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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 February 2003

Making a Federal Case out of Access

“For science to rapidly advance at the frontier, it must be open. And shared knowledge is the enabler of scientific progress.” These words were spoken on October 12, 1999, by then-Secretary of Energy William Richardson on the occasion of the debut of PubScience, an initiative of the federal government’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information. PubScience offered one-stop Web access to articles published by peer-reviewed scientific and technical journals.

After President Bush took office in 2001, the relatively few companies that earn their revenues as collectors at the citation-information tollbooths gained more political clout than those relatively more numerous organizations that profit from the free flow of citation information. As a result, in the fall of 2002 PubScience was discontinued—three years after it began.

But even as the prevailing political winds were buffeting one government information access initiative, another one was conceived by the efforts of senior information managers in 10 federal agencies. In April 2001, a workshop titled “Strengthening the Public Information Infrastructure for Science“was developed jointly by the Center for Information Policy at the University of Maryland at College Park and the CENDI group.

CENDI (Commerce; Energy; EPA; NASA; National Libraries of Agriculture, Education, and Medicine; Defense; and Interior) is a working group of information managers who, on their own initiative, are trying to increase the public’s access to science-related information created by the federal government. The 60 workshop participants endorsed the concept of an interagency science portal or gateway whereby the participating agencies would collectively serve the “science-attentive” public. The effort to launch Science.gov was born.

In December 2002, after eight months of testing, the Science.gov Alliance officially launched its first product: a portal that supports drilling down through a subject guide to science-related Web pages of participating agencies, as well as keyword broadcast searching against multiple government-sponsored scientific databases and Web pages.

Each participating agency has a content manager who selects the sites and databases to be included in Science.gov. The agencies collectively decide on the subject taxonomy used to browse the Science.gov subject guide. In addition, all agency-supplied descriptive metadata for the included sites is submitted to the National Technical Information Service, which normalizes it. There is another search engine for the full text of the included sites and databases. Called Explorit, it is supplied by Deep Web Technologies, a company founded in 2002 by Abe Lederman, who developed Explorit in 1994 while working as a consultant to Los Alamos National Laboratory.

It’s nice to know that whichever way the political winds might blow, there are many librarians and other information managers on the federal level working hard to make government information accessible to the general public.

RFP Writer’s Guide

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has published a guide to library system standards for writing requests for proposal. Written by Cynthia Hodgson, The RFP Writer’s Guide to Standards for Library Systems is available in PDF format for viewing or printing.

The guide identifies and discusses bibliographic formats, record structure, character sets, exchange media, serials identifiers, binding, circulation protocols, barcodes, interlibrary loan, electronic documents, Electronic Data Interchange, information retrieval, metadata, and Web access. Sample language is provided and compliance-assessment issues are discussed for each standard dealt with in the document.

Divine/Faxon up in the Air

An unsettling three years for the company formerly known as Faxon seem to be ending in its dissolution. In September 1999, the company was bought by RoweCom. Then in November 2001, a company called Divine, which was formed in 1999 by a series of information-industry acquisitions, bought RoweCom and renamed it Divine Library Services. But Faxon/RoweCom’s cash-flow problems were not solved by Divine’s intervention. In December 2002, Divine decided to soak up the red ink by attempting to sell off the subscription-management operations of its subsidiary.

Contracts and Agreements

Ex Libris—with the Online Dakota Information Network, a consortium of 54 academic, government, public, school, and special libraries throughout North Dakota; with the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Sacramento, and San Francisco, California; and with the National Institute for Working Life, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden; all for Aleph 500 systems and MetaLib/SFX. Systems being replaced are MnSCU/PALS, Innovative Interfaces INNOPAC, and TINLIB respectively. The University of Iowa, a current Aleph 500 and MetaLib/SFX customer, has selected the DigiTool asset-management product.

Innovative Interfaces—with Azusa (Calif.) Pacific University; Chatham College in Pittsburgh; Simpson College in Redding, California; and Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, Tennessee; all for Millennium systems. Systems being replaced are Geac Advanced, Gaylord Galaxy, CDMS/Datatel, and Sirsi DRA Classic respectively.

Epixtech—with the SAS Institute, a software company headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, for a Horizon system in the corporate library, to replace the company’s homegrown Catalyst system. The following Epixtech Dynix customers are upgrading to Horizon: Broome County Public Library in Binghamton, New York; the Carroll Library Partnership in Westminster, Maryland; the Hillsborough County Public Library Cooperative and the Tampa Bay Library Consortium, both in Tampa, Florida; the Pasadena (Tex.) Independent School District; and the Trumbull (Conn.) Library System.

TLC—with the 37 schools of the Irving (Tex.) Independent School District; the seven locations of the Livingston (La.) Parish Library; and the Memorial Library of Nazareth (Pa.) and Vicinity, all for Library.Solution systems and other software. Systems being replaced are Winnebago, Epixtech Dynix Scholar, and Gaylord Galaxy respectively. The following libraries are being newly automated with Library.Solution: Carroll County Public Library in Carrollton, Kentucky; Aurora (Ind.) Public Library District; Gallatin County Public Library in Warsaw, Kentucky; Owen County Public Library in Owenton, Kentucky; and the Vance Air Force Base Library near Enid, Oklahoma.

Sirsi—with the Cobb County Public Library System, headquartered in Marietta, Georgia, for a Unicorn system for the library’s 17 locations, to replace the library’s Sirsi DRA system; and with the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) in Oklahoma City, for the Unicorn system and the Hyperion Digital Media Archive.

Endeavor Information Systems—with the University of Auckland in New Zealand, an existing Voyager site, for ENCompass.

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