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Technically Speaking
Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois. Column for April 2000 XHTMLQuote of the Month“When someone imposes involuntary filters on someone else, that is censorship. If a library is supposed to provide a computer that gives citizens access to the Internet, but it prevents access to certain types of material such as pornography, then the library is deciding for the citizenry what they should be able to read. Here the library is installing itself as a central authority that knows better than the reader.” —From Weaving the Web, by Tim Berners-Lee Heads Up—It’s Cleanup Time!This month’s Heads Up Alert concerns the new Web standard approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in late January. XHTML 1.0 has replaced HTML 4.0 as the Web’s most current hypertext markup language standard. In the long run XHTML will serve as a transition to a semantic Web that will greatly facilitate our ability to organize and retrieve electronic resources. In the short run it means that current HTML code will have to be “cleaned up” if it is to remain compatible with future Web markup standards that will be based on XML, the extensible markup language. XHTML is very close to HTML, but it is “cleaner and tighter.” So start cleaning up your HTML code now. To find out how, visit the SunWorld Web site and learn more about preparing for the new Web. The End of MARC?“We need to replace MARC as soon as possible with an equally rich, but unencumbered format that facilitates, rather than impedes, our ability to experiment.” Thus spoke Dick R. Miller, head of technical services and systems librarian at Stanford University’s Lane Medical Library, at the Medical Library Association Meeting last May in Chicago. That unencumbered format to which he was referring is, of course, XML. This past winter, to facilitate such experimentation, the Lane Medical Library released XMLMARC version 1.0, MARC to XML conversion software for free, noncommercial use. XMLMARC is a Java client/server program that, according to Miller, “converts MARC to XML based on flexible maps and simplified, yet detailed DTDs for bibliographic and authorities formats.” The software can be downloaded. The $64,000 question is: Will ALA or another professional group lead a standards effort to adapt the rules of AACR2 cataloging to XML so that the profession can settle on a single successor to MARC? Or will we backslide into an environment in which there will be multiple ways to encode AACR2 bibliographic data on the Web? Getting Hyper over LinksOne reason why the Web is the medium of choice for information seekers and providers is because of the ease of hyperlinking resources. Before the Web, the best substitute for an actual link was a citation or a reference. This year all the major periodical index and abstract (I&A) and full-text database providers are rushing to fulfill the promise of the Web by creating links where in the past there have only been citations and references. The announcements are flying so thick and fast it is hard to keep track of who is doing what and how they are doing it. RoweCom Information Quest (IQ) and Dialog have inked an agreement to link I&A records in IQ to full text in Dialog. Dialog and CatchWord have formed a partnership to link Dialog I&A records with full text held on CatchWord. CatchWord and Ovid got together to do the same thing. Even the government got into the act: The Department of Energy’s PubSCIENCE Web site can search hundreds of scientific and technical journals simultaneously and link to the publisher sites for full text. And the ILS vendors are getting evangelical about linking as well: Ex Libris announced that it has acquired the sole rights to the SFX Reference Linking Software Solution, an application developed at the University of Ghent in Belgium that dynamically links electronic resources. Contracts and Agreements
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By David Dorman