News
| Published date | 01 June 1994 |
| Pages | 385-397 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045329 |
| Date | 01 June 1994 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
News
The electronic library
scene
Details have now been released of the
six research efforts, developing new
technologies for digital libraries, which
are being funded for four years by the
US government. The Digital Library
Project's
focus is 'dramatically to ad-
vance the means to collect, store, and
organise information in digital forms,
and make it available for searching, re-
trieval and processing via communica-
tion networks
—
all in user-friendly
ways.'
Each effort brings together re-
searchers and users from a university
with those from other
organisations,
in-
cluding other academic institutions, li-
braries, museums, publishers, govern-
ment laboratories, state agencies,
secondary schools, and computer and
communications companies. Each pro-
ject will develop a test-bed for research
and prototyping purposes. This will
then be scaled to accommodate more
information, more advanced informa-
tion handling tools, and a greater num-
ber
of
users.
The six
projects
are
funded
to a total of
$24.4
million, each receiv-
ing
between $3.6m and
$4.8m.
They are
as follows.
A project at the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley will produce a proto-
type digital
library with a focus
on
envi-
ronmental information. The research
prototype is intended for eventual full-
scale
deployment
in the
State of Califor-
nia's CERES production systems. Re-
searchers will try to produce
technologies which allow untrained us-
ers to contribute to and find relevant
information in other worldwide digital
library
systems.
Research areas include
automated indexing, intelligent re-
trieval and search processes; database
technology
to
support digital library
ap-
plications; new approaches to docu-
ment analysis; and data compression
and communication tools for remote
browsing.
At the
University of Michigan there
will be research and development to
create, operate, use and evaluate an-
other test-bed of a large-scale, continu-
ally evolving multimedia digital library.
In this case, the content focus will be
earth and space sciences. Potentially
connecting thousands of users and in-
formation repositories, the library sys-
tem will aim to meet the needs for sys-
temising information available on the
Internet. There will be particular stress
on testing and evaluating
the
prototype
system by a wide variety of users, in-
cluding those from on-campus, local
high schools
and
public
libraries.
Com-
mercial sponsors include Elsevier Sci-
ence,
UMI
and McGraw-Hill.
At Stanford University, the Stan-
ford
Integrated Digital Library Project
will develop the enabling technologies
for a single, integrated virtual library
that will provide uniform access to the
large number of emerging networked
information sources and collections
—
both online versions of pre-existing
works and new works that will become
available in the future. It will create a
shared environment that links every-
thing from personal information collec-
tions,
to
collections found today
in
con-
ventional libraries, to large data
collections shared by
scientists.
The
re-
search thrusts of
the
project
include:
in-
formation sharing and communication
models; client information interfaces;
and information finding services. Par-
ticipating organisations include Dialog,
O'Reilly
and WAIS
Inc.
A similar project
at the
University
of
Illinois will be centred around engi-
neering and science literature. The test-
bed, which will include a customised
version of
NCSA Mosaic
software, will
become
a production facility of
the
Uni-
versity Library with thousands of docu-
ments and tens of thousands of users
across several universities. Research
will include sociological evaluation of
the
test-bed,
technological development
of
semantic
retrieval,
and
prototype de-
sign
of future
scaleable
information
sys-
tems.
At the University of California,
Santa Barbara,
Project Alexandria
will develop a digital library providing
easy access to collections of
maps,
im-
ages and pictorial materials as well as a
full range of new electronic
library
serv-
ices.
Santa Barbara has a research focus
in
the area of spatially-indexed informa-
tion, but the project also involves the
State University of New York at
Buf-
falo,
the University of Maine and sev-
eral industrial partners. Each site will
include, as necessary, facilities for
geo-
graphical information interfaces, elec-
tronic
catalogues,
and information stor-
age and
acquisition.
The Informedia interactive online
digital video library system to be cre-
ated by Carnegie Mellon University
and WQED/Pittsburgh will
enable users
to access, explore and retrieve science
and mathematics materials from video
archives.
The
system will work
by
inte-
grating speech, image and natural lan-
guage
understanding technologies, with
1000 hours of video on offer initially.
Issues involving human-computer in-
teraction, pricing
and
charging for
digi-
tal video use, and privacy and security
will be
addressed
as
part of
the
research
programme.
Digital Library Initiative is sup-
ported jointly by the US National Sci-
ence Foundation, the Department of
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA), and the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA). The coordinator is the Divi-
sion of Information, Robotics and In-
telligent Systems. For more informa-
tion on the initiative contact the
Division on +1 (703) 306 1930, or by
e-mail
at dl-info@nsf.gov.
That UK public libraries should be
geared to the electronic age is one of
three
main
recommendations of a report
to government by Aslib. This will en-
able regional 'hyperlibraries' to take
over collections in specialised fields,
create centres of excellence, and be-
The Electronic Library, Vol. 12, No. 6, December 1994 385
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