The Association of American University Presses, a cooperative, non-profit organization of 110 university presses in the United States, Canada, and overseas, has announced a searchable on-line catalog/bookstore at http://aaup.princeton.edu or http://press-gopher.uchicago.edu. The system supports searching across all participating publishers or by individual presses; based on Library of Congress MARC records, embellished by additional material, such as price, provided by the publishers. The site offers assistance in searching as well as guidelines for authors who submit electronic materials to the respective publishers. The project is two years in the making and is supported by the members with financial support from William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in collaboration with The Library Corporation. Activities have been centered at the University of Chicago Press and Princeton University Press. 65,000 of a projected 100,000 titles are currently on-line.
The Institute of Physics, a not-for-profit organization with members in the United Kingdom and Ireland, has undertaken an experimental UK Pilot Site Licence Initiative with support from the Higher Education Funding Councils (HEFCs) of England, Scotland and Wales and the Department of Education for Northern Ireland; Blackwell Publishing and Academic Press will also participate in the pilot project. The intent of the pilot is to examine licensing of copyrighted material to allow broader usage and dissemination as a result of a result of the Joint Funding Councils' Libraries Review Group and Professor Brian Follet's implementation group. The HEFCs will pay the Institute of Physics Publishing to make all of its journals available at 70 percent of the 1996 subscription to libraries in institutions of higher education in the UK. Many of the restrictions on use, such as copying, have also been lifted. Additional information on the Institute's publishing program, including electronic serials, may be found at its web site (http://www.iop.org/).
A University of South Australia team has initiated the Integrated Document Access Project for the Council of Australian University Librarians and the National Library of Australia (http://www.ida.unisa.edu.au). The goal of the project is to identify, evaluate, and design a framework for providing integrated access to print and electronic materials. In the near term, the project is assembling a list of relevant projects.
The Getty Art History Information Program (AIHP) is an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust (http://www.ahip.getty.edu/). The AIHP has undertaken two long-standing efforts related to digital libraries; development of thesaurus and standardized vocabulary, and database projects, executed jointly with other organizations and institutions in the US and Europe, and recently expanded to include potential Internet access. Other current initiatives include the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project, an eight-member collaboration among major museums, universities, and the Getty to develop and test administrative, technical, and legal mechanisms (including intellectual property) that may support the widespread, dissemination of high-quality images from museums to educational institutions; and the Networked Access Project, an electronic discussion of prepared papers, which is devoted to understanding the information requirements of humanities and arts organizations.
The Thesaurus Florentinus, a project to restore the mural paintings of the Cupola di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, embodies advances in the image processing of the photographs of the murals and development of an information system to store and access the images and restoration-related data for use by the research and scientific communities. The site (http://www.dada.it/intech/thes/cover.html) includes a description of the project and a demonstration of the imaging associated with documenting and restoring one of the panels. The project is developed by Intech, with the supervision of Soprintendenza ai Beni Ambientali ed Architettonici di Firenze, and with the technological support of IBM and Eastman Kodak.
The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (CETH) is maintained by Rutgers and Princeton Universities with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://cethmac.princeton.edu/). The center undertakes activities on a national scale that are associated with creating, disseminating and using electronic texts in the humanities. Its three major activites are: (1) the Rutgers Inventory of Electronic Texts in the Humanities and research on the catalog and documentation requirements of these texts; (2) networked access via the Text Encoding Initiative (TEC) SGML application, which includes testing various SGML-based retrieval programs in the light of the TEI proposals; and (3) continuing education in methods and tools for electronic texts through a summer seminar on Methods and Tools for Electronic Texts in the Humanities co-sponsored by the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, University of Toronto. In addition to basic information on the center, its staff, and activities, the site contains a bibliography of information including references to electronic dictionaries, SGML, stylistics, and natural language. A comprehensive introduction to SGML with links to related sites may also be found at Robin Cover's SGML Web Page (http://www.sil.org/sgml/sgml.html). This page was developed with support provided in part by SoftQuad, Inc. and by the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia maintains an extensive archive of SGML-encoded electronic texts together with a library-based program in creation and analysis of texts, which includes training and support of teaching and research projects (http://www.lib.virginia.edu/etext/ETC.html). In March 1995, the Center began the Online Scholarship Initiative (OSI), which allows scholars at the university to disseminate via the Internet pre-print copies of articles to be published, and post-print copies of articles already published. Through the university's Electronic Text Library, users may browse online materials in several languages, and through Alex (accessible from the Center's page), users can search additional catalogs of books and other works on the Internet (http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/alex-index.html).
Georgetown University maintains Labyrinth, which offers access to resources related to medieval studies on the Web (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/). The site maintains links to the major databases of library, archival, image, and text projects, with primariy emphasis on collections concerning medieval history, religion, and culture (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/medieval_databases/medieval_databases.html).
The National Endowment for the Humanities has supported the Duke Papyrus Archive, which provides electronic access to texts about and images of Egyptian papyri (http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/). The project encompasses conserving, interpreting, cataloguing and imaging the largely unpublished Duke papyrus collection. The site includes searching of texts and images and a link to the papyrus collection at Yale University (gopher://yaleinfo.yale.edu:7700/11/YaleLibraries/Beinecke/manu/Beinpap) as well as discussions of imaging and cataloging techniques and methodologies. An equally significant collection of papyri is owned by the University of Michigan (http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap/HomePage.html), which is currently running the Papyrus Digitization Project (http://www.lib.umich.edu/pap/digitization.html). The project consists of offering on-line users the opportunity to download images; evaluate their utility relative to users' research and interest, and the responsiveness (download time) of the system; and provide feedback to the project.
The National Digital Library program at the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/) is building upon the former American Memory project to encompass digitization of important collections within the Library's holdings of approximately 105 million items and searching of these collections. The Library presently uses the INQUERY system developed by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). Among the collections currently available are the Depression-era life histories from the Works Projects Administration; color images from the Farm Security Administration; early motion picture footage by Thomas A. Edison, and historically significant documents associated with Thomas Jefferson and other figures in US history.
The US Bureau of the Census sponsors the TIGER (Topographically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system) Map Service, which provides a public resource for generating high-quality, detailed maps of any location in the United States, using public geographic data (http://tiger.census.gov/). Maps can be generated on the fly using current census data according to user specifications (http://tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapbrowse-tbl). The project (which began in 1994) is based on an open architecture that allows other Web developers and publishers to use maps generated by this service in their applications and documents. The Urban and Regional Information Systems (URISA) Special Interest Group (SIG), a private, professional organization of information professionals with an interest in geographic information systems and transportation issues, maintains a page, TIGER2000, to encourage, promote, use, and enhance the TIGER system (http://www.mxi.com/gis/tiger/). The page includes links to mapping and geographic resources maintained by the Bureau of Land Management (http://www.blm.gov/gis/nsdi.html).
The Commission on Preservation and Access' (CPA) report on identifying the most acceptable, digital preservation and access techniques for oversize, color images associated with text materials, such as fold-outs found in geographic texts, is available at http://www.cc.columbia.edu:80/imaging/html/largemaps/oversized.html. Five early twentieth-century maps from fragile volumes were scanned together with single-frame color microfiche of the same maps, which had been generated as part of an earlier project sponsored by the CPA (produced during an earlier Commission-sponsored project), and 4 x 5" color transparencies. The site includes the report, which is also available in print from the Commission, and the complete collection of images.
The University of Waterloo maintains a comprehensive guide to electronic cartographic resources, including maps, charts, remote sensing images, and other spatial data. In addition to links to electronic versions of maps and images; there are links to map catalogues, inventories, and bibliographies (http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/discipline/Cartography/cart.html).
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