Technically Speaking

By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org

Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.

Column for April 2001

Heads Up for a New Format

In late February NISO published a draft standard titled “File Specification for the Digital Talking Book” and asked for comments through March 20. The standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.86, is expected to be finalized sometime in May.

With a recognized standard in place, we can expect a riot of digital talking books to blossom forth in library and consumer markets during the next few years. Nevertheless, the days of libraries collecting soon-to-be-obsolete physical formats are almost past. Soon our only worry will be obsolete arrangements of electrons. Let’s hope that re-formatting electronic files will be faster and cheaper than re-collecting the same content in new types of tapes and disks.

Preservation by Redundancy

And speaking of preservation, an inspiring idea seems to cut the Gordian Knot of digital content preservation via a simple and dramatic plan: Multiply important content all over the Web. Sun Microsystems and the Stanford University Libraries have teamed up to develop an online archiving program for academic content published on the Internet. Called LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe), it is an open-source, distributed system using Java and Linux technologies, designed to run on PCs. It does not need to be centrally administered.

Started in May 2000 and initially funded by the National Science Foundation and Sun Microsystems, the project recently received continuing funding from the Mellon Foundation. The money will enable expansion of the project from its test-bed sites—including Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Tennessee, and the Los Alamos National Library—to a second tier of libraries beginning this month. The initial project focus of preserving science journal articles published on the Web is expected to broaden soon.

Sending and Retrieving the News

Reuters has used NewsML—the XML-based standard encapsulating related text, graphics, and sound content into a single package—to send news feeds over the Web since May 2000. In 1999 Reuters donated NewsML to the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) for use as a public industry standard to encourage its adoption by customers. The IPTC ratified NewsML version 1.0 in October 2000, and in February Seybold Publications predicted quick expansion of its use.

Just what IPTC finds valuable about NewsML is evident in this excerpt from a review on its Web site: “NewsML enables publishers to provide the same text in different languages; a video clip in different formats; or different resolutions of the same photograph. [Its] rich metadata concept can help with things like revision levels that make it easy to track the evolution of a NewsItem over time, status details (publishable, embargoed, etc.) and administrative details, such as acknowledgments or copyright . . . . [It] has default metadata vocabularies to ease implementations but it does not dictate which metadata vocabulary is used . . . Multiple vocabularies can be utilized within the same NewsItem.”

Contracts and Agreements

• Innovative Interfaces—with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, for Millennium library automation software and the INN-Reach resource-sharing system for the 2,500 school, public, academic, and special libraries that are members of the Access Pennsylvania Database Project.
• ABC-CLIO—with the California State University Library Consortium on behalf of its 23 California State Campuses, to access the company’s growing library of e-books.
• Endeavor Information Systems—with the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, for a Voyager system for its 97 university and college libraries.
• Ex Libris (USA)—with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for an ALEPH 500 for the MIT libraries.
• Follett Software Company—with the Coquitlam, Delta, and Richmond districts in British Columbia, Canada, for installation of Circulation Plus and Catalog Plus for Windows in all of the schools.
• The Gale Group—with the State of Connecticut, for access to 10 Gale databases as part of the state’s Digital Library initiative.

Acquisitions and Alliances

• Ingenta purchased CatchWord for $16 million, adding CatchWord’s online conversion, hosting, and distribution services for journal publishers to its extensive suite of online services for publishers and researchers.
• The Research Libraries Group and VTLS agreed the latter will distribute RLG’s ILL Manager bundled with VTLS’s Virtua integrated library systems, as well as market it as a stand-alone application.

Supplier Note

Cambridge Scientific Abstracts announced its ability to link citations from its Internet Database Service (IDS) to the full text of articles in OCLC’s Electronic Collections Online service, bringing the number of full-text services to which IDS can link to 10.

Correction—Technically Speaking reported that a Swiss Consortium, SBT, had replaced VTLS’s Virtua with Ex Libris’ ALEPH 500. In fact, the consortium had not installed a Virtua system.