Universal Dataflow and Telecommunications

Archive - Historical Material

Issue #23
Fall/Winter 1993

IFLA Secretary General Visits UDT Core Programme Office

Mr. Voogt is the first IFLA Secretary General to visit the UDT Core Programme office. The day was spent in meetings with Programme Director Leigh Swain and other Programme staff members. Discussions included a review of the Core Programme operations, UDT publications, the Programme's 1994 Work Plan, and UDT participation in the 1994 IFLA Conference in Cuba. Also reviewed was a proposal prepared by the UDT Core Programme which outlines the various applications and services available over the Internet and how they can be used by IFLA HQ to enhance communications and information exchange among its members.

National Librarian Marianne Scott hosted a dinner for Mr. Voogt and National Library staff members involved in IFLA activities on Saturday, July 24. Another dinner, this one co- hosted by Parliamentary Librarian Erik Spicer, was held on Monday, July 26 to provide Mr. Voogt with an opportunity to meet officials of other organizations in the National Capital Region who are interested in IFLA activities. Some of the organizations represented were the National Archives of Canada, the Canadian Library Association (CLA), the Association pour l'avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation (ASTED), the Canadian Commission for Unesco, the International Development Research Centre (IRDC), and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI).

Internet Workshop Planned for Havana, Cuba 1994

Watch future issues of the UDT Newsletter for more information!

TULIP, the University Licensing Project

Introduction

TULIP was born in March 1991. University systems and library leaders such as Bill Arms and Tom Michalak of Carnegie Mellon University, Stuart Lynn of Cornell University, Peter Lyman of the University of Southern California and Clifford Lynch of the University of California wanted to find a way to accelerate the distribution in electronic form of traditional journal information information presently found only in print. Elsevier was looking at the same question from the publisher's side.

During a Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) workshop in early March 1991, and a CNI Task Force meeting later that month, several things came together. At the Task Force meeting, it was agreed that if ten or fifteen universities would commit to the same basic experiment, then a publisher could justify investing in the creation of a major testbed. Bill Arms and Stuart Lynn outlined a project and organized a group of fifteen universities on the spot and TULIP, as it came to be known, was planted.

TULIP's Objectives

TULIP is a cooperative research project testing systems for networked delivery and use of journals. The participants set three objectives at the outset:

1. Technical

To determine the technical feasibility of networked distribution to and across institutions with varying levels of sophistication in their technical infrastructure. "Networked distribution" means sending the information both across the national Internet and over campus networks to the desktops of students and faculty. Elsevier will deliver the journal information to participating universities in standard formats. The universities will incorporate the information in local prototype or operational systems. A wide variety of delivery alternatives, search and retrieval systems and print-on-demand options will be compared.

2. Organizational and Economic

To understand, through the implementation of prototypes, alternative costing, pricing, subscription and market models that may be viable in electronic distribution scenarios; comparing such models with existing print-then-distribute models; and understanding the role of campus organizational units under such scenarios. The overall goal is to reduce the unit cost of information delivery and retrieval. Viable means economically and functionally acceptable to all parties.

3. User Behaviour

To study reader usage patterns under different distribution (technical, organizational and economic) situations. Improvement in the functionality of the information, whether as to article structure or retrieval tools, will also be considered. Certain data will be collected uniformly at all sites for analysis in the aggregate and for comparison among different systems.

Outline of Implementation

Elsevier is providing electronic files for 42 Elsevier and Pergamon journals in materials science and engineering. The files consist of:

• TIFF bit-mapped page images (cover-to-cover, including tables of contents), scanned from the printed page at 300 dpi (600 dpi for certain applications), Group IV fax compression;
• edited and structured ASCII heads for each editorial item, including bibliographic citation and article abstract;
• unedited ICR-generated ASCII full text (for searching, not display).

Elsevier will create the files and ship them to Engineering Information (Ei), which maintains the archive and will act as the Internet host. Ei will redistribute or otherwise provide access over the Internet to the updates according to individual university profiles. Each university will receive without charge during the project the electronic full-text (bit-mapped and ASCII) for those journals to which they subscribe in paper. They will also receive the bibliographic information for all 42 journals and will have on-demand access on a pay-per-use model to those titles to which they do not subscribe. Most universities will mount the subscribed-to full- text files locally on their own file servers. Some will retrieve all articles over the network on- demand from Ei. Both models are important to test for efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

At present, the participating universities are in an advanced stage of implementation or have completed the implementations of the program on their campuses. These implementations reflect the hoped-for diversity and include single-sites, multiple campuses within one institution (where the files will be mounted on one server for all), a cooperative arrangement between two institutions and the possibility of testing regional network distribution to a much larger group of schools.

Access tools and distribution systems on campus will also include a wide range of alternatives, from high resolution images sent directly to desktop workstations to DocuTech print-on-demand of individual articles and of locally sold subscriptions. The goal is to provide as much local autonomy as possible, subject to standard terms and conditions which are outlined in licenses signed with each site.

Participating Universities

Carnegie Mellon University,
Cornell University,
Georgia Institute of Technology,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
University of California (all campuses),
University of Michigan,
University of Tennessee,
University of Washington,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute, State University will be the initial participants.

There are also official observers (California State University, Harvard University, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, Stanford University and the University of Southern California) and they have an option to join when ready. Decisions on the extension of the project to other universities in the U.S., to European or Pacific Region institutions or to corporations will be considered at the end of 1993. The program is planned to run through 1995.

Materials Science: Why?

The participating universities have common strengths in the physical and engineering sciences. In looking within these disciplines for a target area, we wanted a field in which the researchers were comfortable with computer applications and had a higher than average installed base of workstations. An obvious choice might have been computer science itself, but we felt these users would be so atypical in their computer facility as to make it hard to generalize results to other disciplines. Materials science provided a field in which there was both a sufficiently large corpus of frequently cited material within one publishing company and interested faculties.

Contacts for further information:

North American Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Project (NAILDD) Underway

In developing the NAILDD project, ARL is soliciting participation not just from the library community but also from the vendors of automated library systems and document delivery service providers as they are vital to interlibrary loan and document delivery services to North American libraries. Over 60 vendors were invited to attend an ARL Vendor Forum held in conjunction with the June 1993 ALA meeting in New Orleans. The enthusiastic attendance at the Vendor Forum led to the formation the ARL North American Interlibrary Loan Document Delivery Developers/Implementors Group (DIG), which includes representatives from library networks/utilities, automated system vendors, online information providers and standards groups.

The DIG's objective is to develop detailed descriptions of the Accounting and Management Systems that are required for interlending and document delivery in North America and to determine the necessary standards. An equally important objective is to determine the linkages that will permit communication between the various information providers and their users. Current national and international standards such as the ISO ILL protocol (ISO 10160/61) and the Z39.50/Search and Retrieve (ISO 10162/10163) standard for information retrieval will be reviewed, and, if necessary, new standards or extensions to current standards will be developed and submitted to the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for ballot.

The group's first meeting was held on August 17, 1993 in Washington, D.C. Three working groups, the Management System Working Group, the Financial/Accounting System Working Group, and the Linkages/Standards Working Group, were established, and have begun their work which is scheduled for completion in February 1994.

Latin American Network Information Center (UT-LANIC)

With the extension of the Internet to the major Latin American countries, users of the Internet, BITNET and UUCP can use UT-LANIC to locate and connect to databases and information services in the public domain. Users will be able to access quick descriptions and evaluations of approximately 100 databases and archives of information, and connect automatically to the database of their choice.

Eventually, UT-LANIC will provide users with an index of both free and commercial databases and information services by title and subject, Spanish-language descriptions of the databases, and information on how to access these resources. UT-LANIC may also be used to house databases of Latin American information and make it available to Internet users worldwide.

The Institute of Latin American Studies is providing funding for the implementation of the service, which will be offered free of charge to Latin American users. To date, UT-LANIC has been established on a Gopher server at the University of Texas.

Contact:

telnet lanic.utexas.edi
login: lanic
Once connected, a series of menus guides users through UT- LANIC services.

For further information on the UT-LANIC system, contact:

Tools for Accessing Internet Resources: A Brief Introduction for Libraries

The following paper is an introduction to software tools that make resources on the Internet more accessible. It is a condensed version of a paper prepared by Edward J.Valauskas as a contribution to the Guest Lecture Series entitled "IFLA and Electronic Communications". It was presented at the 1993 IFLA Conference in Barcelona, Spain. We thank Mr. Valauskas for permission to condense his paper for our readers. The full text of Mr. Valauskas' paper and the other papers from the session will be published in an upcoming issue of IFLA Journal.

Introduction

The Internet connects thousands of computers and computer networks worldwide. It provides a relatively easy way to communicate and exchange information. However, as the Internet is continually increasing in both size and complexity, it is also becoming more difficult to use the Internet's resources. As a result, a number of software tools have been developed to help users to navigate the Internet and its vast store of information.

Librarians and information professionals use the Internet for various reasons. As a reference tool, the Internet offers a wealth of resources, up-to-date, accurate, and unavailable in any bound volume. The Internet gives direct access to specialists in hundreds of disciplines, who are quite willing to help with both the most mundane and the most difficult problems faced by librarians and their patrons. As a communications device, the Internet allows librarians to send messages and documents to each other without being constrained by mail, telegraph, or fax.

Tools for accessing the resources on the Internet like Gopher, Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), the World-Wide Web (WWW), and the National Center for Supercomputer Applications' Mosaic, help to place the wide variety of Internet resources at your fingertips.

The following provides a brief description of each tool. Other Internet resources such as discussion lists, online library catalogues, and electronic journals are also described.

Internet Access Tools

1. Gopher

Gopher is a computerized agent working over the Internet to bring all sorts of useful facts to the user's desktop. It was started at the University of Minnesota as a way to deliver information online. The inventors of Gopher wanted everyday users to be able to find text files and display them on their desktop computers, without having to know a lot about the entire process of connecting and disconnecting to other computers. Gopher is wildly successful because it has stuck to its original philosophy of ease of access. The Gopher universe includes over 1 100 servers around the world, each with a collection of menus and documents. Gopher handles all of the network details, so a user can go from the Library of Congress catalogue to an online thesaurus to a weather report with a few clicks of a button.

Gopher divides the digital world into clients and servers. A client may be any sort of computer, a PC, a Macintosh, a Next workstation, or a UNIX box. Gopher's client software runs on your desktop computer. Local Area Networks (LANs) and the Internet connect desktop computers with Gopher servers. Servers are computers that store documents in menus and work to locate menus and documents on other servers. The client software determines how a file will look on the screen. Electronic bookmarks can be created to help users keep their place in menus or documents; documents can be saved and printed as required.

Gopher works in a world of files and menus. When a user connects to a Gopher server, a set of messages tells the server what the user wants to view. For example, the user may see a menu with several submenus. The server reads the message from the user's computer, sends the information about the menu and submenus, and disconnects. The user can open up a menu and see a document of interest. To scan the document, the user re-opens the connection to have the document read or printed. At present, these documents are usually simple text files without special components, so they are easy to maintain and retrieve. The next version, the Gopher + software, will handle other formats. Gopher is a tool for browsers, and it can work in the background while your computer does other work. Gopher servers around the world handle millions of questions a week thanks to this simple design.

There is a wide variety of Gopher documents, and there are descriptions for each kind of document. These descriptions point to information that might be stored on the hard disk of a machine right around the corner, or a machine halfway around the world. Gopher might point to an online library catalogue located across the city or on a different continent. Gopher might be used to access a database of telephone numbers or to download files archived in a variety of formats.

Finding sources like these in Gopher can be very difficult because of its menu and submenu structure. Researchers in Nevada created "Veronica" to address this problem. Veronica stands for Very Easy Rodent Online Network Information by Computer Access. Veronica is a keyword index to all the menu titles, submenu titles, and document titles in Gopher; it is updated monthly. It can be searched via a Gopher menu selection.

Besides reference works, Gopher also offers access to electronic texts, thus providing digital access to the fiction of various authors, such as the complete works of Lewis Carroll. For example, in the Electronic Books submenu of the University of Minnesota Internet Gopher, there are books by Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, and Willa Cather.

2. WAIS

WAIS, or Wide Area Information Servers, allows users to search indexed text on a number of servers. WAIS servers are identified by using a directory. There are some 340 WAIS servers providing access to some 200 databases, including the catalogue of the Columbia University Law School Library, collections of news articles, and postings from discussion lists on the Internet. One or two databases are added to WAIS each day from around the world; there are servers in at least eight countries, and users in over 25 different countries.

With WAIS, one uses a computer to search in natural language among all of the servers and indexed documents. The computer returns a list that sets out the relevancy of each hit in comparison to the user's search terms. The relevancy is based on the difference between the keywords given by the user and the frequency of their appearance in an indexed document. The search query can be repeated to different servers. News, science, and literature are the strengths of WAIS. Indexed files may fill only ten megabytes on a personal computer or include hundreds of megabytes and reside on a parallel supercomputer. WAIS is less effective with very specific questions, or with questions on topics not yet covered by some server. WAIS is different from Gopher in that it connects the user directly with indexed documents, and in that its directory of servers gives you some idea of the kind of resources available to you in advance of a search. 1,2

3. WWW

World-Wide Web, also known as WWW or W3, combines information retrieval and hypertext on the screen. In the Web, documents have links. On a computer with a graphical interface, a hypertext link is represented by boldfaced text or an icon. On a computer with line commands, the link is represented by a number in the text; this number enables the user to view another document. World-Wide Web was originally the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), developed in Geneva as a way to improve access to online telephone directories, documentation, preprints, news, and announcements. World-Wide Web consists of three parts: hypertext servers, client programs that use graphics, and information gateways. Servers provide a means to reach real hypertext documents, index files that point to other services, and virtual documents that are files created in response to a particular question. World-Wide Web is a powerful tool to search files that are frequently updated, and to create links to documents and files no matter where they are stored on the Internet. Of the kinds of tools available for use with the Internet, the World-Wide Web is one of the most sophisticated because of its ability to manage megadatabases, such as files of preprints in high- energy physics. Some 12 000 preprints in particle physics appear each year, and the Web is one tool that tracks these documents for scientists and their librarians in institutions around the world. 3

4. Mosaic

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois is developing a system that combines these Internet tools into an unified device. Known as Mosaic, it combines the features of Gopher, WAIS, and World- Wide Web in a single interface. The basic engine of this system works like World-Wide Web with hypertexted connections, but it also includes the means to access complicated files that contain graphics, video, and audio. Mosaic points to the future of Internet tools that will provide a variety of services, based on the first generation of Internet software tools. These future Internet tools will be able to search for documents, remember the interests of its users, and even construct reports on demand as new information becomes available on the Internet.4

Internet Resources

1. Online Library Catalogues

Hundreds of library catalogues are available via the Internet. A Gopher menu offers access to libraries in different countries. Gopher provides prompts that permit a user to reach a library catalogue located a few miles away or on the other side of the globe.

The Internet gives access to the bibliographic records of millions of books, and details on the holdings of academic and research libraries around the world. With these resources, a librarian can verify bibliographic information, locate an obscure title or paper for a patron, construct bibliographies, and compare subject specialities of libraries in different countries. Via the Internet, one can also check on new titles, and even order them from a number of university presses. Blackwell North America makes available a catalogue of books in print, and the inventories of several bookstores are also online.

2. Discussion Lists

There are hundreds of electronic discussion lists and conference proceedings available over the Internet. They give users direct access to scholars in disciplines as different as folklore, animation, medieval history, climatology, and economics. More than 100 discussion lists are available specifically for librarians. The Special Library Association, the American Library Association, and other organizations support electronic conferences devoted to topics as diverse as rare books, maps, difficult reference questions, and conservation. 5 It would be impossible to subscribe to all discussion lists. A recent survey indicated that special librarians on average subscribe to a little more than three discussion lists per person. 6

Discussion lists give users an opportunity to ask for or offer help. Librarians can post complicated reference questions to listservs and have access to the expertise of librarians located in institutions across the United States, Europe, Central and South America, and Australia. A reply may appear in minutes.

3. Electronic Journals and Newsletters

There are hundreds of electronic journals and newsletters on the Internet. They cover such diverse topics as beans, ancient Greece, astronomy, tourism, medicine, and philosophy. These journals are like their printed counterparts in that they appear on a regular schedule, have a team of editors and reviewers, and focus on a specific topic. Many also publish original research. Some electronic journals appear in both paper and electronic editions, including the biweekly newspaper The Scientist and the journal Postmodern Culture. Only six electronic journals charge for a subscription, although printed editions of many journals carry a fee while their electronic counterparts do not. Traditional newspapers are becoming available in certain networks but they are not yet accessible on the larger Internet. 7 For instance, the National Capital Freenet in Ottawa, Canada, makes The Ottawa Citizen available electronically, and the Cleveland Freenet provides USA Today. The Mercury-News from San Jose, California and other newspapers can be found on America Online. For librarians, electronic journals such as Public-Access Computer Systems Review (which grew out of a discussion list) and Current Cites give the latest information on the use of technology in libraries.

4. FTP

Many of these digital journals have back issues which are available by using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP). These journals and other documents and programs exist on servers across the network. Retrieving a document by using FTP is a three-step process. The user connects to a remote computer where a desired file is stored. Once the user gains access to a remote computer, it is possible to examine its directories and locate the desired program. The user then transfers the program to his/her computer. In this way, the user can locate documents, programs, and tools by following a simple sequence of commands and prompts. 6 There are several client tools, such as the programs Archie and Fetch, that simplify this process even further.

Conclusion

The Internet offers possibilities for interaction not available by any other technology. A librarian can take advantage of materials that may be physically located thousands of kilometres away. It can decrease demands of distance and time, and bring together intellectual and physical resources. It is not surprising that the Internet is being embraced by librarians around the world.

References

1. Kahle, Brewster, An Information System for Corporate Users: Wide Areas Information Servers, Online, 15(5), Sept. 1993, pp. 56-60.

2. Valauskas, Edward J., Virtual Browsing: HYyperWAIS for Network Access, Online, 17(3), May 1993, pp. 103- 105.

3. Valauskas, Edward J., Information at Your Fingertips: Large Databases and the Macintosh, Database, 15(2), April 1992, pp. 99-101.

4. Valauskas, Edward, J., One Stop Internet Shopping: NCSA Mosaic on the MacIntosh, Online, 17(5), Sept. 1993, pp. 99-101.

5. Kovacs, Diane K., Directory of Scholarly Electronic Conferences in Ann Okerson (ed.), Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists (3rd ed.), Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1993, pp. 143-146, 188-203.

6. Ladner, Sharyn J. and Tillman, Hope N., Using the Internet for Reference, Online, 17(1), Jan. 1993, p. 46.

7. Strangelove, Michael, Electronic Journals and Newsletters: An Introduction, in Ann Okerson (ed.), Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists (3rd ed.), Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1993, pp. 53-58.

The IFLA UDT Core Programme

The UDT Core Programme objective is to promote the effectiveness of libraries and other Core Programmes of IFLA by:

• a. promoting the electronic transfer of data within the library and information community;

• b. working to reduce telecommunications barriers affecting that data transfer;

• c. assisting and supporting the other Core Programmes on the means and mode of communicating electronic data;

• d. serving as a focal point for monitoring developments, providing information, and for support of the promotion, implementation and use of compatible standards for library-specific applications of electronic data communications.