D-Lib Magazine
March 2002

Volume 8 Number 3

ISSN 1082-9873

In Brief

New Protocols for Gazetteer and Thesaurus Services

Contributed by:
Linda Hill
Alexandria Digital Library Project
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara CA USA
<[email protected]>

The Alexandria Digital Library Project announces the online publication of two protocols to support querying and response interactions using distributed services: one for gazetteers and one for thesauri. These protocols have been developed for our own purposes and also to support the general interoperability of gazetteers and thesauri on the web. See <http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~gjanee/gazetteer/> and <http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/~gjanee/thesaurus/> .

For the gazetteer protocol, we have provided a page of test forms that can be used to experiment with the operational functions of the protocol in accessing two gazetteers: the ADL Gazetteer and the ESRI Gazetteer (ESRI has participated in the development of the gazetteer protocol). We are in the process of developing a thesaurus server and a simple client to demonstrate the use of the thesaurus protocol.

We are soliciting comments on both protocols. Please remember that we are seeking protocols that are essentially "simple" and easy to implement and that support basic operations - they should not duplicate all of the functions of specialized gazetteer and thesaurus interfaces.

We continue to discuss ways of handling various issues and to further develop the protocols. For the thesaurus protocol, outstanding issues include the treatment of multilingual thesauri and the degree to which the language attribute should be supported; whether the Scope Note element should be changed to a repeatable Note element; the best way to handle the hierarchical report for multi-hierarchies where portions of the hierarchy are repeated; and whether support for searching by term identifiers is redundant and unnecessary given that the terms themselves are unique within a thesaurus. For the gazetteer protocol, we continue to work on validation of query and report XML documents and on implementing the part of the protocol designed to support the submission of new entries to a gazetteer.

We would like to encourage open discussion of these protocols through the NKOS discussion list (see the NKOS webpage at <http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/>) and the CGGR-L discussion list that focuses on gazetteer development (see ADL Gazetteer Development page at <http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/gazetteer>). You can also contact us in person if you wish. Greg Janée is the lead software engineer for the protocols. He can be reached at <[email protected]>. My email address is above.

Research and Development in Advanced Network Technology (RADIANT)

Contributed by:
Dr. Wu-chun Feng
Technical Staff Member and Team Leader of RADIANT Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA

The "Research & Development in Advanced Network Technology" (RADIANT) group <http://www.lanl.gov/radiant> at Los Alamos National Laboratory addresses the communication needs of high-end scientific applications, such as global climate modeling and genome sequencing, over a wide range of environments: wide-area networks in support of computational grids and local-area and system-area networks in support of clusters and supercomputers. Founded in 2000 and led by Dr. Wu-chun Feng (<http://home.lanl.gov/feng>) the RADIANT group pursues networking research in three areas:

• high-performance networking <http://www.lanl.gov/radiant/website/research/hpn.html>,

• high-speed monitoring and measurement <http://www.lanl.gov/radiant/website/research/measurement.html>, and

• cyber-security <http://www.lanl.gov/radiant/website/research/security.html>.

When time permits, they dabble in the area of "Bladed Beowulf" clusters (<http://www.lanl.gov/radiant/website/news/sc2001/sc2001.html> and <http://www.lanl.gov/radiant/website/research/robust/scss.html>).

In recent months, RADIANT has become prominent due to the group's work on four particular projects: Dynamic Right-Sizing (DRS), MAGNeT, TICKET, and Bladed Beowulf clusters.

The DRS project <http://www.lanl.gov/radiant/website/research/hpn/drs.html>, motivated by our research from SC 2000 <http://www.sc2000.org>, which was subsequently reported on by Byte.com <http://www.byte.com/documents/s=523/byt20010104s0001/index.htm>, automatically and transparently tunes TCP buffer sizes (while abiding by TCP semantics) to improve wide-area network performance by an order of magnitude. The DRS technique can be implemented in either kernel space or user space. The software patch for the kernel-space solution is available now at <http://www.lanl.gov/radiant/website/software.html>. The user-space solution will be available soon.

MAGNeT is our Monitor for Application-Generated Network Traffic. Unlike existing tools that only monitor traffic as it looks in the network, MAGNeT monitors traffic before it even hits the network. Recent interest in this software has come from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and the University of Illinois for "quality-of-service monitoring" while Avaya Labs is looking to use it for "protocol-stack monitoring." We, on the other hard, are using it to understand what the true applications' demands are of the network. The software for MAGNeT will be made available soon.

TICKET stands for Traffic Information-Collecting Kernel with Exact Timing. TICKET amounts to a supercharged tcpdump tool. With a typical PC, tcpdump can only monitor and record network traffic at 300-500 Mb/s with millisecond granularity. In contrast, TICKET monitors traffic at gigabit-per-second speeds (and beyond) with nanosecond granularity.

Finally, our "Bladed Beowulf" cluster project consists of compute nodes made from commodity off-the-shelf parts mounted on motherboard blades measuring 14.7" x 4.7" x 0.58". Each motherboard blade (node) contains a 633-MHz Transmeta TM5600 CPU, 256-MB, 10-GB hard disk, and three 10-Mb/s Fast Ethernet network interfaces. Using a chassis provided by RLX, twenty-four such nodes mount side-by-side in a vertical orientation to fit in a rack-mountable 3U space, i.e., 5.25" high. This particular project has resulted in considerable press coverage over the past three months:

ComputerWorld <http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO68065,00.html>

Yahoo! Finance <http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/011211/112131_1.html> and <http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020219/190555_1.html>

InfoWorld <http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/12/14/011214hnblades.xml>.

LinuxGram <http://www.linuxgram.com/article.pl?sid=01/12/14/1650242§ion=197>.

LinkOut - Explore beyond PubMed and Entrez

Contributed by:
Y. Kathy Kwan
LinkOut Coordinator
National Center for Biotechnology Information
National Library of Medicine
Bethesda, Maryland, USA
<[email protected]>

The power of linking is one of the most important developments that the World Wide Web offers to the scientific and research community. By providing a convenient and effective means for sharing ideas and collaboration, linking helps scientists and scholars to promote their research goals.

LinkOut is a powerful linking feature of Entrez, an information system developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. LinkOut allows users to move seamlessly from PubMed and other Entrez databases to a variety of relevant, web-accessible online resources provided by third parties. For example, LinkOut enables users to access the full-text of a PubMed citation, consult resources at the German Human Genome Project from a Human DNA sequence in the Entrez Nucleotide database, and see a picture of a Ginkgo biloba tree in the Gymnopserm Database from the Ginkgo biloba entry in the Entrez Taxonomy database. < http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/linkout/doc/linksexample.html>.

The design of LinkOut is open and flexible. Links can be provided in any URL syntax, and link providers may restrict access to their resources as they wish. Links to external resources are listed in the LinkOut display of an Entrez record. From the PubMed database, these external LinkOut resources can also be accessed through an icon from the Abstract and Citation formats.

LinkOut in PubMed allows a library to choose which full-text providers to link to. This includes publishers of electronic journals and all full-text providers that participate in LinkOut. In addition, a library can supply links to locally-loaded journal collections or any e-journal collection for which the library can provide reliable URLs. Consequently, a library can easily setup an environment for its users that features seamless and appropriate links to its electronic collection.

The majority of links in PubMed point to online journals, but the scope of LinkOut goes beyond that basic function. LinkOut includes information specific to the subject area of PubMed citations and relevant to users' research and study. Currently, users can find links to consumer health information, commentaries on articles, authors' background and research interests, datasets of articles, practice guidelines, and more. In development is the ability to link to a library's print collection holdings. Through LinkOut, PubMed citations become an entry point to countless relevant resources on the web.

Libraries provide links to their e-journal collections via the Library LinkOut Files Submission Utility, where holdings are simply checked off. Use of the Utility is free to all libraries. For registration, please send a request to <[email protected]> and include the name of the library and a contact person, telephone number, and address.

Documentation on LinkOut is available at the LinkOut homepage:
< http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/linkout/>.

Comments and questions about LinkOut can be sent to <[email protected]>.

Launch of OAIster Project

Contributed by:
Kat Hagedorn
OAIster Librarian
Digital Library Production Service
University of Michigan Libraries
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
<[email protected]>

We are pleased to announce the recent launch of the OAIster project at the Digital Library Production Service of the University of Michigan Libraries.

The OAIster project is one of the Metadata Harvesting Initiative Mellon Foundation grants awarded to 7 institutions in July 2001. The institutions were tasked with developing web services of digital resources that use the OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol (<http://www.openarchives.org/OAI_protocol/openarchivesprotocol.html>). Institutions have taken different paths in developing these services. Services will include those specific to a certain subject area, those specific to a particular digital format, and those more broadly defined that harvest digital resources irrespective of subject area or format.

OAIster is part of the latter category. Our goal is to create a wide-ranging collection of free, useful, previously difficult-to-access digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone.

The novelty of our service is multi-fold:

• Our service will reveal digital resources previously "hidden" from users behind web scripts.

• There won't be any dead ends. Users will not be retrieving merely information (metadata) about resources -- they will have access to the real things.

• The service will provide one-stop "shopping" for users interested in authoritative digital resources.

• Digital resources will be easily findable and viewable through our service. The middleware we use to index these resources makes this possible (http://www.dlxs.org/aboutdlxs.html).

At the same time, we are launching a survey, designed to reveal how people use digital materials and what features would interest them in the OAIster service. The survey can be taken at: <http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=1429194588>.

For further information about OAIster, please visit our web site at: <http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/>.

Introducing the Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS)

Contributed by:
Justine Heazlewood
Manager, Electronic Records and Online Access
Public Record Office Victoria
Victoria, Australia
<[email protected]>

The Victorian Electronic Records Strategy (VERS) is a framework of standards, guidance, case studies (demonstrations), and implementations that have been developed by Public Record Office Victoria (the state archives) to enable the long-term preservation of current electronic records. The strategy has been developed in partnership with the government agencies that create the records.

One of the key components of VERS is a Standard for the Management of Electronic Records which includes specifications on

• the metadata necessary for long term preservation of electronic records

• a standard long-term format

• a method for securing records so that unauthorised changes are detectable

The VERS long-term format is based on the notion of encapsulating the computer files which make up the records along with the metadata necessary to understand those computer files in the future. The format we have chosen is XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Digital signature technologies are used to seal the XML record so that it is possible to detect any alterations made to the record.

As part of developing successful implementation methodologies for VERS, Public Record Office Victoria is working with a government agency, the Department of Infrastructure, to implement a recordkeeping system to meet VERS requirements. This implementation is close to completion and much of the work done over the past two years has been documented and made available.

To help other agencies implement VERS, and to make available the repository of knowledge the VERS team has built up, the Public Record Office Victoria has recently released an online VERS toolkit. The toolkit is designed as a combined information portal and starter kit. It contains a step-by-step implementation guide as well as a discussion forum, a toolbox and a reference library.

Copies of all of the documents and tools mentioned can be found on the VERS website at <http://www.prov.vic.gov.au/vers>.

CRUMB - Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss

Contributed by:
Beryl Graham
CRUMB Co-editor
University of Sunderland
Sunderland, UK
<[email protected]>

As part of an AHRB "Small Grant in the Creative and Performing Arts", Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook of the University of Sunderland have set up CRUMB - "A new website for those who exhibit, organise, archive or make new media art (including Internet art, interactive installations, CD-ROMs, digital video, etc.)"

The site includes:

• Exclusive CRUMB INTERVIEWS on the issues faced by curators when dealing with new media, including: Matthew Gansallo on the Tate (London) web commissions. Kathy Rae Huffman and Julie Lazar on The Problem With Museums Today. Natalie Bookchin and Brendan Jackson on community art and 'hacktivism'. Christiane Paul and Larry Rinder of the Whitney, New York. Barbara London of MoMA, New York.

• LINKS to rare new media curating material, including documentation of CRUMB seminars at the BALTIC and The Media Centre.

• A DISCUSSION LIST <http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/new-media-curating.html>. This email discussion list has over 200 subscribed members, including leading academics and curators from the UK, USA, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Slovenia, and India. Discussion topics of the month are led by the CRUMB editors, and have included the nitty-gritty of installation tactics, and the development of a critical vocabulary.

Whilst CRUMB is focused on the problems of exhibiting contemporary art, it also includes some links to the challenges of conserving and archiving new media art: How do you conserve a web site? What happens when hardware goes out of production? At a recent CRUMB seminar, Mark Tribe, founder of Rhizome.org, outlined their archiving strategies for net.art, including emulation and documentation. Beryl Graham is currently 'Researcher in Residence' at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Pip Laurenson of the Tate is also currently researching the specialist issues for conserving new media art.

CRUMB is run by new media curators who have worked independently, and with institutions of all sizes. It aims to help meet the challenges of new art-forms in interesting times.

Visit often ... leave crumbs.

Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss <http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/crumb/>

Co-Editors: Telephone: +44 191 515 2896 Beryl Graham: <[email protected]> Sarah Cook: <[email protected]>

School of Arts, Design and Media, University of Sunderland, Ryhope Road, Sunderland SR2 7EE, United Kingdom.

Inaugural Meeting of the ACRL Media Resources Discussion Group

Contributed by:
Jill Ortner, Chair
ACRL Media Resources Discussion Group
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York, USA
<[email protected]>

Recently, a new discussion group was formed as part of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL): the ACRL Media Resources Discussion Group. This Group will primarily address issues of concern for media librarians or others who have responsibility for media resources or materials. The Group held its inaugural meeting on Sunday, January 20, 2002, at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The primary order of business at the January meeting was to establish the organization of the Group, set guidelines for future sessions, choose meeting days/times at future ALA meetings, and begin program planning. Twenty-nine people attended the meeting.

The Group arrived at the following organizational decisions:

• The Discussion Group Leader will serve a one-year term beginning after the ALA Annual Meeting in June 2002.

• The Leader will seek out and appoint a Vice-Chair who will serve as Chair the following year. The incoming Vice-Chair should be announced at (or before) the Discussion Group session at the ALA Annual Meeting.

• The primary duties of the Chair will be to
• Choose discussion topics and, if necessary, recruit facilitators qualified to give background on topics for the discussion group sessions at the ALA Mid-Winter and Annual Meetings.
• Communicate with ALA regarding reserving meeting times for the discussion group at the ALA Mid-Winter and Annual Meetings.

• The primary duty of the Vice-Chair will be to assist with creation of pathfinders, bibliographies, or other background materials on the discussion topics. The Chair and Vice-Chair may mutually agree on other responsibilities for the Vice Chair as needed.

Group meetings will be planned in such a way as to be flexible, and meetings will highlight and provide a brief background and explanation of any new media or media formats that may have been developed between meetings.

Generally, meetings will include discussion on two topics selected by the Chair. These two topics will be announced in advance using e-mail discussion groups maintained by ALA, ACRL and subject-related organizations. The Chair may also allow: brief announcements by liaisons from other related media-oriented groups; announcements by vendors regarding new equipment, formats, or promotions (these would be at the invitation and discretion of the Chair); and brief discussion to propose topics for future sessions.

At the inaugural Group meeting, the following discussion topics were suggested for future meetings:

• Distance Education
• Media Content related to Curriculum
• Media Literacy
• Access to Media - circulation, interlibrary loan, etc.
• Meta data for Media
• Microforms - digital scanners, microprint, storage
• MP3-CD
• Digital Millennium Copyright Act
• Collection maintenance/management/access
• Security

The next meeting of the ACRL Media Resources Discussion Group is scheduled for Sunday, June 16, 2002, at the ALA Annual Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

For more information about the ACRL Media Resources Discussion Group, please contact:
Current Chair: Jill Ortner, <[email protected]>, or
Current Vice-Chair (Incoming Chair): Diane C. Kachmar, <[email protected]>.

Physicists Gain Online Research Tool That Will Save Thousands of Hours Yearly

Contributed by:
Christine Lafon
Public Affairs
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
<[email protected]>

In 1939, an article titled "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission" opened the doors of knowledge that would lead to the atomic bomb. In 1948, "The Origin of Chemical Elements" revealed how the opposite physical process, nuclear fusion, powers stars. Until now, there has been no easy way to find these and other seminal scientific papers that laid the foundations of modern physics. But now, physicists and astronomers alike can have quick, free access to the knowledge of the past 100 years of physics research.

That access is available through the NASA Astrophysics Data System or ADS (online at <http://adswww.harvard.edu/>), the largest non-commercial database of scientific abstracts and articles in the world. Since its debut in 1993, the ADS has grown in popularity so much that it now draws more than 50,000 users per month, 10,000 of whom use the ADS at least 10 times per month.

"With the new physics material we've added to the ADS, the usefulness of this database for both physicists and astronomers has been substantially increased," said Dr. Guenther Eichhorn, ADS Project Scientist. "We will be working to advertise the new capabilities of the ADS in the physics community, where researchers have previously had to rely on expensive commercial services to access past articles."

The Astrophysics Data System

The ADS provides two key resources to researchers searching for previously published works. The first is an abstract database, which now holds more than 2.8 million abstracts from more than 200 journals.

As its second resource, the ADS includes the full text of many articles in the form of scanned pages. More than 1.8 million pages from some 250,000 articles occupy 400 gigabytes of memory in this database. Approximately 5,000 additional pages are added every week.

The ADS covers all major and most minor astronomical journals back to volume 1, the first issue published. This includes articles printed as far back as 1827. More than 95% of the astronomical literature from 1975 or later is included in the ADS. Placing these materials online provides an enormous time saver to the research community. "We estimate that the ADS saves researchers more than 800,000 hours per year that they would otherwise spend in the library painstakingly copying page after page of journal articles," stated Eichhorn. "That's the equivalent of 400 full-time employees."

Physics Is Added

The latest additions to the ADS database are the fruit of a collaboration between the ADS and the American Physical Society, which publishes nearly a dozen physics journals. In this agreement, the society provided the ADS with more than 300,000 abstracts from nine journals, including Physical Review A through E and Physical Review Letters. The ADS also received comprehensive lists of references from those journals. In addition, the ADS now links to the society's database of online articles, making another large set of scanned articles directly accessible to ADS users. Access to these APS articles is available to members of institutions with a subscription to APS journals and on a per-article purchase basis to others.

In return, the American Physical Society will link to the ADS astronomy records from their reference lists. This will allow physics researchers to easily access detailed information for astronomy or astrophysics articles referenced from the society's physics publications.

The Future of the ADS

Eichhorn and the ADS team foresee a future of continued growth and increasing access to their extensive database. A high priority for the coming years is improving the ability of third-world nations to access the ADS.

Already, 10 mirror sites are operating worldwide in nations as diverse as Brazil, China and India. This speeds access to the ADS information for researchers in other countries.

However, many developing countries still lack easy internet access. For these countries, the ADS team is working to design portable, self-contained systems that can store the full ADS database.

"All of the abstracts in the ADS already can fit onto a typical laptop computer," said Eichhorn. "However, the scanned articles require much more space."

With the steadily increasing storage space available on computer hard disks, Eichhorn believes that a stand-alone PC system can be developed within the next year that will be able to store lower-resolution scans of all the articles in the ADS.

"A lot of people would benefit greatly from a system like this," he added.

Eichhorn will travel to a United Nations workshop in Argentina this September to present the ADS plans for expanding third-world access.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists organized into seven research divisions study the origin, evolution, and ultimate fate of the universe.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Guenther Eichhorn
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Phone: 617-495-7260
<[email protected]>

David A. Aguilar, Director of Public Affairs
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Phone: 617-495-7462. Fax: 617-495-7468
<[email protected]>.

In the News

Recent Press Releases and Announcements

Funding Available for Native American Libraries

March 7, 2002, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Washington, DC - In 2002, the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) will award approximately $2,521,000 in grants to Native American Libraries. With three types of grants for Native American Libraries, IMLS helps improve services for an important part of the nation's community of library users: 1) Basic grants support core library operations; 2) Professional Assistance grants heighten the professional proficiency of the library staff; and, 3) Enhancement grants support existing, or new, library projects and services. (Basic and Professional Assistance grants are noncompetitive, Enhancement grants are competitive.)

Currently, IMLS is accepting applications for Enhancement grants. Indian tribes and Alaska Native villages (as recognized by the Department of Interior) must have already applied for Basic grants this fiscal year to be eligible to apply for Enhancement grants. Applicants may apply for up to $150,000. Priority will be given to applications supporting projects and services that:

• Establish or enhance electronic links among or between libraries;

• link libraries electronically with educational, social or information services;

• help libraries access information through electronic networks;

• encourage libraries in various communities and of different types to establish consortia and share resources;

• pay costs for libraries to acquire or share computer systems and telecommunications technologies, and

• target library and information services to persons having difficulty using a library and to underserved urban and rural communities.

For more information, please see the full press release at <http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/030702.htm>.

Serials Solutions Joins NISO

"Bethesda, Md., USA � (March 4, 2002) NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, is pleased to welcome a new member, Serials Solutions, to its voting roster. Serials Solutions is dedicated to improving the visibility of full-text electronic-format journals by providing client institutions of all types and sizes with comprehensive reports that show all the full-text electronic journals available at their institutions. The organization partners with a variety of aggregators to provide visibility for journals within collections making these aggregated databases increasingly useful to library patrons."

"In welcoming Serials Solutions to NISO, Pat Harris, Executive Director said: 'Internet development has spurred tremendous growth in the information intermediary arena. We are pleased to have Serials Solutions, a new kind of information service vendor, join NISO and help us shape standards that will be useful to all players in the information industry.'"

Serials Solutions will be represented by Mike McCracken, Co-Founder and Director of Technology. More information about the Seattle-based company can be found on their website at <http://www.serialssolutions.com>.

For more information, please see the press release at the NISO web site. The NISO web site is at <http://www.niso.org>, or contact NISO Headquarters at (301) 654-2512. Email: <[email protected]>.

Digital Library Federation (DLF) Endorses Two New Aids for Developing Digital Library Collections

"WASHINGTON, D.C.�The Digital Library Federation (DLF) has formally endorsed new aids of two kinds to help research libraries achieve quality in digitizing books and other material for online use. One is a set of principles for good digital collections. The other is a set of technical specifications for achieving fidelity in digitizing items for such collections."

"...The newly endorsed principles for digital collections are embodied in a paper entitled, "A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections." Members of a Digital Library Forum convened by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) produced the framework. They intend that grant applicants to IMLS and other federal agencies will use it, not as a set of requirements but as a resource for developing good digital objects, metadata, collections, and projects. Standards of "goodness" in the principles embrace not only how useful and accessible digital materials are but also how fully they may be interoperable, reusable, and enduring (persistent). The principles also incorporate needs for verification, documentation, and respect for intellectual property laws. The IMLS framework is online at <http://www.imls.gov/pubs/forumframework.htm>. The DLF endorsement statement is at <http://www.diglib.org/standards/imlsframe.htm>."

"The technical specifications for digital fidelity are in a paper entitled, "Benchmark for Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials." A group convened by the DLF on preservation reformatting practices produced the benchmark, which identifies minimum level characteristics for digital page images contained in a preservation digital master. Libraries that meet or exceed these specifications in reformatting books and other holdings for online use will ensure their collections of interoperability with others. Patrons will be able to access books and serial publications digitally copied and managed at different sites with assurance of fidelity to originals. The benchmark paper as endorsed by the DLF is accessible online at <http://www.diglib.org/standards/bmarkfin.htm>."

For more information, please see the full press release at <http://www.clir.org/pubs/press/DLFendorses2.html>.

Digital Preservation Coalition Launch at House of Commons

The following was announced 1 March 2002 on the DNER listserv by Paul Davey: "Rosie Winterton, MP, television personality Loyd Grosman and Lynne Brindley, CEO of the British Library and DPC Chair, all spoke at a high profile and very well attended launch of the Digital Preservation Coalition at the House of Commons on 27th February. The primary purpose of the DPC is to focus on the preservation of the huge wealth of educationally valuable digitised material threatened by extinction, ironically as a result of the phenomenal and exponential pace of computer software and hardware technology."

"...The Guardian...did publish a very interesting article the next day, which can be found here: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4364669,00.html>."

For more information about the Digital Library Coalition (DPC), please the DPC web site at <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/preservation>.

Digitized Linus Pauling Research Notebooks Released On-Line by Oregon State University Special Collections

The following announcement was submitted to D-Lib Magazine by Chris Peterson, Oregon State University:

"Digitized versions of the forty-six research notebooks of two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling (1901-1994) [were released] on-line to the public on February 28, 2002. The notebooks are made available via Oregon State University's Valley Library Special Collections website at: <http://osulibrary.orst.edu/specialcollections/rnb/index.html>."

"As with many scientists, Dr. Pauling utilized bound notebooks to record and manipulate the details of his research as it unfolded. A testament to the remarkable length and diversity of Dr. Pauling's career, the Pauling Papers holdings include forty-six research notebooks spanning the years 1922 to 1994 and covering any number of the myriad scientific fields in which Dr. Pauling involved himself. In this regard, the notebooks' 7,500 pages contain many of Pauling's laboratory calculations and experimental data, as well as scientific conclusions, ideas for further research and numerous autobiographical musings."

"Pauling biographer Tom Hager, author of Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling, is enthusiastic in his praise for the digitized notebooks website. 'OSU Special Collections has created a unique window on scientific history in the making,' says Hager. 'The online publication of Linus Pauling's research notebooks -- a vast array of primary and uncensored material from one of the world's great researchers -- represents a milestone in archival accessibility and a great boon for scientists, historians, teachers and students.'"

"The digitization effort, carried out by the OSU Special Collections staff, will be revealed to the public on what would have been Dr. Pauling's 101st birthday. By proclamation of Gov. John Kitzhaber, February 28th is, in perpetuity, "Linus Pauling Day" in the state of Oregon. Each year, in celebration of Linus Pauling Day, OSU's Pauling Heritage Committee coordinates a series of events meant to focus attention upon the remarkable life and career of the university's most famous graduate."

"In addition to the OSU initiative, the National Library of Medicine will also be observing this anniversary with a new "Profiles in Science" digital exhibit dedicated to Linus Pauling. The exhibit, available at <http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov>, is comprised of over 200 scanned letters, manuscripts and photographs outlining Pauling's biomedically-related work."

"Dr. Pauling, an internationally-recognized humanitarian and one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, was born in Portland, Oregon, where he attended high school. Pauling later received his undergraduate education at Oregon Agricultural College, now known as Oregon State University. He remains the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes -- the first for Chemistry in 1954 and the second for Peace in 1962."

"The Pauling legacy is represented at OSU by the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers in the Valley Library's Special Collections—a vast archive of over 500,000 items donated by: Dr. Pauling in 1986; the Linus Pauling Institute and its two endowed chairs; the Pauling Chemistry Lecture in the College of Science; the Linus and Ava Helen Pauling Lecture on World Peace in the College of Liberal Arts; and an endowed chair in the Department of Chemical Engineering."

OCLC and ALISE Announce Grant Awards

"DUBLIN, Ohio, Feb. 21, 2002--The OCLC Office of Research and the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) have awarded three grants to university researchers for 2002. Recipients of the OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grants were recognized in January at the awards luncheon held during the ALISE 2002 Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana."

"The university-based research aided by these grants complements the efforts of the OCLC Office of Research and advances librarianship and information science," said Lorcan Dempsey, vice president, Research. "The value of this research is reflected in the increase of these awards, beginning next year, to $15,000 from $10,000."

Awardees included:

• Jane Greenberg, assistant professor, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who received a grant for her project, "Optimizing Metadata Creation: A Model for Integrating Human and Automatic Processes."

• Lorna Peterson, associate professor, University at Buffalo, SUNY, who was granted funding for a study titled, "Operationalizing Barriers in Dissemination of African Research and Scholarship."

• Wonsik Shim, assistant professor, Florida State University, who was awarded a grant for his research titled, "Reification of Information Seeking Habits."

Budapest Open Access Initiative supported by the Open Society Institute's Information Program

February 14, 2002: "The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), released today, aims to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. The BOAI arises from a meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI)."

"The OSI Information Program is committing funding of 1 million US dollars per year for three years in support of open access projects. Funding will include support for:

• the development of business models and plans for sustainable self-archiving and open access publishing;

• use of library networks (like the Electronic Information for Libraries consortium, currently covering 40 countries - see www.eifl.net) to mobilize support for open access globally;

• support for researchers in low and middle income countries to publish in open-access journals which charge up front fees;

• development of software tools and templates for open access publishing, self-archiving, indexing and navigation;

• promotion of the open access philosophy among foundations and donors, science and research funding agencies, libraries and universities, as well as governments, policymakers and international organizations worldwide."

"OSI may also, at a later stage, provide direct seed funding to certain types of open access and self-archiving initiatives."

For more information, please see the statement of support at <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/commitment.shtml>, or contact Melissa Hagemann, <[email protected]>.

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DOI: 10.1045/march2002-inbrief