of service is the reference librarian giving? What knowledge and skills does a reference librarian need to provide quality and accurate service? How can reference librarians be sure they have appropriate and adequate real and digital tools to provide quality service? How can reference librarians and their institutions work collaboratively to provide quality service, across both the public and private sector spectrum? Should reference librarians cede some of their responsibilities to intelligent agents or other artificial intelligence technologies?

  This institute is sponsored by the Library of Congress and hosted by Diane Kresh, Acting Director of Public Services and Director of Preservation at LC, in cooperation with Library Solutions Institute of Berkeley, California, Anne Lipow, Director.

• Providing Social Science Data Services: Strategies for Design and Operation, August 3 - 7, 1998, Ann Arbor, Michigan USA. Space is limited.

  This one-week workshop is designed for those who provide local support services for the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and other numeric data for quantitative research. Through discussion, hands-on computing exercises and homework, the participants will examine how to plan and design appropriate levels of service for local environments; identify and select data and documentation; and use Internet tools for retrieval. Examples of topics covered include: working with variables, critiquing data documentation, using ICPSR's various data distribution formats; searching The Internet for social science data; subsetting data files; examining and evaluating web-based data extractors; ordering and downloading ICPSR data; and options for local data delivery. Techniques and tools examined during the week will include network file transfer tools; data verification techniques; specialized web search engines and thesauri; and statistical software. Throughout the workshop, an emphasis will be placed on social science concepts and terminology as well as on practical solutions to service delivery.

  This one-week course is part of a large summer institute devoted to quantitative methods of social research. For further information on the institute's summer program and application materials, see;

  http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ICPSR/Other_Resources/Summer/summer.html.

• Creating Electronic Texts and Images; Second Summer Institute at the University of New Brunswick, August 16 - 21, 1998, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

  The course is designed for librarians and archivists who are planning to develop electronic text and imaging projects; for scholars who are creating electronic texts as part of their teaching and research; and for publishers who are looking to move publications to the Web. The course will center around the creation of a set of electronic texts and digital images. Topics to be covered include:

  • SGML tagging and conversion
  • Using the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines
  • The basics of archival imaging
  • The form and implications of XML
  • Publishing SGML on the World Wide Web
  • EAD - Encoded Archival Descriptions

  Course participants will create an electronic version of a selection of Canadian literary letters from University of New Brunswick's Archives and Special Collections. Participants will encode the letters with TEI/SGML tagging, tag an EAD finding aid (a one day course component), and explore issues in creating digital images. Some prior experience is presumed. For participants with little or no previous experience with SGML applications, there will be a one-day introductory level session on Saturday, August 15. For those on the West Coast, an introductory session taught by the instructor David Seaman will be offered on June 17, 1998, as a pre-conference workshop at the Canadian Library Association Annual Conference & Trade Show in Victoria, British Columbia.

  The Institute is sponsored by the University of New Brunswick Library's Electronic Text Centre and the Department of Archives and Special Collections. Further information on the curriculum and registration is available at the web site:

  http://ultratext.hil.unb.ca/Texts/Announce/seaman98.htm.

Pointers in This Column

Copyright (c) 1998 Corporation for National Research Initiatives

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