D-Lib Magazine
October 1998

ISSN 1082-9873

Clips & Pointers

International Digital Libraries Collaborative Research

Effective Immediately

Proposal Target Dates: January 15, 1999 (first year competition)

January 15 (following years' competition)

Announcement Number NSF 99-6 (NEW)

Introduction

This activity is supported by the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and the Division of International Programs of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences. It builds on and extends prior Foundation efforts in digital libraries research.

International digital libraries research is intended to contribute to the fundamental knowledge required to create information systems that can operate in multiple languages, formats, media, and social and organizational contexts. To achieve this, collaborative creation of new research understandings, tools and ideas exploiting the different opportunities offered by materials and technologies in use in different countries is strongly encouraged. Research supported under this program is expected to:

• identify a collection of information which is not accessible or usable because of technical barriers, distance, size, system fragmentation or other limits;

• using this as a testbed, create the understanding and new technology to make it possible for such information to be found, delivered to and/or exploited by a distributed set of users; and

• evaluate the effect of this new technology and its international benefits.

The program's goal is to enable users to easily access digital collections, regardless of location, language or formats, and enable broad use in research, education, commerce and other purposes. Such a global information environment requires research on:

• interoperable technologies for advanced retrieval of many kinds of information, including ways of adapting to different formats or organizations of databases;

• technology for intellectual property protection in a global marketplace the development of linked, compatible databases with inherently regional information, such as databases of geographic, botanic, agricultural, demographic or economic data; and

• methods and standards for ensuring long-term interoperability among distributed and separately administered databases; worldwide data mining and self-organizing databases; collective work on preserving and organizing domain-specific content.

While there are now uncoordinated efforts in many countries, cooperative research can help avoid duplication of effort, prevent the development of fragmented digital systems, and encourage productive interchange of scientific knowledge and scholarly data around the world.

This NSF effort will fund the US portion of collaborative digital library projects among investigators from different countries to foster long-term, sustainable relationships between US and non-US researchers and research organizations. Cooperating groups in supported projects are expected to be balanced in terms of level of effort and expertise, and demonstrate the benefits obtainable from complementary and synergistic international research. The research strengths of researchers in different countries should be combined to facilitate work on complex multi-faceted problems relating to the access and use of international distributed and multilingual resources.

Content

Proposals should have the overall research goal of enabling users to access and exploit information in new ways. Research issues include information organization, forms of information distribution, scalability and security techniques for worldwide data systems, and tools to search, store, and deliver information in different media or languages.

Specific research areas falling under this program are:

• multi-lingual information systems, cross-language retrieval systems, language translation, and language teaching software

• multi-national digital libraries including sound, data, image, multimedia, software, and other kinds of content

• interoperability and scalability technology to permit extremely large world-wide collections

• metadata techniques and tools

• geospatial, environmental, biological, historical and other information systems in which location is highly relevant, including consideration of best organizations for such systems

• preservation and archiving of digital scholarly information, including technology and procedures for long-term information asset management

• social aspects of digital libraries and cross-cultural context studies

• utilization of digital libraries in educational technology at all levels of instruction

• economic and copyright issues: authentication, payment, rights formalism, trust and fair use

• electronic publishing and scholarly communication technology, including collaboratories, online repositories, and new methods of organizing scientific knowledge distribution.

These topics are not intended too be totally inclusive, but to illustrate and encourage research which opens exciting new research areas, and gives promise of user benefit from international research synergy.

Eligibility

Multi-country, multi-team projects are required, and proposals to this program must involve at least one research team in the United States and one in another country. A project should have a single jointly developed proposal from all involved groups, which clearly delineates both the division of areas of research and the synergies expected. Each research team is responsible for obtaining support for its part of the project. NSF will not support the non-US portion of a project, nor the US portion of a project not receiving support in the foreign country or countries involved. The NSF proposal must contain, in addition to budget(s) for the US team(s), information indicating the level of investments and efforts for each foreign team. Where desirable, NSF may choose to coordinate review with a foreign funding agency and make joint decisions.

Institutions eligible to apply to the NSF supported portion of this program are US universities and US non-profit research institutions. Each project should not exceed three year's duration with a maximum yearly cost of $165,000. NSF funding for this initiative is anticipated to be a minimum of $1M annually.

Proposal Content

Proposal preparation guidelines are in the NSF Grant Proposal Guide, NSF 99-2.

Each proposal must include a plan of work explaining:

• what the primary research questions are,

• what information resource is to be used in the project,

• what area will be investigated,

• who is likely to use the information and for what purposes, and

• what benefits are expected to flow from the research.

• In addition, the proposal must have a clear and explicit management plan. This includes:

• details of how cooperation is to be carried out and coordinated,

• description of and justification for the partitioning of the research activities,

• processes to be used for coordinating and evaluating progress, and

• anticipated travel requirements.

Biographical information should be provided for all investigators in the collaborative effort, both US, and non-US as described in the NSF Grant Proposal Guide, NSF 99-2. Citations to participant publications which appeared after July 1, 1998 are encouraged to be given as Web addresses only. A letter of endorsement from the foreign counterparts, which identifies the source of support for the non-US activities, is required.

Proposal Evaluation

Evaluation criteria applied to all NSF proposals listed in the Grant

Proposal Guide, NSF 99-2, are:

1. What is the intellectual merit of the proposed activity? How important is the proposed activity to advancing knowledge and understanding within its own field or across different fields? How well qualified is the proposer (individual or team) to conduct the project? (If appropriate, the reviewer will comment on the quality of prior work.) To what extent does the proposed activity suggest and explore creative and original concepts? How well conceived and organized is the proposed activity? Is there sufficient access to resources?

2. What are the broader impacts of the proposed activity? How well does the activity advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and learning? How well does the proposed activity broaden the participation of underrepresented groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity, disability, geographic, etc.)? To what extent will it enhance the infrastructure for research and education, such as facilities, instrumentation, networks, and partnerships? Will the results be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding? What may be the benefits of the proposed activity to society?

In addition, the following criteria will be used for this program:

1. Does the proposal represent new research in the area of digital libraries, and does it contain new scientific ideas and methods?

2. Does the project demonstrate the need for and advantages of shared international activities, and exploit, as appropriate, new communications methods to link its teams?

3. Are the research groups interacting as true collaborators, displaying complementary and comparable levels of professional expertise?

4. Does the management plan provide mechanisms for effective communication, coordination, progress assessment, and flexibility?

5. Should the research be successful, how many people will benefit from the new technology created?

6. Should the research be successful, how will the content be made available to communities of users?

7. Do the previous efforts of the research teams demonstrate their competence and support their likelihood of achieving the goals of the project?

8. If the work is successful at creating a new information service, does the proposal include a plan by which that service will be continued after the research funding ends, and how credible is that plan?

9. How effective is the project plan for enabling others to draw upon the results of the research?

Integration of Research and Education

One of the principal strategies in support of NSF's goals is to foster integration of research and education through the programs, projects and activities it supports at academic and research institutions. These institutions provide abundant opportunities where individuals may concurrently assume responsibilities as researchers, educators, and students and where all can engage in joint efforts that infuse education with the excitement of discovery and enrich research through the diversity of learner perspectives. PIs should address this issue in their proposal to provide reviewers with the information necessary to respond fully to both NSF merit review criteria. NSF staff will give it careful consideration in making funding decisions.

Integrating Diversity into NSF Programs, Projects, and Activities

Broadening opportunities and enabling the participation of all citizens -- women and men, underrepresented minorities, and persons with disabilities -- is essential to the health and vitality of science and engineering.

NSF is committed to this principle of diversity and deems it central to the programs, projects, and activities it considers and supports. PIs should address this issue in their proposal to provide reviewers with the information necessary to respond fully to both NSF merit review criteria. NSF staff will give it careful consideration in making funding decisions.

Categories Of Support

All awards for this announcement made by NSF will be as grants or cooperative agreements to academic institutions and qualified non-profit research organizations. Partnership arrangements with other groups in the United States are encouraged, including subcontracts with the proposing organization.

Proposal Schedules and Preparation

Letters of Intent: Due One Month Prior to Proposal Submission

Letters of Intent are encouraged to assist the program in administrative and review preparation. Organizations or persons considering submission of a proposal should send an electronic mail message with the following statement: "I am interested in submitting a proposal to the International Digital Libraries Program," and include the title and brief abstract of the proposed work, as much as is known of the list of participants, including the foreign participants, and the source of funds anticipated for the foreign partners. Letters of intent will not be refereed or evaluated but should contain sufficient information about the topic to help in the selection of reviewers.

Submit the letter of intent as an electronic mail message to idli2@nsf.gov

<mailto:idli2@nsf.gov> or send a letter of intent to:

International Digital Libraries Research
Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
Suite 1115
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard Arlington, VA 22230

Full Proposals: Target Date January 15, 1999 (first year competition)

January 15 (succeeding years' competition)

The proposals must be marked INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARIES - NSF 99-6 in the top left hand box, "Program Announcement", on the cover sheet (NSF Form 1207). Proposals must be prepared as specified in the NSF Grant Proposal Guide, NSF 99-2 and sent to:

National Science Foundation PPU
International Digital Libraries Research, Suite 1115
4201 Wilson Boulevard Arlington, VA 22230

Award Administration

NSF requires prospective grantees to furnish, upon request by NSF's Division of Grants and Agreements, basic organization and management information that will assist the NSF Grant Officers in assessing their financial and managerial responsibility. These requirements are described in the NSF 95-26, NSF Grant Policy Manual. Grants awarded as a result of this solicitation are administered in accordance with the terms and conditions of NSF GC-1, "Grant General Conditions," or FDP-III, "Federal Demonstration Partnership General Terms and Conditions," depending on the grantee organization. Any Cooperative Agreement resulting from this announcement must comply with NSF GC-1 and Cooperative Agreement General Conditions, CA-1.

NSF expects significant findings from research to be promptly submitted for publication by US supported teams, and strongly encourages this practice on the part of the non-US collaborators.

Other Information

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funds research and education in most fields of science and engineering. Grantees are wholly responsible for conducting their project activities and preparing the results for publication. Thus, the Foundation does not assume responsibility for such findings or their interpretation.

NSF welcomes proposals from all qualified scientists, engineers and educators. The Foundation strongly encourages women, minorities, and persons with disabilities to compete fully in its programs. In accordance with federal statutes, regulations, and NSF policies, no person on grounds of race, color, age, sex, national origin, or disability shall be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving financial assistance from NSF (unless otherwise specified in the eligibility requirements for a particular program).

Facilitation Awards for Scientists and Engineers with Disabilities (FASED) provide funding for special assistance or equipment to enable persons with disabilities (investigators and other staff, including student research assistants) to work on NSF-supported projects. See the program announcement or contact the program coordinator at (703) 306-1636. The National Science Foundation has Telephonic Device for the Deaf (TDD) and Federal Information Relay Service (FIRS) capabilities that enable individuals with hearing impairments to communicate with the Foundation regarding NSF programs, employment, or general information. TDD may be accessed at (703) 306-0090 or through FIRS on 1-800-877-8339.

Privacy Act and Public Burden Statements

The information requested on proposal forms and project reports is solicited under the authority of the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, as amended. The information on proposal forms will be used in connection with the selection of qualified proposals; project reports submitted by awardees will be used for program evaluation and reporting within the Executive Branch and to Congress. The information requested may be disclosed to qualified reviewers and staff assistants as part of the review process; to applicant institutions/grantees to provide or obtain data regarding the proposal review process, award decisions, or the administration of awards; to government contractors, experts, volunteers and researchers and educators as necessary to complete assigned work; to other government agencies needing information as part of the review process or in order to coordinate programs; and to another Federal agency, court or party in a court or Federal administrative proceeding if the government is a party. Information about Principal Investigators may be added to the Reviewer file and used to select potential candidates to serve as peer reviewers or advisory committee members. See Systems of Records, NSF-50, "Principal Investigator/Proposal File and Associated Records," 63 Federal Register 267 (January 5, 1998), and NSF-51, "Reviewer/Proposal File and Associated Records," 63 Federal Register 268 (January 5, 1998). Submission of the information is voluntary. Failure to provide full and complete information, however, may reduce the possibility of receiving an award.

Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 120 hours per response, including the time for reviewing instructions. Send comments regarding this burden estimate and any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to: Reports Clearance Officer; Information Dissemination Branch, DAS; National Science Foundation; Arlington, VA 22230.

Year 2000 Reminder

In accordance with Important Notice No. 120 dated June 27, 1997, Subject: Year 2000 Computer Problem, NSF awardees are reminded of their responsibility to take appropriate actions to ensure that the NSF activity being supported is not adversely affected by the Year 2000 problem. Potentially affected items include: computer systems, databases, and equipment. The National Science Foundation should be notified if an awardee concludes that the Year 2000 will have a significant impact on its ability to carry out an NSF funded activity. Information concerning Year 2000 activities can be found on the NSF web site at < http://www.nsf.gov/oirm/y2k/start.htm> .

Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance Numbers:

47.070 Computer and Information Science and Engineering
47.075 Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
OMB# 3145-0058 P.T. (34)
K.W.(1000000,0400000,0300000)

Agency Contacts

Stephen M. Griffin
National Science Foundation
Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
4201 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22230
Electronic mail: sgriffin@nsf.gov
Telephone: 703-306-1930
Fax: 703-306-0599

For country specific or regional information, please contact:

Division of International Programs
4201 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22230
Electronic mail: intpubs@nsf.gov <mailto:intpubs@nsf.gov>
Fax: 703-306-0476

Telephones:

Africa, Near East, South Asia: 703-306-1707
Americas: 703-306-1706
East Asia and Pacific: 703-306-1704
Eastern Europe, Newly Independent States: 703-306-1703
Japan and Korea: 703-306-1701
Western Europe: 703-306-1702

International Collaboration on Subject Based Internet Gateways

Contributed by:

Norman Wiseman
JISC Head of Programmes
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NG7 2RD
United Kingdom
JISC@nottingham.ac.uk

Subject gateways provide an interesting alternative to the Internet search engines in the increasing problem of finding quality resources on the net. Subject gateways provide lists of quality-tested resources in specific disciplines, and often a variety of value-added services relevant to the specific disciplines. Several pilot schemes of varying dimension have been or are being undertaken in several countries. Extending these pilots to form self-sustaining services covering the entire subject spectrum has, however, proved a very difficult problem to crack.

The UK eLib Programme (funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee [JISC]) is facing this problem in its current effort to extend its network of subject gateways. Since it does not seem possible to do the job entirely on our own, given the resources we can apply to the task, we are very interested in exploring the options for international collaboration. After initial discussion with colleagues in the US and Australia, we decided to call a meeting at the Second European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) in Crete; this was attended by 25 delegates from 15 countries.

Chris Rusbridge from eLib spoke first about the UK's call for proposals for a Resource Discovery Network. Renato Ianella described Australian developments. Susan Calcari talked about Project Isaac, and William Arms mentioned the National Science Foundation (NSF) SMETE effort. Further comments were made on current developments in the Nordic countries, Japan, and New Zealand. It was quite clear this is a shared problem in which there is wide interest and that several organisations are prepared to put some level of resource into it.

The meeting identified a range of issues which will need to be addressed, the most important of which were:

Framework: a comprehensive guide is needed to what is available and where. This will be an essential tool for identifying resources that already exist and whom to approach as potential partners.

Guidelines: a wealth of experience in creating and managing internet gateways, and the costs of these activities, exists in the community. Collecting this information and making it widely available will create a valuable resource for those interested in developing new gateways, and present an opportunity to share best practice and move forward together for those with more experience.

Quality of Service: the issues regarding quality assessment and agreements over quality criteria for partnerships are multi-dimensional, but this is an area where the Nordic countries have done much useful work. More information and guidance is also needed on the delivery of the service -- resilience, accessibility, help desks, persistence and accuracy -- and on the long term preservation of the material.

Scope: most resources so far have been collected for use in research in higher education. The NSF is now looking to create a comprehensive set of materials for undergraduate teaching, and many countries will wish to compile similar resources. Some countries want resources which are relevant and accessible to all levels of education, not just higher education. Mechanisms for widening the user base successfully, and the funding implications of these additional activities, will need to be fully articulated.

There was general agreement that the Dublin Core consensus process was an attractive way of taking the work programme forward. Funding will be sought over the coming months for a series of workshops that could examine the associated issues, identify potential solutions and draft much of the material that was required.

More information on these activities, including a full report of the inaugural meeting, will be posted to the IMESH mailing list at MAILBASE (imesh@mailbase.ac.uk -- see http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/imesh).

Thomas Baker, currently at AIT, remarked at ECDL: "Good big systems start as good small systems." and "The main challenges are not the technology, but the policy and process." Both these comments seem very relevant to this current activity.

Those of us who believe strongly in the subject gateway approach hope we will look back on 23 September 1998 in Hersonissos, Crete, as the small start of something great.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS)

Richard Hill
American Society for Information Science
Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
rhill@asis.org

Volume 49, Number 13 (November 1998)

[Note: below are URLs for viewing past contents of JASIS (from 1986 to present), both as presented here and full text. Bert Boyce's "In This Issue" column has been inserted in this table of contents.]

In This Issue
Bert R. Boyce

Research

• Topological Aspects of Information Retrieval
  Leo Egghe and Ronald Rousseau

We begin with two articles suggesting the possible separation of document and query vector space. Viewing information retrieval as a topology on a document space determined by a similarity function between queries and documents gives what Egghe and Rousseau call a retrieval topology. Such topologies might use a pseudo metric which measures the distance between documents independent of the query space, or might make all similarity functions between documents and queries continuous, called here the similarity topology. The topological model allows the introduction of Boolean operators. The inner product is suggested as producing a more powerful model than the cosine measure.

• On the Necessity of Term Dependence in a Query Space for Weighted Retrieval
  Peter Bollmann-Sdorra and Vijay V. Raghavan

Bollmann-Sdorra and Raghavan show that if query term weights are to be useful in retrieval, term independence is an undesirable property in a query space. Independence remains desirable in document space. It would appear that the assumptions that documents and queries are elements of the same space, and that term independence is required, are not warranted.

• Optimizing a Library's Loan Policy: An Integer Programming Approach
  Hesham K. Al-Fares

Al-Fares presents a new loan policy model which incorporates a decision variable for maximum books to be borrowed, along with the traditional loan period, and adds user satisfaction with policies to the usual book availability satisfaction indicator. Each indicator is defined as the ratio of satisfied demand to total demand. Number of renewals, duplications, demand, and reservations are considered to have a very small effect.

• On the Fusion of Documents from Multiple Collection Information Retrieval Systems
  Ronald R. Yager and Alexander Rybalov

Yager and Rybalov assume m retrieval systems without file overlap each providing a ranked list of texts based upon their varying ranking criteria, and in response to a common query, and define fusion as the construction of a single ordered list of the n most relevant texts over all m system responses. This requires determining the potential of each system to provide relevant answers to the query.

A previous fusion method which is empirically effective but where different runs will result in different orderings, uses a random selection method biased toward the length of the contributing list. Alternatively one might use the longest remaining list for each choice or take equally from each collection until the shortest is exhausted, and then continue until the next shortest is exhausted, and on, until all are exhausted. A centralized fusion scheme computes a value based upon the number of documents in a list and the number already removed. The value is re-computed for each collection after each removal of the top element in the collection with the highest value. Another possibility is a proportional approach, where the list value is its remaining number of elements less one divided by the original number, and a value can be assigned to each individual document which is the number of elements in the list less its position in the list, divided by the number of elements in the list.

• Indexing and Access for Digital Libraries and the Internet: Human, Database, and Domain Factors
  Marcia J. Bates

Bates provides a review of what we know and do not know about indexing and access that will apply to large digital document files. Particularly she emphasizes that statistical regularities exist in the subject representation of files and should influence design, that subject domain should affect system design, and that what we know of human linguistic and searching behavior must be taken into account for an optimal information retrieval system.

• Software Engineering as Seen through Its Research Literature: A Study in Co-Word Analysis
  Neal Coulter, Ira Monarch, and Suresh Konda

The indexing for 16,691 documents from 1982 to 1994 which were assigned at least one term from the software engineering category was collected by Coulter, Monarch, and Konda and a co-occurrence study carried out to determine the interaction of software engineering areas of study over time. The association measure was the square of the co-occurrences of two terms over the product of their occurrences. The threshold value was varied with the size of the data sets, but the number of links and nodes was fixed at twenty-four and twenty. For the period 1982 - 1986 15 networks were generated; for 1987 - 1990 16; and for 1991 - 1994 11. The networks exhibit considerable change over time although some consistent themes, like software development and user interfaces, persist.

• Information Aspects of New Organizational Designs: Exploring the Non-Traditional Organization
  Bob Travica

To address the role of information technology in non-traditional organizations Travica treats IT as level of use of several specific technologies, and non-traditional structure as the level of organization structure, plus other selected variables. Data came from surveys of a random stratified sample of employees at twelve local accounting offices and an interview with the local manager. Information technology correlates with non-traditional structure. Information technology correlates negatively with formalization and centralization, and positively with cross boundary communication. Spatial dispersion is negatively associated with trust sharing.

The ASIS home page <http://www.asis.org> contains the Table of Contents and brief abstracts, as above, from January 1993 (Volume 44) to date. The full text of JASIS from 1986 (Volume 37) forward is available at <http://www.interscience.wiley.com>. One must register, but there is no charge. This site includes the full text of JASIS and other Wiley journals. You may also set up a personal home page which allows you to:

• Browse the Wiley InterScience collection
• Search across the entire content of Wiley InterScience journals
• Add your own notes and comments to individual articles
• Store sets of search criteria for the searches you perform most often
• Go directly to the home page of your favorite Wiley journal
• Create and maintain your personal reading list

To view the JASIS articles full text, one must click on the "view articles" button at the top of the Title/Abstract page.

The complete sequence, after logging on and going to the JASIS page is:

1. select issue to view;
2. select title of article;
3. select the "view article" button at the top of the page above the abstract. The article will then appear in Adobe Acrobat.

In Print

• Digitizing Legacy Documents: A Knowledge-Base Preservation Project, Elizabeth Anderson, Robert Atkinson, Cynthia Crego, Jean Slisz and Sara Tompson

  This document describes a production system to scan all of Fermilab's scientific and technical reports going back to 1972, convert them into Portable Document Format (PDF), save them to a server for World Wide Web access, and write them to CD discs for distribution. This project has been funded by a 1998 Educate and Automate grant from the Illinois State Library. The document is available in postscript, compressed postscript, PDF, and HTML formats.

• Eliminating Legal and Policy Barriers to Interoperable Government Systems, David Landsbergen and George Wolken

  This report defines interoperability broadly, as essentially a problem in sharing information. It thus goes beyond technical problems of hardware and software compatibility to examine bureaucratic, societal and economic issues. Certain aspects of the interoperability problem are not addressed: the uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding privacy rights and how to protect them; international law and practice; and procurement policy and procedures. Finally, many of the problems identified in our interviews as being "interoperability problems" in fact stem from problems endemic to the management of information technology in the public sector: inadequate resources; technologically obsolescent hardware and software; recruitment in a competitive industry; project-specific constraints resulting from context visibility, scale and scope; and "turf battles between agencies." These problems, though acknowledged, are not addressed.

Point-to-Point

• The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts

  The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection of digital documents in the subject areas of American literature, English literature, and Western philosophy. Only texts in the public domain or freely distributed texts are included in the collection. The catalogue offers users value-added access to this material by providing various browsing, search, and download options. It is maintained by Eric Lease Morgan.

• Telecom Information Resources on the Internet

  This document contains references to information sources relating to the technical, economic, public policy, and social aspects of telecommunications. All forms of telecommunication: voice, data, video, wired, wireless, cable TV, and satellite, are included. The intent is to provide "high-level" pointers to other WWW servers, with brief descriptions of the type of information. The table of contents includes:

  • Introduction
  • National Information Infrastructure (U.S.)
  • Announcements, Event Listings
  • Network Commerce and Intelligent Agents
  • Telecom News and Headlines
  • Network Security and Cryptography
  • Associations, Nonprofits: Foundations and Professional, Trade, and Interest Groups
  • Other Companies
  • Broadcasters
  • Research Labs, Testbeds and Projects
  • Content Providers
  • Standards Bodies
  • Global Information Infrastructure
  • Technical Information and FAQs
  • Government
  • Telecom Operating Companies
  • Industry Facts and Data
  • Telecom Policy and Regulation
  • Internet Economics
  • University Research Centers, Programs and Education
  • Internet Service Providers
  • Usenet Newsgroups
  • Internet Telephony
  • Other Telecom Directories
  • Intranets
  • Other General Purpose Starting Points
  • Mailing Lists and On-line Publications

  This list is maintained by Professor Jeff MacKie-Mason and Juan Riveros. The server is supported by the School of Public Policy Studies, and the School of Information, both at the University of Michigan.

Goings On

• First International Conference on Information and Computation Economies (ICE-98), October 25 - 28, 1998, Charleston, South Carolina, USA

  The First International Conference of Information Systems and Economies proposes to bring together researchers and scientists to form a community to discuss and share leading research on:

  • information and computation economies
  • networking and economics
  • economic models for managing networked computing systems

  The Advance Program describes sessions dedicated to Artificial Agent Economies, Network Pricing, Quality of Service Provision, Market-based System Control, New Research, and Invited Papers. Additional information on the conference, panelists, and registration is available at the conference's web site.

• Joint Scientific Data Centers Symposium and USGCRP Data Management Working Group Workshop, November 2 - 6, 1998, Silver Spring and Laurel, Maryland, USA

  Raytheon Company, in partnership with the NOAA Environmental Satellite Data Information Service (NESDIS), has announced the 3rd Annual Raytheon Science Data Centers Symposium. The symposium brings together a broad group of space and Earth science data centers and data management facilities specialists to share visions, technologies and practices that will improve the services offered to space and Earth science researchers, educational institutions, and the public. The conference is intended primarily for Raytheon, Government and University employees. The 1998 symposium theme is Interoperability: The Next Generation of Data Access. Topics include:

  • Interoperability/Data Standards
  • Science Data Center Management
  • Current and Future Media Technology
  • Product Development
  • Information Systems and Data Access
  • Millennium Problems
  • Science Data Acquisition
  • Product Development
  • Education and Public Outreach
  • Digital Libraries

  Registration and program details are available at the conference's web site.

  Immediately following the symposium is the DMWG workshop, "Data Archiving: Policies and Practice", which will take place beginning the afternoon of November 4 though November 6 at the National Wildlife Visitor Center in Laurel, Maryland. This workshop proposes to focus on operational considerations and issues related to the archival, access, retrieval and delivery of data. Operational staff from data centers and archives constitute the primary target audience; however, representatives from the archival technology industry and others with an interest in archival operational issues are invited. For more information, see http://gcmd.nasa.gov/dmwg98/

• Seventh International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), November 3 - 7, 1998, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

  The Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) provides an international forum for presentation and discussion of research on information and knowledge management, as well as recent advances on data and knowledge bases. The purpose of the conference is to identify challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and information systems, and to shape future directions of research by soliciting and reviewing high quality, applied and theoretical research findings. The topics of interest include, but are not limited, to the following areas:

  Application of knowledge representation techniques to semantic modeling Development and management of heterogeneous knowledge bases Automatic acquisition of data and knowledge bases (especially raw text) Object-oriented DBMS Optimization techniques Transaction management High performance OLTP systems Security techniques Performance evaluation Hypermedia Unconventional applications

  Parallel database systems Physical and logical database design Data and knowledge sharing Interchange and interoperability Cooperation in heterogeneous systems Domain modeling and ontology-building Knowledge discovery in databases Information storage and retrieval and interface technology Concurrent engineering and computer integrated manufacturing Digital Libraries Multimedia Databases.

  Additional information on the program, registration, and workshops and tutorials associated with the conference may be found at the conference's web site.

• AMIA '98 Annual Symposium: A Paradigm Shift In Health Care Information Systems: Clinical Infrastructures for the 21st Century, November 7 - 11, 1998, Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA

  The preliminary program for the annual symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) is now available. It covers plenaries, tutorials, sessions, panels, colloquia, and workshops on the themes of clinical information management; health information networks; training, education, and cognitive science; expert systems and algorithms; information retrieval and digital libraries; user interface issues; standards and policies; images and nontextual data; and bioinformatics and molecular applications.

  Detailed information on the program, registration, travel, and hotel accomdations are available via the conference's web site.

• Metadiversity -- A Call to Action; Responding to The Grand Challenge for Biodiversity Information Management through Metadata, an Interactive Symposium, November 9 - 12, 1998, Natural Bridge, Virginia, USA

  Sessions at this four-day conference will deal with the interdisciplinary importance of biodiversity information with emphasis on the challenges in species discovery and taxonomic information; earth observation and ecosystem monitoring data; biotechnology and genetic information; and environmental information. There will also be sessions that deal with infrastructural issues, focusing on the challenges that libraries, museums, botanical gardens, and data archives specifically face in making their data collections available and interoperable. The structure will consist of plenary and break-out sessons, with several talks and panels devoted to issues relating to metadata, digital objects, and vocabulary control.

  The conference is jointly sponsored by the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Federation of Abstracting & Information Services. Information on registration is available at http://www.pa.utulsa.edu/nfais/hotel-res.html.

• 4th OMNI Annual Seminar, November 18, 1998, London, UK

  The OMNI service announces its final call for delegates for annual seminar no. 4. The seminar will consist of 9 speakers, many being notable in the fields of health/medicine informatics and electronic/digitial libraries.

  The full programme of 9 speakers (complete with times and full abstracts) is available from the OMNI seminar '98 page at: http://omni.ac.uk/seminars/seminar98/

  Presentation titles include:

  • Maps, landscapes and buildings: the human dimension in information
  • The future of OMNI: commercial decisions in an academic world
  • A gateway to complementary and alternative medicine on the web
  • Enhancing Internet medical document retrieval with medical core metadata
  • The information landscape
  • New developments of MedHunt medical search engine
  • The hybrid library and medical information
  • Online medical communities in the UK
  • Visible Human UK mirror: establishing a mirror

  OMNI is also organising two half-day workshops:

  • Searching the Internet (17th November pm & 18th November pm)
  • Internet Medline (19th November am)

  The OMNI seminar forms one of the streams on day three of the MEDNET '98 World Congress on the Internet in Medicine, hosted by St. Thomas' Hospital, London. The seminar is of interest to people involved in health/medical informatics, metadata, integration of electronic medical information, biomedical resource quality and access issues, and related issues.

• 20th IATUL Conference: The Future of Libraries in Human Communication, May 16 - 22, 1999, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece. Abstracts due December 1, 1998.

  The International Association of Technological University Libraries (IATUL) will hold its 20th annual meeting at the Technical University of Crete at Chiana. Subthemes will include the following:

  • The changing role of the library: missions and ethics
  • The changing role of the library: new organisations
  • Focus on users
  • The Librarian of the 21st century
  • Total quality management: from industry to higher education and libraries

  For for further information on submitting a paper, see the Call for participation.

• Joint International Conference of the ACH/ALLC in 1999: Digital Libraries for Humanities Scholarship and Teaching, June 9 - 13, 1999, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Abstracts for papers and panels due December 1, 1998.

  The Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) invite submissions of 1,500 to 2,000 words on any aspect of humanities computing, defined broadly as the use of computing methodologies in humanities research, teaching, or archives. The conference welcomes work across the humanities disciplines, including (but not limited to) languages and literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, and art history; the creative arts, such as creative writing, art and music; cultural studies and anthropology; computational linguistics and corpus linguistics. Suggested topics for submissions include:

  • significant issues of creation, representation, discovery, delivery, teaching, management and preservation of digital resources relevant to the humanities.

  • hypertext, markup, text corpora, statistical models, linguistic text analysis, and humanities computing as a discipline.

  • the role of humanities computing in undergraduate and graduate training, and institutional support for humanities computing.

  • analytical discussions of software applications and implementations for teaching humanities content, and evaluations of such uses.

  Additional information on submission requirements, registration, and travel is available through the conference's web site.

• Information Ecologies: the impact of new information "species", December 2 - 4, 1998, York, UK

  This three-day conference proposes to look at the impacts new information ecologies on libraries and universities, at the nature and economics of some of these new information species, and at how we should plan in order to cope with our new environment in the future. Such issues will be addressed with particular reference to the experiences of eLib projects, set in the wider context of the international community. The programme has been posted to the conference's web site along with registration and other more detailed information.

  This conference is organised by the Electronic Libraries Programme and co-ordinated by UKOLN.

• Third ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing, May 10 - 12, 1999, Ronneby, Sweden. Abstracts due on December 7, 1998.

  The theme of this conference is "Redefining the Information Chain -- New Ways and Voices". Papers on technical, human and economic aspects of electronic publishing will be welcomed. The conference will be concerned with electronic publishing both for specialist audiences and for the general public with two tracks, one for technical issues, such as file formats, protocols, networking, etc., and the second to include case studies, presentations of projects and presentations of implemented electronic publishing in public and scholarly libraries, art galleries, and museums as well as electronic provision of local community or tourist information, government information, and the like. Further information on submission, early registration, and related issues can be found at the conference's web site.

Pointers in this Column

I MESH: International Collaboration on Internet Subject Gateways	http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/imesh
3rd Annual Raytheon Science Data Centers Symposium November 2 - 4, 1998 Silver Spring, Maryland, USA	http://www.stx.com/dcs98/welcome.htm
4th OMNI Annual Seminar November 18, 1998 London, UK	http://omni.ac.uk/seminars/seminar98/
20th IATUL Conference: The Future of Libraries in Human Communication May 16 - 22, 1999 Technical University of Crete Chania, Greece	http://educate.lib.chalmers.se/IATUL/confe.html
American Society for Information Science (ASIS)	http://www.asis.org
AMIA '98 Annual Symposium: A Paradigm Shift In Health Care Information Systems: Clinical Infrastructures for the 21st Century November 7 - 11, 1998 Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA	http://www.amia.org/F98pprog/toc.htm
Data Archiving: Policies and Practice November 4 - 6, 1998 Laurel, Maryland, USA	http://gcmd.nasa.gov/dmwg98
Digitizing Legacy Documents: A Knowledge-Base Preservation Project Elizabeth Anderson, Robert Atkinson, Cynthia Crego, Jean Slisz and Sara Tompson	http://fnalpubs.fnal.gov/archive/1998/tm/TM-2056.html
Eliminating Legal and Policy Barriers to Interoperable Government Systems David Landsbergen and George Wolken	http://iep.fedworld.gov/library/elapbigs/cover.html
First International Conference on Information and Computation Economies (ICE-98) October 25 - 28, 1998 Charleston, South Carolina, USA	http://www.cs.columbia.edu/ICE-98/
Seventh International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) November 3 - 7, 1998 Bethesda, Maryland, USA	http://www.csee.umbc.edu/cikm/1998/
Information Ecologies: the impact of new information "species" December 2 - 4, 1998 York, UK	http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/elib-conf-98/
Joint International Conference of the ACH/ALLC in 1999: Digital Libraries for Humanities Scholarship and Teaching June 9 - 13, 1999 University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia, USA	http://www.iath.virginia.edu/ach-allc.99/cfp.html
Metadiversity -- A Call to Action; Responding to The Grand Challenge for Biodiversity Information Management through Metadata, an Interactive Symposium November 9 - 12, 1998 Natural Bridge, Virginia, USA	http://www.pa.utulsa.edu/nfais/infor-sym.html
Telecom Information Resources on the Internet	http://china.si.umich.edu/telecom/telecom-info.html
The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts	http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/alex/
Third ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing May 10 - 12, 1999, Ronneby, Sweden	http://www5.hk-r.se/elpub99.nsf
Wiley InterScience	http://www.interscience.wiley.com

Copyright (c) 1998 Corporation for National Research Initiatives

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