D-Lib Magazine
February 1997

ISSN 1082-9873

Clips and Pointers

Berkeley Digital Library Technology Assists in California Flood Recovery Efforts

The DLI-funded UC Berkeley Digital Library Project has been making significant ongoing contributions to California's flood recovery efforts. These efforts have been aided by the ready availability of pertinent on-line information provided by the project. This information had been acquired as part of the project's continuing efforts to create an environmental digital library testbed.

Several of the data sets previously acquired by the project contain valuable information not otherwise easily accessible. An example of such a data set is one that contains authoritative data about all dams under the jurisdiction of the State of California. This data base had been extracted automatically from a printed document by a document recognition process developed as part of the project. The project also developed web-based form and map interfaces to these data, providing recovery efforts with the ability to quickly obtain answers to dam-related queries which were previously not easily obtainable by any means.

Other on-line data sets acquired by the project that proved to be useful include several sets of geo-referenced aerial photographs, especially those of the hard-hit Sacramento delta area. It is noteworthy that none of the data sets were acquired by the project with these specific purposes in mind, but rather, because they were deemed to be of general utility for planning purposes. Thus, the value of acquiring and making available such resources in digital form was made amply manifest in this crisis.

In addition, the project learned from State relief workers that USGS "quad sheets" (essentially detailed maps) of affected areas would be valuable if available. Because of its acquired expertise and developed infrastructure, the project was able to provide rapid response to this request, and acquire and make available the high-priority data within approximately 1.5 weeks. Working in cooperation with USGS, the project plans to imminently supplement these data with USGS so-called DRG quad sheets, which have comparable spatial extent but superior geographic properties.

Point-to-Point

• Metadata: Mapping between metadata formats. Michael Day, Research Officer at UKOLN, The UK Office for Library and Information Networking, University of Bath, has assembled a collection of resources that addresses issues in mapping among several metadata formats, including US MARC, GILS, IAFA/ROADS, SOIF, Z39.50, and the Dublin Core.

• Online Music Scholarship Resources, part of a project funded by the Mellon Foundation on music scholarship and information technology, contains a compilation of links, which have been organized by subject. Among the topics covered are "Digital Libraries – General Sources" and "Digital Libraries – Music". The latter offers useful synopses of current projects concerning digitization and Internet-based music scholarship as well as links to the identified sites.

• Let There Be Light! Licensing Electronic Resources: State of the Evolving Art. Summary of Proceedings, George Soete. This summary contains synopses of the fourteen presentations comprising this two-day meeting held in San Francisco on December 8-9, 1996. The text has been augmented by hyperlinks to relevant sites and documents, personal web pages, and e-mail addresses.

Goings On

• The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) Workshop on Intelligent Scalable Text Summarization has issued its call for papers. Deadline for submission is March 15, 1997. The Joint Conference will be held in Madrid, Spain, July 7-12, 1997; the date of the workshop has not yet been set. More complete information on the call for papers, program, registration, travel, and accommodations are available at the conference's web site.

• The Second IEEE Metadata Conference is sponsored by the IEEE Mass Storage Systems and Technology Technical Committee, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Hughes Information Technology Systems, and IEEE Digital Libraries Task Force. The two-day conference will be held at NOAA in Silver Spring, Maryland September 16-17, 1997. The Call for Papers closes March 15, 1997; proposal abstracts are requested in electronic form.

• Museums and the Web: An International Conference, March 16-19, 1997, Los Angeles, California. The conference consists of 16 workshops and 17 sessions with over 50 papers by speakers from 13 countries. The site includes information on registration, hotel and travel, sponsorship, and exhibition opportunities.

• The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Fall Symposium will be held in Nashville, Tennessee, October 24-29, 1997. The two themes of the conference is The Emergence of 'Internetable' Health Care and Systems That Really Work. Priority will be given to submissions that include an evaluation component and solutions to issues that arise from the Internet environment, including: security, distributed architectures, communications standards, and intellectual property. Further information is available at the association's web site.

• The Sixth International World Wide Web Conference will be held in Santa Clara, California, April 7-11, 1997. Concurrently with the conference will be a series of sessions devoted to access for blind and visually impaired computer users, Web Access '97. Information on registration, invited speakers, and the program is available at the conference's web site.

• ELVIRA 4 (Electronic Library and Visual Information) Conference on Digital Library Research, which is hosted by the International Institute for Electronic Library Research, De Montfort University, will take place at British Telecom's Training Centre, Milton Keynes, UK, on May 6-8, 1997. The advance program and registration information are posted to the conference's web site.

• The deadline for submission of papers for inclusion in the Workshop on AI in Digital Libraries, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Workshop Series, to be held in Nagoya, Japan, August 23-29, 1997 was February 14, 1997. Full text papers are expected to be made available by mid- April. Further information on the workshop is available at the workshop's web site; information on the program, registration, and attendance is maintained at the conference's web site.

Pointers in This Column:

American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Annual Fall Symposium Nashville, Tennessee October 24-29, 1997	http://www.amia.org
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)/ European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) Joint Conference/ Workshop on Intelligent Scalable Text Summarization	http://horacio.ieec.uned.es/cl97/
ELVIRA 4 (Electronic Library and Visual Information) Conference on Digital Library Research International Institute for Electronic Library Research De Montfort University Milton Keynes, UK May 6-8, 1997	http://www.iielr.dmu.ac.uk/ELVIRA/ELVIRA4/
Let There Be Light! Licensing Electronic Resources: State of the Evolving Art. Summary of Proceedings	http://arl.cni.org/scomm/sum.html,
Metadata: Mapping between metadata formats	http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/interoperability/
Museums and the Web An International Conference March 16-19, 1997 Los Angeles, California	www.archimuse.com
Online Music Scholarship Resources	http://www.iat.unc.edu/technology/music/music.ht ml
Second IEEE Metadata Conference	http://www.llnl.gov/liv_comp/metadata/md97.html
Sixth International World Wide Web Conference Santa Clara, California April 7-11, 1997	http://www6conf.slac.stanford.edu/
Workshop on AI in Digital Libraries International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Workshop Series Nagoya, Japan August 23-29, 1997	http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/cfp.html http://www.ijcai.org/ijcai-97/

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