Clips and Pointers

Point-to-Point

EEVL: NETworking Aid for Engineers
Over a year in the making, and funded at 200,000 Pounds, the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) now links directly to over 1,300 Internet resources in engineering, with a user-friendly interface which will allow all engineers, academics, students, and commercial sectors, plus anyone else with an Internet connection, to access the latest engineering information by keyword, subject, or title. Resources in the EEVL database include Web sites for engineering e-journals and electronic newsletters, engineering companies, professional societies and institutions, engineering departments within higher education institutions, government sources, engineering email lists, resource guides and directories, research centres, recruitment services, and more. EEVL is funded through the Electronic Library Programme (eLib), managed by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on behalf of the Higher Education Funding Councils. The EEVL Project lead sites are Heriot-Watt University Library and the Institute for Computer Based Learning, and partner sites are the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, Cambridge University, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Nottingham Trent University, and the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). The service is actively managed and maintained by a team of engineering information specialists, headquartered at Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University Library.
For more information, please contact: Roddy MacLeod, EEVL Project Manager, Heriot-Watt University, eevl@icbl.hw.ac.uk.

WebMedLit: Free Access to Journals in Clinical Topics and Human Epidemiology
WebMedLit, Web Medical Literature Services, is a new service that provides timely access, integrates disparate source material, and demonstrates methods of providing access to a defined area of literature. A series of on-line journals have been identified, and programs are run programs run daily to check for updates to the sources followed. Because of different styles of HTML writing, each source requires a separate program to retrieve the file and extract the title links. The abstracts are retrieved; then filters are run against the text, and the topical views are built. The abstracts are screened against a thesaurus maintained for each individual topic, and the thesauri are updated as needed. The views are built such that the title links always point back to the original sources at the publishers' sites.
For more information, please contact Michael Rogers, mrogers@netaxs.com.

Stanford University Libraries: Copyright and Fair Use
The Council on Library Resources, FindLaw Internet Legal Resources, and the Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources have jointly sponsored the Copyright & Fair Use Site, a searchable collection of resources including primary materials, legislation, articles, example curricula, and pointers to other Internet/web resources.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco provide access to a searchable database of 60,000 images of works on paper, a collection of exhibitions, a "guided tour" through the site, which effectively explains the selection and curatorial process, and educational information, which includes on-line resources as well as a description of programs at the museums themselves.

Argos -- a cooperative effort from the editors of Abzu, Byzantium, Diotima, Exploring Ancient World Cultures, Kirke, Perseus, and Romarch -- is an experimental search engine dedicated to the ancient and medieval portions of the Internet. The beta version is not up to test its performance under "real" conditions. Sites and collections covered by the search engine are selected through a juried, editorial process, which is believed to enhance the precision of the results.

In Print

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Center for Knowledge Management has issued the draft Guide to Creating Core Descriptive Metadata. The approach is centered on issues of resource discovery and accommodates resources in multiple formats.

The Library of Congress Classification System allows browsing of the 21 categories comprising the Library's subject classification system. This material is subject to revision.

The Getty Information Institute has established the Categories for the Description of Works of Art. The site includes material explaining how the system of categories was devised and outlines the categories themselves. The intent is to develop a standard classification and language to enable consistent description of works of art.

The National Commission of Libraries and Information Science has issued The 1996 National Survey of Public Libraries and the Internet: Progress and Issues: Final Report, written jointly by John Carlo Bertot, Charles R. McClure, and Douglas L. Zweizig. Based on a national survey of 1,495 public libraries (response rate of 71.1 percent), the authors conclude public libraries have made "impressive gains" in connectivity and in commitment of resources to information technology since 1994 but that disparities remain. For example, rural populations remain significantly underserved, and the commitment is primarily one of equipment rather than of service.

The U.S. Department of Education has established The Future of Networking Technologies for Learning, which contains 14 papers on the implications of networking technologies for education in the mathematics, sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. The site also hosts a forum for contributed opinions.

Workshop Summary: Technology Issues for Terms and Conditions

James R. Davis, Xerox PARC, and Judith L. Klavans, Columbia University

Some thirty experts in the areas of law, publishing, computing, librarianship, economics, and public policy met at a National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop on terms and conditions for digital objects that took place September 24-26, 1996 at the Arden Homestead conference facility of Columbia University. The workshop was organized by James R. Davis of Xerox PARC and Judith L. Klavans, Director of the Center for Research on Information Access of Columbia University.

The goal was three-fold: (1) to bring together leaders and experts from several disciplines to explore perspectives and pressing issues in intellectual property as viewed from different positions; (2) to formulate a set of common priorities for research and development proposals; and (3) to take a leading role in suggesting to funding agencies directions for research as seen from these various perspectives. In addition to these three larger goals, the technology experts attending were also seeking guidance and information on how to formulate technical languages for expressing these needs; such formalisms are essential both to express requirements on users (for example, who can access the data, e.g. students, alumni, anyone), and to express conditions on use (for example, can the data be just viewed, copied, freely distributed).

Among the issues identified were: the relation between contract and copyright law; pricing information in the networked environment; ambiguity in interpretation; the rights and obligations of content users as well as providers, for example, taxonomies of fair use; and metadata implications.

The workshop home page, which includes a list of the attendees, is http://dri.cornell.edu/tandc/workshop.html. This page will provide access to future technical papers and in-depth reports.

Goings On

Web Net 96 , the first World Conference of the Web Society, is an international conference held in San Francisco, California, October 15-19, 1996. The conference is organized by the Web Society and the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). For more information, see http://curry.edschool.Virginia.EDU/ AACE/conf/webnet/home.html.

The American Society for Information Science (ASIS) will hold its annual meeting in Baltimore on October 19-20, 1996. The theme of the meeting is Global Complexity: Information, Chaos and Control. For more information, including a program description and proceedings, see http://www.asis.org/annual-96/index.html

The American Medical Informatics Association will hold its Annual Fall Symposium in Washington, D.C., October 26-30, 1996. The theme is "Beyond the Superhighway: Exploiting the Internet with Medical Informatics." For more information on the organization and the program, see http://www.amia.org/

The IEEE Computer Society on Technical Graphics in cooperation with ACM SIGGRAPH will hold its Symposium on Information Visualization (Info Vis '96) in San Francisco on October 27-November 1, 1996. The final program and other relevant information is available at http://WWW.ERC.MsState.Edu/conferences/vis96/infoviz/infoviz.html

Pointers in This Column:

American Medical Informatics Association http://www.amia.org

American Society for Information Science (ASIS)
1996 Annual Meeting http://www.asis.org/annual-96/index.html

Argos http://argos.evansville.edu

Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) http://www.eevl.ac.uk/

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco http://www.thinker.org/index.html

Getty Information Institute
Categories for the Description of Works of Art http://www.ahip.getty.edu/gii/cdwa/

IEEE Symposium on Information
Visualization (Info Vis '96) http://WWW.ERC.MsState.Edu/conferences/vis96/infoviz/infoviz.html

Library of Congress Classification System http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8459/lc.html

National Commission of Libraries and Information Science
The 1996 National Survey of Public Libraries and the Internet:
Progress and Issues: Final Report http://istweb.syr.edu/Project/Faculty/McClure-NSPL96/NSPL96_T.html

National Science Foundation
Workshop Summary:
Technology Issues for Terms and Conditions http://dri.cornell.edu/tandc/workshop.html

Stanford University Libraries:
Copyright & Fair Use Site http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

UCSF Center for Knowledge Management
Draft Guide to Creating Core Descriptive
Metadata http://www.ckm.ucsf.edu/meta/mguide3.html

U.S. Department of Education
The Future of Networking Technologies for Learning http://www.ed.gov/Technology/Futures/index.html

Web Net 96 http://curry.edschool.Virginia.EDU/ AACE/conf/webnet/home.html

WebMedLit, Web Medical Literature Services http://www.webmedlit.com

hdl:cnri.dlib/october96-clips

American Medical Informatics Association	http://www.amia.org
American Society for Information Science (ASIS) 1996 Annual Meeting	http://www.asis.org/annual-96/index.html
Argos	http://argos.evansville.edu
Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL)	http://www.eevl.ac.uk/
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco	http://www.thinker.org/index.html
Getty Information Institute Categories for the Description of Works of Art	http://www.ahip.getty.edu/gii/cdwa/
IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (Info Vis '96)	http://WWW.ERC.MsState.Edu/conferences/vis96/infoviz/infoviz.html
Library of Congress Classification System	http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8459/lc.html
National Commission of Libraries and Information Science The 1996 National Survey of Public Libraries and the Internet: Progress and Issues: Final Report	http://istweb.syr.edu/Project/Faculty/McClure-NSPL96/NSPL96_T.html
National Science Foundation Workshop Summary: Technology Issues for Terms and Conditions	http://dri.cornell.edu/tandc/workshop.html
Stanford University Libraries: Copyright & Fair Use Site	http://fairuse.stanford.edu/
UCSF Center for Knowledge Management Draft Guide to Creating Core Descriptive Metadata	http://www.ckm.ucsf.edu/meta/mguide3.html
U.S. Department of Education The Future of Networking Technologies for Learning	http://www.ed.gov/Technology/Futures/index.html
Web Net 96	http://curry.edschool.Virginia.EDU/ AACE/conf/webnet/home.html
WebMedLit, Web Medical Literature Services	http://www.webmedlit.com

D-Lib Magazine October 1996