D-Lib Magazine
July/August 1997

ISSN 1082-9873

Clips and Pointers

NSF Awards $3 million to the Internet Scout Project; Expansion Planned

The Internet Scout Project, located in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is a project of the InterNIC. Developed in response to a 1992 project solicitation by NSF, the first services came online in 1993 and have been in continuous production since the Spring of that year. In April of this year, NSF awarded Internet Scout an additional $3,000,000 to continue providing current awareness and resource discovery services on the Internet.

The mission of the Internet Scout Project is to promote the progress of research and education in the U.S. by improving the Internet's information infrastructure. This is done generally through the advancement of information and resource discovery and specifically by providing selections of Internet resources which are content-rich, authoritative, and effectively presented. The primary audience for these services is the U.S. research and education, science and engineering community although, in point of fact, the Internet Scout Project serves a much broader audience. This audience includes people involved in the Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities. Additionally, there is both a K-12 and an international audience. The project currently employs thirteen persons, full and part-time, including librarians and content specialists with interdisciplinary backgrounds.

Internet Scout currently has five current awareness services. Its flagship, the Scout Report, is in its fourth year of production and enjoys a readership in excess of 100,000 per week. It is a guide to new Internet resources. Net-Happenings, in its fifth year, reaches in excess of 25,000 readers per day. It filters over 110 listservs and newsgroups and provides the detail and currency necessary to stay abreast of Internet developments in a variety of areas. K.I.D.S. (Kids Identifying and Discovering Sites) is a cooperative effort between K-12 students in the Madison Metropolitan School District (Madison, Wisconsin) and Boulder Valley School District (Boulder, Colorado). Students from four schools alternate annotating thematic sites of interest to them twice a month throughout the school year. Scout Toolkit is a resource guide to effectively using informational and software-based services on the Internet. The Scout Report Signpost, the newest service, provides access to the Scout Report's critical summaries. This service can be both browsed or queried.

Internet Scout plans for selective dissemination of information include the development of three additional Scout Reports, each of which will have a disciplinary focus and will be available this Fall; in specific, Science and Engineering, Business and Economics, and Arts and Humanities. These new reports will, in turn, further populate the Scout Report Signpost. Signpost will continue to explore various taxonomies for representing information and will serve as a testbed for the development of Uniform Resource Names (URN). Additionally, Internet Scout plans to continue its outreach efforts for promoting quality resources on the Internet, Internet II and Next Generation Internet.

ISO Working Group for Transliteration from Indic to Latin script

ISO [International Organization for Standardization] has recently set up a working group to develop standards for transliteration from Indic scripts to Latin script. The scripts involved are Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Oriya, Malayalam, Sinhala, Telugu, and Tamil. To make the work of the working group more visible and more relevant to end users than has been usual in the past, an electronic mailing list, Conv-dev, has been set up.

The purpose of this list is restricted to the development of transliteration standards, rather than general discussion on Indic scripts. Anyone actively involved in using or developing relevant transliteration systems and who is prepared to contribute to the list from time to time, is very welcome to join.

To join the list, send an email to: majordomo@elot.gr with this message in the body of the text: subscribe conv-dev your@email.address (but with your real email address replacing the string your@email.address).

Once you are subscribed, you will receive further necessary information.

Point-to-Point

• Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research, maintained (or "woven") by Alan Liu, offers a hierarchical, subject classification to humanities resources on the web. The frequently-updated site can also be searched by keywords. "Humanities" are construed broadly to range from "cyberculture" to photography and architecture. Among the useful features of the site are sections highlighting new features as well as "Highlights" for each of the broad subject areas.

• The US Bureau of Census's new service, Federal Electronic Research and Review Extraction Tool (FERRET), supports social science research by permitting researchers to retrieve data from the Current Population Surveys (CPS) for March 1995 and 1996 supplements and CPS Displaced Workers 1996 data, which are datasets created and updated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The site allows researchers to view data or extract records as ASCII text with a user defined delimiter with crosstabulations or frequency distributions, or as SAS datasets.

In Print

• The Institute of Physics Publishing has announced the publication of on-line multimedia research papers in the journal Nanotechnology. One of these papers, with MPEG video simulations of carbon nanotube-based gears, is available free of charge as the "Featured Article" on the Nanotechnology Web page (http://www.iop.org/Journals/na).

• The Final Report of the project, An Evaluation of the U.S. Government's Implementation of the Government Information Locator Service (GILS), is now available. The site provides access to the technical proposal, project description, personnel and related material as well as the report itself. The study was begun in September 1996; data collection was concluded roughly six months later in March 1997, and the final report issued in June 1997. Although the project recognized the complexity of GILS as a networked information service by considering multiple aspects, including policy, technology, content, and standards, a primary focus of the study was on users: Who uses GILS? How well users' needs are being served, and to identify what modifications might improve service to the public?

• Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) Guidelines for Cataloging Electronic Resources provides guidance to libraries in adding access to VIVA resources through their local catalogs. The guidelines address a number of issues, such as cataloging at the collection or item level, leaving the eventual decision to the local institution but providing guidance such as example records based on MARC formats. The guidelines also call for post-cataloging maintenance procedures to update URLs and changes to content of remote resources.

Goings On

• The annual meeting of the International Federation of Library Associations IFLA '97 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, from August 31, 1997 to September 5, 1997. The theme of the conference is "Libraries and Information for Human Development" and seeks to explore the relationships among education, culture, knowledge transfer, and the role of libraries. Further information on the program and related issues are available at the conference's web site.

• Eleventh International Unicode Conference will be held from September 2 to 5, 1997 in San Jose, California. The three-day conference is organized around the theme of "Software Development + the Internet: Going Global with Unicode" and will consider issues relating to implementations of Unicode in multilingual computing including operating systems and applications, fonts, and text layout. Space is limited.

• Information Resources in Academic Medicine: Strategies for Turbulent Times will be held at the Lansdowne Conference Resort, Leesburg, Virginia, from September 7 to 9, 1997. This two-day professional development conference will address a broad range of information resource issues that arise in teaching hospitals and related institutions; medical schools; university, academic medical centers; and health sciences libraries.

• The Second IEEE Metadata Conference will be held in Silver Spring, Maryland, from September 16 to September 17, 1997. The objectives of the program are to: consider metadata issues faced by the various communities (e.g., imass storage, data management, image and multimedia processing, and distributed computing); encourage the exchange of ideas on common technologies and standards; invite opinions and views of users and providers; and stimulate the development and usage of metadata.

• Scholarly Publishing and Communication in the Electronic Environment will be held at the University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada, on September 26-27, 1997. The conference, funded by the Connaught Committee and the Snider Visiting Professorships of the University of Toronto. seeks to promote knowledge of distributed network publishing within the university and research communities; publicize existing networked-based scholarly and scientific literature and information; encourage librarians, computer specialists, publishers and academics to collaborate; consider new cooperative research, resource sharing and models enabled by networked technologies; and evaluate scholarly electronic publishing.

• The Ethics of Electronic Information in the 21st Century, September 26-28, 1997, is sponsored by a series of groups at the University of Memphis. The two-day conference proposes to address a series of issues associated with ethics in the Information Age. These include notions of privacy, access, and ownership. The final program will be developed after August 1, 1997. Registration and other information is available via the conference's web site.

• The 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems will be held at the Centre of Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from May 26 to May 29, 1998. Papers are solicited in the following areas: Distributed Multimedia and Digital Libraries, Mobile Systems, Internet Applications, Multi-agent and Self-organising Systems, Distributed Databases and Information Systems, Interoperable Systems, Communication Protocols, Distributed Operating Systems, Distributed Software Engineering, Distributed Algorithms and Verification Techniques, Fault Tolerance, Availability and Security, Cooperative and Groupware Systems, and Distributed Real-Time Systems. There is particular interest are papers on applications, such as digital libraries, Internet applications including electronic commerce, multi-media information servers, and virtual-reality systems, that enabled by high-performance computing and high-capacity networks and distributed systems. Additional information submission requirements are available at the conference's web site. The deadline for submissions is October 1, 1997.

Pointers in This Column:

18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems May 26 - 29, 1998 Amsterdam, The Netherlands	http://icdcs.fernuni-hagen.de/
Eleventh International Unicode Conference September 2 - 5, 1997 San Jose, California.	http://www.unicode.org/unicode/iuc11/
Ethics of Electronic Information in the 21st Century September 26-28, 1997 Memphis, Tennessee	http://www.memphis.edu/ethics21/
Evaluation of the U.S. Government's Implementation of the Government Information Locator Service (GILS) Final Report	http://www.unt.edu/slis/research/gilseval/gilsdocs.htm
Federal Electronic Research and Review Extraction Tool (FERRET)	http://ferret.bls.census.gov/cgi-bin/ferret
IFLA '97 August 31 - September 5, 1997 Copenhagen, Denmark	http://www.db.dk/ifla97/
Information Resources in Academic Medicine: Strategies for Turbulent Times September 7 - 9, 1997 Leesburg, Virginia	http://www.aamc.org/events/specmtgs/inforeso/start.htm
Internet Scout Project	http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
Nanotechnology	http://www.iop.org/Journals/na
Second IEEE Metadata Conference September 16 - 17, 1997 Silver Spring, Maryland	http://www.llnl.gov/liv_comp/metadata/md97.html
Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) Guidelines for Cataloging Electronic Resources	http://poe.acc.virginia.edu/~ejs7y/vivacat/vivacat.htm
Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research	http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/

Copyright © 1997 Corporation for National Research Initiatives

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