By David DormanAmerican Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.
Column for October 1999
Last month’s installment of the “Marking Progress” series summarized how a lack of a common computing environment led to the development of the MARC encoding and communications standard for bibliographic records. Just as the building of individual roads in North America eventually led to their almost universal connection and to standards in such areas as construction, surfacing, width, and signage, individual computer systems are evolving into networks with standard communication and encoding protocols. Beginning with ARPANET in the 1960s, the now-ubiquitous network of networks, the Internet, gradually began connecting more and more computers; by the early 1990s that gradual progress had exploded into the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web.
The early Internet protocols, telnet, e-mail, and ftp, were essentially communication protocols enabling users to access and transport data from one computer to another via electronic connections. But the data that could be viewed using these protocols was limited to simple text. Then in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee developed an SGML document-type definition he called HTML, or HyperText Markup Language; a corresponding communications protocol for transporting HTML files across the Internet called HTTP, or HyperText Transport Protocol; and a file-linking protocol called URL, or Universal Resource Locator. Together, these three protocols allow users to create complex documents that any other computer can display, as long as it is connected to the Internet and makes use of a Web server and a browser.
Just as a stretch of road gains its value from being compatible with and connected to all other stretches of road, so too does a computer gain from being part of a single environment. The urge to access and communicate information has been and will continue to be the primary motivating factor in computer development. The advent of the Web was a watershed because it gave computer users a sense of just how useful a common computer environment for text, sound, and visual representation can be.
Berners-Lee is now at MIT heading up the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which continues to extend the functionality of his two original protocols. As great a breakthrough as HTML was, computer users still create information in proprietary formats and encoding structures because HTML code was designed primarily as a presentation format—and a fairly limited one at that. Realizing HTML’s limitations, the W3C began developing a new family of SGML subsets that are designed to work well with HTTP. The most important one, called the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), is being embraced by the entire computer industry. XML and its family of similar encoding standards will soon replace all proprietary word processors and all previous encoding protocols, including MARC. Next month I’ll discuss the capabilities of XML and why it’s inevitable that it will replace MARC as an encoding standard for cataloging records.
If subscribing to an information source that provides access to periodical literature can be viewed as a form of marriage (economic and polyandrous), then the license the two parties work out can be likened to a prenuptial agreement. Well, the queen bees of subscription agents—Blackwell, Dawson, EBSCO, Harrassowitz, and Swets—have decided to make it more convenient for libraries to tie the knot by developing a set of standard licenses for various contractual situations (AL, Sept., p. 28). Four model licenses have been developed, covering single academic institutions, academic consortia, public libraries, and corporate and other special libraries.
The project’s official Web site offers background: “The starting point was the UK’s PA/JISC model license, jointly developed by publishers and librarians from the Publishers Association and the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils. It was a vital source of format, concepts, and model provisions. The U.S. Principles for Licensing Electronic Resources from the American Library Association et al., and the Statements of Current Perspectives from the International Coalition of Library Consortia were both important sources of ideas, as were the Liblicense Web site and many publishers’ individual licenses.”
The primary purpose of the licenses is to identify and put in a standard format all the concerns and issues that come up in a typical licensing negotiation. The model licenses do not try to prescribe the outcome of such negotiations. The licenses, which are in the public domain, can be viewed and purloined at www.licensingmodels.com. The actual writing and the maintenance of the Web site are the work of John Cox Associates of the United Kingdom, whose office resides at the very British address of The Pippins, Lees Close, Whittlebury, Towcester NN12 8XF.
I asked Cindy Clemnon, the contract coordinator of the Center for Library Initiatives of CIC (Committee on Institutional Cooperation—a cooperative organization of a dozen large Midwestern universities), to comment on this effort. She had this to say:
“It is heartening to see the publishing community beginning to acknowledge, in a systematic way, that the types of licenses used previously were not a good fit for academic library consortia. . . . Hopefully, acknowledging that there are standards for licensing agreement language will allow both the library and the publishing communities to focus our energies in other areas, such as the creation of new archival solutions for electronic products.”