D-Lib Magazine
October 2002

Volume 8 Number 10

ISSN 1082-9873

In Brief

DSpace: An Open Source Institutional Repository for Digital Material

Contributed by:
MacKenzie Smith
Associate Director for Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
<[email protected]>

The MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard Company have completed development of the DSpace™ system, an open source institutional repository for digital material. Institutional repositories are designed to collect, manage, distribute, and preserve the digital assets of an organization <http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html>, for example, the scholarly publications and research material of the faculty at a research university. This type of digital material is extremely valuable to institutions, but is challenging to capture, describe, and preserve over time. Libraries are ideally suited to take on this activity, and to conduct the necessary research in the areas of open scholarly communication and long-term preservation of fragile digital research material that the DSpace platform enables.

DSpace is a standards-based system that implements both the Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) reference model and the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI PMH). The DSpace system was designed to support interoperation with both other DSpace installations and other OAI-compliant archives.

The DSpace information model maps to that of the institution: it consists of "communities" (e.g., schools, departments, centers, labs, and programs) that contain one or more "collections" of digital "items", each of which can have one or more associated digital files (e.g., a simple digital image, or a scanned article made up of twenty TIFF page images). At MIT, communities are responsible for the submission of material to DSpace, including metadata provision, and the communities also determine policies for their material such as who may submit, what collections they want to define, and who will have access to those collections through the web user interface. The Libraries will manage the system, as well as house and preserve the material over time. Content being submitted to DSpace at MIT will include: published and preprint papers; technical reports; working papers and conference papers; electronic theses; digital datasets (e.g., geospatial and statistical); digital images; digital audio/visual material; digital educational material; and, of course, digitized library collections.

The DSpace system supports submission of digital material directly by its creators or by an agent acting on their behalf (e.g., departmental or library staff). DSpace also supports searching and browsing material by users, and delivery of requested digital items via standard web browsers. As a production-quality preservation archive, DSpace ensures that digital content will be discoverable and available over the very long time frames in which libraries normally operate.

DSpace is now in full production at MIT <http://web.mit.edu/dspace> and will be made available to other institutions under an open source license on November 4, 2002. The system was built using 100% open source technology to ensure wide availability to all types of institutions with varying levels of resources. For more information, see <http://dspace.org>.

Workshop Report: Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries at JCDL '02

Contributed by:
Katy Börner
Indiana University
<[email protected]>

Chaomei Chen
Drexel University
<[email protected]>

The Second International Workshop on Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries was held at the 2nd Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Portland, Oregon, on July 18th, 2002.

The objectives of the workshop were to provide a stimulating forum for researchers in information visualization and digital libraries to share their views, experiences, and plans; to raise awareness of the state of the art in related fields of research; to identify a research agenda concerning the role of visual interfaces in digital library research; to exploit potentially useful theories, methodologies, and technologies; and to establish long-term interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers from different fields.

This year's workshop introduced several new topics, for example:

• Web based Visual Interfaces
• Mobile Access to Information
• Collaborative Document Spaces
• Usability and Formal Methods
• Real World Needs, Products & Applications

The keynote speech was given by Tim Bray, a co-inventor of XML and founder of Antarti.ca Systems. In his talk, entitled "Design Criteria for Visual Interfaces to Anything", Tim Bray argued that visual interfaces are a necessity for the digital library, in particular when datasets become too big to be displayed on a single screen. Drawing on the work of Edward Tufte and other pioneers, he laid out two sets of criteria, one for where visualization is appropriate and the other for excellence in doing it. Bray illustrated his main points using Antarcti.ca's visual interfaces to PubMed, Map.Net, and VCDeal map.

During a break in the workshop, participants had a chance to experience a diverse range of interactive demonstrations of visual interfaces to digital libraries. The following demonstrations were included:

• "Interactive Information Visualization in the Digital Flora of Texas", by John Leggett, Texas A&M University
• "2D and 3D Visualization of Large Information Spaces", by Carlos Proal, Universidad de las Americas-Puebla, Mexico
• "ENVISION_ODL a Lightweight Protocol between Digital Libraries and Visualization Systems", by Rao Shen, Virginia Tech
• "James Burke's Knowledge Web", by Patrick McKercher
• "Collaborative Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries", by Katy Börner, Indiana University
• "Visualizing Knowledge Domains", by Katy Börner, Indiana University, Chaomei Chen, Drexel University and Kevin W. Boyack, Sandia National Laboratories

This year's workshop featured seven papers. Each paper was presented and discussed among the participants. The presentations and discussions were divided into two sessions. Dan Ancona, University of California, chaired the first session. Anselm Spoerri, Rutgers University, chaired the second session.

The first paper in the morning session was presented by Adrian Graham, Hector Garcia-Molina, Andreas Paepcke and Terry Winograd, Stanford University, and was entitled "Time as Essence for Photo Browsing Through Personal Digital Libraries." Their paper described a visual photo browser for collections containing thousands of time-stamped digital images. Subsequently, Carlos Monroy, Rajiv Kochumman, Richard Furuta and Eduardo Urbina, Texas A&M University introduced the "Interactive Timeline Viewer (ItLv): A Tool to Visualize Variants Among Documents". ItLv visualizes and supports the interactive exploration of text variants obtained in a textual collation helping to understand the relationships among the texts. The third paper was presented by Mark Notess and Natalia Minibayeva, Indiana University, and described work on "Variations2: Toward Visual Interfaces for Digital Music Libraries". Based on a discussion of the unique challenges of visualizing musical data as well as the limitations of existing music retrieval and browsing interfaces, Notess and Minibayeva proposed a data model and interface design for the Variations2 digital music library project.

The afternoon session started with a presentation by Michael Christoffel and Bethina Schmitt, University of Karlsruhe, Germany on "Accessing Libraries as Easy as a Game". Aiming at the look and feel of a "real world" library, they used a game engine to model the interior and exterior of an existing library building as well as the basic functionality, such as literature search and browsing. Initial feedback from teenagers and other users followed a play instinct when trying out the system. The next talk was given by TeongJoo Ong and John J. Leggett, Texas A&M University, who introduced "Interactive Information Visualization in the Digital Flora of Texas" a visual interface used by a large group of botanists and botanically interested non-specialists. Among the different types of interactive information visualizations are a hierarchical taxonomic browser, specimen distribution and density maps, and stackable bar graphs of temporal specimen data. Dan Ancona and Terry Smith, University of California, presented "Towards Escaping the Interface Local Minimum: Visualization and the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype". The project aims to ease the access, browsing, delivery, and understanding of geospatially referenced library items. Initial visualizations use cartographic metaphors to lay out digital objects in geographic or in abstract semantic spaces. Last but not least, Rao Shen presented joint work with Jun Wang and Edward A. Fox, Virginia Tech on "A Lightweight Protocol between Digital Libraries and Visualization Systems". The proposed protocol, called VIDI, extends the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and presents a new solution to achieve interoperability between the growing number of digital libraries and diverse visual interfaces.

Links to all papers presented at the workshop as well as all systems demonstrated may be found at the workshop page <http://vw.indiana.edu/visual02/jcdl.html>.

A collection of extended versions of papers in the two workshops in 2001 and 2002 will be published as a book in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 2539, entitled Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries.

In 2003, the "Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries" workshop will be merged with another JCDL-workshop on "Document Search Interface Design and Intelligent Access in Large-Scale Collections" <http://xtasy.slis.indiana.edu/jcdlui/uiws.html>. The tentative title of the combined workshop is "Information Retrieval and Navigation Interfaces". Organizers will be Javed Mostafa and Katy Börner.

ECDL 2002 Workshop Report: E-books + E-Readers + E-journals = E-education?

Contributed by:
Monica Landoni
University of Strathclyde
<[email protected]>

Paloma Diaz
University de Carlos III de Madrid
Madrid, Spain
<[email protected]>

The E-education workshop started with presentations from both chairs, Monica Landoni and Paloma Diaz. "What are electronic books and does anybody read them anyway?" was the title of Landoni's presentation, in which she described the work carried out by her electronic book research team at the University of Strathclyde, UK. The main focus of the group is on definitions and models for electronic books in teaching and learning together with methodologies for evaluating their usability. This interest was shared by Diaz from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain, in her presentation on "Usability of hypermedia learning e-books", in which she explored the hypermedia dimension of electronic books and provided a solid analysis of methodological issues, particularly criteria and measures involved in this type of evaluation.

In "Towards a modular access to electronic handbooks", Caterina Caracciolo from the University of Amsterdam discussed the possibility of enriching the electronic book model by using ontologies in order to provide the reader with better search facilities.

While models for electronic books were the focus of these three presentations, Pithamber R. Polsani from the University of Arizona, USA, in his paper "The use and abuse of reusable learning objects", provided much needed definitions, methodologies and guidelines for the production of learning objects.

In the second part of the workshop, discussion shifted to the use of electronic material in education. In particular, "Personalising electronic books" by James Ohene-Djan and Alvaro A.A. Fernandes from the Universities of London and Manchester (UK) respectively, provided insight into the functionalities that electronic books should inherit from the paper counterpart in order to be at least as appealing to readers. Ohene-Djan and Fernandez presented a model that deals with personalisation and adaptation mechanisms in a formal way.

Ruth Wilson, from the University of Strathclyde, presented some results of a study into the impact of electronic material on teaching habits in higher education. In her paper, "E-Education in the UK", she described reactions from educators in different disciplines to the introduction of electronic material in their everyday teaching experience. While there is still an optimistic view that electronic material can make a difference, complaints about a lack of content and technical limitations are common in a number of disciplines.

In "E-nhance lectures" by L. Naber and M. Kohle, Vienna University of Technology, Austria, the authors discussed problems lecturers face when producing good electronic material for teaching in higher education. These problems can be overcome only with proper training, support and adequate authoring tools. Different types of authoring tools for the production of electronic books were then briefly presented and evaluated in "E-book technology and its potential applications in distance education" by Norshuhada Shiratuddin, Monica Landoni and Forbes Gibb from the University of Strathclyde and Shahizan Hassan, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The authors described a small experiment designed to evaluate the usability of the various software packages and the electronic material the software produced.

All the above papers are available from <http://www.dei.inf.uc3m.es/ebecdl2002/agenda.htm>, and they will be shortly published in their final version in JODI, the Journal of Digital Information <http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk>.

The day ended with a discussion panel on the future of e-education. The panel considered the problems involved in producing and distributing electronic material for education. Particular areas of concern included the cautious attitudes of publishers, who are extremely afraid of losing control of content, and the risk of big software players becoming involved too early in a market that is still looking for models and standards. An interesting initiative, DBNL (Dutch acronym for Digital Library of Dutch Literature), was briefly presented by one of the workshop participants, Rene van Stipriaan. He described how, over the last four years, they have been able to convince Dutch publishers to provide them with free content to be digitised and made available on their web site (http://www.dbnl.org). This site is now very popular, receiving more then one thousand hits each day. Rene emphasised that this model works for both librarians and publishers. The library web site is now well respected and receives a great deal of attention from readers because of its high quality content, and, at the same time, publishers have seen an increase in sales of the paper versions of the material that has been digitised and made available on the web site.

ECDL 2002 Workshop Report: Web Archiving

Contributed by:
Andreas Rauber
Vienna University of Technology
Vienna, Austria
<[email protected]>

Julien Masanès
Curator
Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Paris, France
<[email protected]>

Following a session on Web Archiving on the first day of the ECDL conference, the Workshop on Web Archiving, organized jointly by the French National Library and the Vienna University of Technology, attracted almost 50 participants from 20 countries. It featured a program of 12 presentations, organized into 3 sessions, covering the wide range of issues in this field.

The first session focused on technical issues, starting with a presentation by Raymie Stata on the data acquisition, storage and interaction techniques, used and provided by the Internet Archive. This was followed by the presentation of a specialized, adaptive crawler as well as an associated XML repository allowing flexible querying of XML data by Patrick Ferran from Xyleme. The third presentation in this session, by Morgan Cundiff from the Library of Congress, described the METS XML schema for cataloging and archiving web pages, was followed by a brief demonstration of the METS-Viewer Software. Gregory Cobena from INRIA presented a high-performance crawler that uses a variety of techniques, such as page-rank and update frequency, to identify important pages on the web. This was followed by a presentation by Julien Masanès from the French National Library who presented a general framework and results from a pilot study for web-archiving with a two-tracks approach, one for the surface web, based on automatic tools, the other for the 'hidden' or 'deep web' based on deposit. Donna Bergmark from Cornell University presented a paper on automated collection building based on focused crawls using tunneling.

The second session was devoted to presentations of various web-archiving projects and showed the diversity of requirements and approaches in this field.

Deborah Woodyard from the British Library then provided an update on the "Britain on the Web" project, formerly known as "Domain uk", a pilot study on archiving a selection of 100 sites from the United Kingdom. Woodyard reported results in terms of efforts required and challenges encountered. In the next talk Hans Liegmann from the German National Library gave an overview of three prototype applications for archiving electronic documents based on submission, i.e., the "On-Line Thesis" project covering 80 universities in Germany, the "Springer Link" archive housing a copy of about 500 journals by Springer, and a generic submission and delivery interface to allow document submission by publishers. Birgit Henriksen from the Royal Danish Library reported on results from their "Netarchive.dk" project, analyzing different archival approaches and the usefulness of the archived material for research. Henriksen pointed out the importance of re-thinking the concept of a web-site and the limits of site- or domain-restricted collections. Neal Beagrie from the Joint Information Systems Committee concluded the session with a presentation of JISC initiatives with respect to building and archiving community collections. He stressed the need for distributed archives, as well as the necessity of links between subject gateways and internet archives.

The last session was devoted to two international consortia initiatives in the field of Web Archiving. It started with a presentation by Andreas Rauber from the Vienna University of Technology on the European Web Archive initiative, which is currently being proposed by a consortium of more than 27 partners from national and university libraries, research centers, and companies as an Expression of Interest (EoI) for an IST 6th Framework Integrated Project. The focus of this initiative lies with the creation of a European Web Archive, covering strategies and tools for data selection and acquisition, archive maintenance and preservation, as well as access provision and exploitation. The second consortium proposed by Internet Archive and several national libraries was presented by Michele Kimpton from the Internet Archive. It aims at defining collection policy and common practice for web archiving in an international collaboration with national libraries. The consortium would specify and develop a new web crawler targeted towards the archival needs of libraries, crawl each participant's national web space, and provide national data collections crawled by Internet Archive since 1996.

Further information and links to the presentations are available via the Workshop Homepage at <http://listes.cru.fr/wws/d_read/web-archive/pgr_ECDL2002.html>.

ECDL 2002 Workshop Report: Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF 2002)

Contributed by:
Carol Peters
Italian National Research Council
Pisa, Italy
<[email protected]>

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) has three main objectives:

• to stimulate the development of multilingual IR systems for European languages;

• to contribute to the creation of an R&D community in the multidisciplinary area of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR);

• to create reusable test-suites for benchmarking purposes.

These objectives are mainly realized through the organization of annual evaluation campaigns. The results of the third campaign (CLEF2002) were presented at a two-day workshop held in Rome, 19-20 September, immediately following the sixth European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL2002).

CLEF2002 offered a series of tracks designed to test the performance of mono-, bi- and multilingual text retrieval systems accessing general purpose texts (news documents). Participating systems derived their queries from a common set of structured topics in eleven languages, selecting their preferred language(s). Another track was aimed at testing systems designed for retrieval on domain-specific collections. Additional tasks offered participants the opportunity to test the functionality of interactive cross-language systems with respect to the help provided to users with little or no competence in the target language.

There were two distinct document collections. The primary collection consisted of a multilingual comparable corpus of more than 1,000,000 news documents in eight European languages (Dutch, English, French, Finnish, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish). The second collection included the GIRT database for German social science and the Amaryllis multidisciplinary database of French bibliographic documents; both databases had associated multilingual controlled vocabularies.

Participation in CLEF2002 showed a rise in the number of groups with respect to the previous year, with 37 groups submitting results for one or more of the main tracks: 8 from North America; 28 from Europe, and 1 from Asia. Twenty-two groups tried a cross-language task and eleven of these attempted the multilingual track, which involved searching a collection of documents in 5 languages for relevant items and submitting the results in a single merged list. Just 5 groups tackled the interactive tasks. Participating groups consisted of a good mix of first-comers and veteran groups. It was interesting to note that a number of the groups that had participated in previous campaigns attempted a more complex task in CLEF2002, progressing from monolingual to bilingual, or from bilingual to multilingual tasks.

About 70 researchers and system developers from both academia and industry attended the workshop in order to discuss the results of their CLEF experiments, comparing and analysing the success of different approaches and methodologies. In addition to presentations by the groups participating in CLEF2002, additional talks included descriptions of the results of the other two major international cross-language evaluation initiatives (organised by TREC and NTCIR) and a summary of the conclusions of a SIGIR2002 workshop that aimed at producing a CLIR research roadmap. A highlight of the first day was a talk by an industrial group which presented CLIR R&D from the perspective of the business and applications communities. The second day concluded with proposals for new tasks in CLEF2003. These proposals included tracks for mono- and cross-language question and answering, cross-language spoken document retrieval, and cross-language access to image collections.

The presentations given at the CLEF2002 Workshop and detailed reports on the experiments have been posted on the CLEF website at <http://www.clef-campaign.org>.

CITIDEL - A Digital Library for Computing

Contributed by:
Lillian N. Cassel
Computing Sciences
Villanova University
Villanova, Pennsylvania USA
<[email protected]>

The barriers to information sharing and resource dissemination can be substantial. Both information seekers and providers need a safe and secure way to exchange what they have and to search for materials. CITIDEL is the Computer and Information Technology Interactive Digital Education Library. It is the computing related component of the NSDL, the National STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education) Digital Library.

Just entering its second year, the CITIDEL project got off to a running start by building on other work. The Computer Science Teaching Center (CSTC) provides a mechanism for contributors to present their work to the community for dissemination and comment. It incorporates easy labeling of core metadata elements and supports review of materials by volunteers. CSTC provides the basic structure for submission of resources to CITIDEL. (Visit CSTC at <http://www.cstc.org/>.) CITIDEL team members Deborah Knox of the College of New Jersey and Ed Fox of Virginia Tech were instrumental in the initial design and development of CSTC and now contribute their experience to CITIDEL. Initially funded from NSF DUE, CSTC provides a base that could be incorporated into other digital library projects as well.

A strength of the CITIDEL project is the incorporation of a number of existing resources, making them accessible from a single starting point and bringing them into the NSDL family. Of particular importance in this regard is the ability to search the entire ACM Digital Library collection from the CITIDEL site. This is possible because of an agreement with ACM whereby the entire ACM metadata is available for search within CITIDEL. The ACM DL resources remain the property of ACM, but visitors to the CITIDEL site can locate relevant resources without the need to visit several separate sites for full search. ACM has gone beyond metadata sharing to offer free access to specific education-related resources in the library to visitors who reach ACM through CITIDEL. Other existing resources incorporated into CITIDEL include the extensive "History of Computing" site organized and maintained by team member J.A.N. Lee of Virginia Tech with contributions by John Impagliazzo of Hofstra. Other resources include the Networked Computer Science Technical Reports Library (NCSTRL), and the ACM Journal of Educational Resources in Computing (JERIC).

CITIDEL is more than a collection of resources that could be found elsewhere. In addition to providing a common entry point to as many computing resources as possible, CITIDEL will provide services intended to assist the searcher both in finding what is needed and in using what is found. Specialized search is the contribution of team member Lee Giles of Pennsylvania State University. Other services will support turning a collection of materials into a meaningful learning environment. An example is the VIADUCT project, largely the product of J.A.N. Lee and his students, which guides an instructor through the process of producing an extended syllabus ready for use in the classroom, complete with integrated readings, exercises, study guides, simulators, and other materials discovered through searches in CITIDEL. To support people who wish to develop a digital library of their own, CITIDEL development includes work on a "Digital Library in a Box," an easy to use set of resources for putting together the framework of a working digital library. Of course, such digital libraries will be invited to become part of the consortium that is behind the CITIDEL front and thus become accessible to the expanding community of teachers and learners who turn to the NSDL for materials that support their work. CITIDEL recognizes that the user community is diverse includes Spanish language resources through the efforts of team member Manuel Pérez-Quiñones..

CITIDEL is both challenged by and the beneficiary of its target audience. As a digital library in support of computing education, it will often attract experienced computing users and researchers to its site. Therefore, it must present outstanding materials through an interface that supports these experienced users. At the same time, the site will also serve visitors who do not have extensive experience in computing, searching, or the use of a digital library. The site must equally welcome visitors of all experience levels. The combination of new materials produced specifically to serve the NSDL goals and the gathering of existing materials to make them more widely accessible provides the defining mission and challenge for CITIDEL.

CITIDEL is under development, but accessible at <http://www.citidel.org>.

ACRL's 2003 Awards Program: Recognizing outstanding achievements in academic librarianship

Contributed by:
Stephanie Sherrod
ACRL Program Coordinator
Chicago, Illinois, USA
<[email protected]>

For more than three quarters of a century, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has been committed to celebrating the achievements of deserving academic and research librarians through the presentation of awards, grants, and fellowships. Every year ACRL extends recognition and honor to the winners of its awards. With almost $30,000 donated by generous corporate sponsors annually, ACRL has—and will continue to—nominate, select, and honor the very best in academic librarianship.

Recognize a colleague's achievements: Nominate
ACRL members are an integral part of our successful awards program. Please consider those who have influenced your thinking and your growth as an academic librarian. We urge you to nominate colleagues whose work you admire, and whose contributions merit recognition by the profession. Your nominations will insure that the pool of candidates for each award remains both competitive and distinguished.

Informational flyers, complete with submission procedures, past winners, criteria, and contact information, are available through the ACRL office. Flyers can also be found by visiting the ACRL web site at <http://www.ala.org/acrl/award2.html>. December 6, 2002, is the deadline for most of the awards to be presented in 2003. A brief description of each award is listed below.

Achievement and Distinguished Service Awards

• Excellence in Academic Libraries Award (sponsored by Blackwell's Book Services): $3,000 cash award for three awards; one in each type-of-library. Recognizes academic libraries that are outstanding in furthering the educational missions of their institutions.

• Academic or Research Librarian of the Year Award (sponsored by Yankee Book Peddler): $3,000 cash award. Recognizes an outstanding member of the academic or research library profession.

• Hugh C. Atkinson Memorial Award (sponsored by ACRL, ALCTS, LAMA, LITA): $2,000 cash award. Recognizes outstanding achievements (including risk-taking) in the areas of library automation, management, or development and research.

• Marta Lange/CQ Award (sponsored by Congressional Quarterly, Inc.): $1,000 cash award. Recognizes a librarian who has made distinguished contributions to bibliography and information service in law or political science.

• Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award (sponsored by Elsevier Science, Ltd.): $1,000 cash award. Recognizes an individual librarian for significant contributions to the advancement of instruction in a college or research library environment.

• Instruction Section Innovation in Instruction Award (sponsored by Congressional Information Service): $3,000 cash award for librarians who have implemented innovative approaches to information literacy at their respective institutions or in their communities.

• Community College Learning Resources Leadership/Library Achievement Awards (sponsored by EBSCO Subscription Services): $500 cash for each of two awards recognizing outstanding achievement in library programs or leadership.

• Distinguished Education and Behavioral Sciences Librarian Award : Citation. Honors outstanding contributions to education and behavioral sciences librarianship through accomplishments and service to the profession.

• Women's Studies Section Awards for Achievement (sponsored by Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. and Routledge): $1,000 cash for each of two awards recognizing career or significant achievements in the area of women's studies librarianship.

Research Awards/Grants

• Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (sponsored by Institute for Scientific Information): $1,500 cash to assist doctoral students in the field with their dissertation research.

• Samuel Lazerow Fellowship (sponsored by Institute for Scientific Information): $1,000 cash for travel and writing in the fields of acquisition or technical services.

• Coutts Nijhoff West European Specialist Study Grant (sponsored by Coutts Nijhoff International): Grant that supports research pertaining to Western European studies, librarianship, or the book trade.

Publications

• Katherine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab Exhibition Catalogue Awards. (sponsored by Katherine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab, American Book Prices Current): Recognizes outstanding catalogues published by American or Canadian institutions in conjunction with library exhibitions.

• K. G. Saur Award for Best Article in College & Research Libraries (sponsored by R. R. Bowker/K. G. Saur): $500 cash award for the most outstanding article published in C & RL during the preceding volume year.

• Instruction Section Publication of the Year Award. Recognizes an outstanding publication related to instruction in a library environment published in the last two years.

• The Oberly Award. This biennial award is given in odd-numbered years for the best English-language bibliography in the field of agriculture or a related science.

Contact ACRL for details
If you would like more information about the ACRL 2003 Awards Program, visit our web page at < http://www.ala.org/acrl.award2.html> or contact ACRL Program Coordinator Stephanie Sherrod, at 1-800-545-2433 ext.2515, email: <[email protected]>. We welcome your nominations and look forward to celebrating achievements in academic librarianship in 2003.

In the News

Recent Press Releases and Announcements

Free Web-Access to NISO Standards to Continue

"Washington, DC, October 7, 2002 - NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, will continue to make its national standards available as free downloadable pdf files from the NISO website. This decision was reaffirmed unanimously by the NISO Board of Directors meeting on September 19, 2002."

"NISO has been offering all of its American National Standards as free downloads since 2000. Over 100,000 NISO standards were downloaded in the first eight months of 2002."

"'NISO is the only nationally accredited standards developer in the U.S. that makes its standards freely available,' noted Beverly P. Lynch, Chair of the NISO Board of Directors. 'We strongly believe that by making NISO standards publicly accessible NISO is promoting implementation and demonstrating that NISO standards ultimately are owned by the diverse community that develops and uses them.'"

For more information, contact NISO Headquarters at <[email protected]>.

Library Community Hails Reaffirmation of Fair Use in DMCRA

October 3, 2002: "The Association of Research Libraries, the American Association of Law Libraries, the American Library Association, the Medical Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association are extremely pleased to endorse the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act of 2002 (DMCRA). In recent years, we have witnessed an erosion of the historic and crucial balance in copyright law among users, creators, and owners. This timely legislation will protect the interests of the public by restoring that balance."

"Five years ago, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. By introducing the DMCRA, Congressmen Rick Boucher (D-VA) and John Doolittle (R-CA) recognize that it is now time for Congress to recalibrate the DCMA to safeguard the interests of the public. The DMCRA reaffirms fair use in a networked environment. It resolves key concerns regarding hardware and software that permit significant non-infringing uses, and it allows researchers to engage in the scientific research of technological protection measures. The DMCRA is essential to the future conduct of research and education in the digital age."

"The library community applauds the efforts of Congressman Boucher for his long-standing leadership on copyright and intellectual property issues. Representative Boucher has been an outstanding champion of the library, school, and higher education communities. We look forward to working with Congressman Boucher, Congressman Doolittle and other members of Congress to move this important legislation forward. We urge members of Congress to support the DMCRA as essential to promoting research and education in a digital environment."

For more information, see the full press release at <http://www.arl.org/arl/pr/dmcra.html>.

IMLS Announces Library Grants

Institute of Museum and Library Services Gives $1.5 Million to 12 Native American Libraries for Innovative Uses of Technology: "Washington, DC - The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Federal agency that supports the nation's museums and libraries, awarded $1,569,000 in competitive grants today to 12 Native American libraries across the nation. 'Native American libraries are much more than book repositories,' said Dr. Robert S. Martin, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. 'They contain cultural and historical artifacts and help preserve Native American traditions. They also provide much needed access to technology. The grants the Institute makes today will help Native American libraries safeguard their tribe's customs and connect their communities with the world.'"

For more information, see <http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/092402-1.htm>.

Libraries Translate Digital Information into Knowledge You Can Use: Washington, DC - "The federal government gave $7,179,673 in grants today to 27 leading university libraries and research institutions across the country for research, model demonstrations, and preservation and digitization of their resources. The libraries will match the amount with an additional $7,131,502. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the federal agency that supports the nation's libraries and museums awarded the grants. The awards are made through the Institute's prestigious National Leadership Grant for Libraries under two categories of funding Research and Demonstration and Preservation or Digitization. Ninety-one libraries requesting over $24.7 million competed for the grants."

For more information, see <http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/092402-6.htm>.

Museums and Libraries Forge Links: "Washington, DC - The federal government awarded $2,764,022 for 11 partnerships between libraries and museums that will enhance their collections and service to the public. Today the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the federal agency that supports the nation's museums and libraries, announced this year's recipients of its prestigious National Leadership Grants for Library-Museum Collaborations. The recipients will match the grant awards with an additional $2,519,573."

For more information, see <http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/092402-3.htm>.

TSO (The Stationery Office) appointed as Digital Object Identifier Registration Agency

"Washington - Geneva, September 13, 2002. The International DOI Foundation has announced the appointment of TSO (The Stationery Office) as a DOI Registration Agency."

"TSO has long operated as a de facto bibliographer for the UK Government in the printed word -- issuing 13,000 ISBNs per annum and maintaining inventory and metadata describing over a quarter of a million official documents and reports, available through its online bookstore and traditional delivery infrastructure."

"The use of persistent identifiers is integral and implicit in computer network systems and good information practice discipline. With the introduction of DOIs, fundamental information management problems in the UK official sector can now be overcome, enabling all identifier types to be linked and metadata to be systematically organised across distributed digital environments."

"The UK official sector comprises over 70,000 public bodies and has a driving need to create interoperability across its networks as well as with the private sector and the citizen. The use of DOIs will vastly simplify the software development task of suppliers and public sector IT staff. It will also help to solve the conundrum faced by information managers in Government of how to manage information across distributed networks and how to harvest and update metadata. The use of DOIs ensures integration with international standards and enables UK information assets to be networked globally and interoperably."

For more information, see the full press release at <http://www.doi.org/news/TSO.html>.

National Library of the Netherlands and OCLC establish digital preservation center for European libraries, embark on 400,000-record conversion project

"DUBLIN, Ohio, Sept. 6, 2002�The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (the National Library of the Netherlands), OCLC and OCLC PICA are working together to provide preservation, digitization and retrospective conversion services that will increase access to valuable European library materials."

"OCLC and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek will operate Strata Preservation N.V., a center to digitize and preserve the rich history recorded in centuries-old European collections. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, which already operates a microfilming service in The Hague, will work with OCLC Digital & Preservation Resources to digitize, microfilm and preserve library materials in Europe."

For more information, see the full press release at <http://www.oclc.org/oclc/press/20020906.shtm>.

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DOI: 10.1045/october2002-inbrief