New & noteworthy
NINCHNINCH Guide to Good Practice Now Available
The first edition of The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials was published online November 2002. Described as "a resource that will become a touch-stone for new practitioners for years to come," the NINCH Guideis designed for those in all sectors of the cultural community who are digitizing and networking cultural resources.
Unique in several ways, the NINCH Guide is community-based (created by practitioners in many disciplines and media from museums, libraries, archives,the arts and academic departments); it is principles-based (directed by core principles in networking cultural resources); and it is empirical (partly derived from interviews at distinguished digitization programs in the USA and abroad, conducted by Glasgow University's Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute).
The Guide creates a high-level pathway through the issues and decisions to be made in networking heritage materials, following the life-cycle of digital projects in its 13 sections. It includes a bibliography, an edited set of interview reports, and the extensive interview instrument.
Comments and suggestions are strongly encouraged to assist in making the Guideresponsive to the community it serves. Comments may be made online at the Guide's Web site. A PDF version of the Guide (242 pp. in length) is now also available.
The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) is a diverse non-profit coalition of arts, humanities and social science organizations created to assure leadership from the cultural community in the evolution of the digital environment. The initiative began in 1993 as a collaborative project of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the Getty Information Institute, an operating program of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
COLLABORATIVE FACILITIESWeb Site Highlights Technology-oriented Learning Spaces
Collaborative Facilities is a project designed to collect, organize, and disseminate information about model "collaborative facilities" on college and university campuses. The project is sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and hosted by Dartmouth College in an effort to assist institutions in planning, implementing, and evaluating these facilities. The Collaborative Facilities Web site allows information professionals,administrators, faculty, and other interested visitors to "tour"collaborative facilities online and to analyze documents related to their planning, design, administration, staffing, services, and funding. The site also provides contact information for each participating institution in order to encourage the development of an interactive community devoted to collaborative facilities.
Collaborative facilities integrate the services of information technologists,librarians, instructional technologists, multi-media producers, and many others to serve a wide range of faculty and student needs. The organization and functions of these facilities vary widely, but all include a distinct physical space, participation by at least two separate campus units, and staff members dedicated to collaborative work. Collaborative facilities range from "information commons" that provide equipment and reference services to students and faculty to distance-education offices that address institutional concerns to centers that assist faculty in integrating teaching and new technologies.
Visitors to the Web site will find the information organized and cross-referenced in three categories:
- 1.
Institutions. Contains a profile of each contributing college or university, including brief statistics, project descriptions, and contact information.
- 2.
Types of facilities. Organized by type to allow comparisons of different institutional models. Types of facilities include information commons,digital library centers, information arcades, centers for instructional and faculty development, centers or classrooms for instructional delivery,facilities for multi-media production, facilities for multi-media delivery, and centers for distance education.
- 3.
Supporting materials. Lists key documents related to development of collaborative facilities, including planning documents, designs for physical spaces, technology designs and costs, descriptions of services, administration and staffing documents, financial documents, marketing strategies, and other documents.
All higher education institutions are invited to submit materials on collaborative facilities for inclusion in this Web site.
VRDVirtual Reference Desk Conference 2002 Proceedings Available Online
The 4th Annual Virtual Reference Desk Conference was held on November 11-12,2002, and attracted 540 attendees from nine countries to Chicago, Illinois to attend over 50 concurrent sessions. The theme of the 2002 conference, "Charting the course of reference: towards a preferred future," highlighted Internet-based reference and information technology, products, and services in all contexts, including libraries and information centers, education, intranets,the commercial sector, government and more. The conference explored issues in delivering effective digital reference service and setting standards to ensure quality. Specific tracks were related to software, research, policy, evaluation,staffing, education, management, and collaboration. David Lankes PhD, director of the Information Institute of Syracuse and assistant professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, was the opening keynote speaker. The keynote speakers on the second day were Dr Connie Van Fleet and Dr Danny Wallace, editors of Reference and User Services Quarterly, and Karen Schneider, Coordinator of the Librarians' Index to the Internet (lii.org). Presentations from the VRD 2002 Conference are now available in electronic proceedings at the VRD Web site.
UCLASurveying the Digital Future: Year Three of UCLA Internet Report
The UCLA Center for Communication Policy has released Surveying the Digital Future: The UCLA Internet Report – Year Three. In 2000, the first report of the UCLA Internet Project created a base-line profile of behavior and attitudes about Internet use and non-use in five major subjects:who is online and who is not, media use and trust, consumer behavior,communication patterns, and social effects. In 2001 and 2002, the UCLA Internet Project continued its year-to-year appraisal of more than 100 major issues,focusing on Internet users vs. non-users, as well as new users (less than one year of experience) compared very experienced users (six or more years of experience).
The Year Three Report highlights Internet trends in 2002 and illuminates several issues about online technology and its impact on the USA. Key issues include:
the continuing growth of the Internet – post-dot-com collapse;
redefining the "digital divide";
use of the Internet at home;
online privacy concerns;
user perceptions of the reliability and accuracy of information on the Internet.
The UCLA Internet Report is available online at http://ccp.ucla.edu/pages/internet-report.asp
CORNELL UNIVERSITYDevelops New Billing System for Campus Internet Use
Cornell University officials have developed a new system for billing students and employees for Internet use. The new system, based on data collected from network-router logs, is intended to help the University better manage its rising costs for Internet bandwidth. In addition to monthly charges for each port used,and an "infrastructure tax" to cover the cost of the campus-network back-bone, the new billing system incorporates an Internet-use fee, to be based on the bandwidth consumption associated with each campus IP number. A basic monthly fee will cover downloading or serving up to two gigabytes of information per IP number; every megabyte over the two gigabyte allocation will incur an additional usage charge. The system for recovering network costs will be backed up by a new University policy on data privacy.
University officials expect the new billing system to encourage students and faculty to make informed choices about how much bandwidth they use, especially since one of the biggest causes of rising Internet costs is recreational file sharing. At Cornell, the single largest use of Internet bandwidth is by students using KaZaA peer-to-peer software to send outbound music and video files. Officials say the new billing system will help students and others understand the costs associated with such "extreme use" of campus Internet access services.
www.cit.cornell.edu/services/newnetrates/(from The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/free/2003/03/2003030601t.htm)
LUNA IMAGINGAnnounces New Software for Building Visual Collections Online
Luna Imaging, Inc. has released a new entry-level software option that makes building visual collections online quick, easy and economical. Luna's Insight software has been used for nearly a decade by prominent universities and museums in the USA to manage and work with their visual materials, and now Insight Standard allows institutions to build enterprise level digital collections to support teaching and research at an affordable price-tag.
The new Insight™ Standard package includes Luna's full suite of software tools that enable users to build collections from the ground up based upon the Visual Resources Association (VRA) Core 3.0 metadata standard.
VRA provides guidelines for cataloging visual resources, but implementation of the standard within a database structure is left up to the individual. This can be a very complicated task that has a direct bearing on the ability of end users to search and retrieve images. With Insight Standard, users simply install the software and begin adding data and images to a new Insight collection. As new records are created, Insight Standard provides the fields to be completed,ensuring that the visual resources are catalogued in accordance with the VRA guidelines.
Luna has also announced the release of Insight version 3.5, which includes new and improved features as well as new software tools for cataloging metadata about visual collections online.
Insight v3.5's new features include support for multi-page documents, the ability to display QuickTime VR files along with high resolution still images,and support for fuzzy data searching in text data fields. Insight v3.5 is also up to 30 percent faster when searching very large collections.
Inscribe, Luna's new cataloging tool, comes bundled with Insight v3.5. Inscribe allows collection owners to create, edit, and delete catalog information over the Internet and supports a wide range of cataloging requirements.
Insight v3.5 is also backward- and forward-compatible with Insight v3.1.1, so that Insight users may still search across multiple collections regardless of when individual collections are upgraded.
TASI Reviews Image Search Engines
TASI – the UK's Technical Advisory Service for Images – has recently completed a review of image search engines. Replacing an earlier review, TASI's report outlines the different types of image search engines available. Image searching is sometimes offered by general search engines, like Google or Altavista, as well as by specialized image search engines –services devoted to indexing images or multimedia. In addition, there are meta-search engines, which pass on search requests to more than one search engine and then bring back the results.
"Image Search Engine" is sometimes also used to refer to collection-based search engines – services that index a single or small number of image collections. Large digital libraries or commercial stock photo collections, like Corbis, typically offer such search engine-like facilities.
All of the categories of image search engines mentioned above are text-based– their indexes are created from words associated with the images. There have also been attempts to create content-based search engines, which "index"visual characteristics of an image, such as its shape and color. TASI's review concentrates on general, specialized, and meta-search engines, but also covers,briefly, collection-based and content-based engines. The review suggests things to look out for when using search engines to find images, and includes TASI's own critical evaluation of the most popular engines.
BLOGSPOTNew Blog for Librarians and Visually Impaired Library Users
VIP2 – a Very Important Page for Visually Impaired Persons – is a new community for librarians, visually impaired individuals, and anyone interested in discussing and sharing news on digital books, talking books,digital audiobooks, library services and technology for the visually impaired,and other issues of interest. All are invited to share talking book reviews,accessible technology, and news or opinions related to library services and technology for the visually impaired.
PULSE DATA AND BENETECHAnnounce BrailleNote/Bookshare.org Collaboration
Pulse Data International, a leading manufacturer of products designed for people who are blind and visually impaired, and Benetech, the Silicon Valley technology non-profit formerly known as Arkenstone, have announced a formal collaboration integrating Benetech's Bookshare.org initiative with Pulse Data's BrailleNote family of products. Bookshare.org is a subscription service that provides an extensive online library of accessible digital books to US residents with severe visual, reading and mobility disabilities. The BrailleNote Family is the first suite of Personal Data Assistants designed for persons who are blind. Since September 2002, the Windows-CE-based KeyWeb Internet Browser has been integrated into the entire range of BrailleNote products.
This collaboration allows BrailleNote users with a Bookshare.org subscription to browse the Bookshare.org Web site using the BrailleNote, select one of the 12,000 books already available from this site and download it directly to the device. The user can then press "enter" on the downloaded book, and will be prompted for his Bookshare.org user name and password. The BrailleNote will then seamlessly unpack the downloaded book to the BrailleNote's bookreader to be read off-line. This unpacking scheme preserves the book's copyright protection. This functionality was débuted by Pulse Data HumanWare CEO Jim Halliday in February at the Vision Loss in the 21st Century Conference, which is sponsored by the American Foundation for the Blind.
