ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries C 8 R L N e w s ■ F e b r u a r y 2 0 0 1 / 181 CONFERENCE CIRCUIT The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Reports from the meeting held in San Antonio by Betsy Wilson, Janet McCue, Gloriana St. Clair, Patricia lannuzzi, Nancy Baker, Hannelore B. Rader, and Thomas Hickerson Ed. note: W hat follows are sum m aries of several o f the project briefings at the CNI meeting. Thanks to the authors for providing these reports. D evelopm ents in n e tw o rk e d inform ation The Coalition for N etw orked Inform ation (CNI) held a highly successful Task Force meeting in San Antonio, Texas, on D ecem ­ ber 7-8, 2000, attracting m ore than 250 p a r­ ticipants. T he m eeting offered a w ide range of presentations that advanced an d reported on CNI’s program s, show cased projects and issues from task force m em ber institutions, and highlighted cutting-edge activities in the networked information area. The meeting was comprised o f an o p ening and closing ple­ nary session interspersed w ith a rich range of breakout sessions, am ple time for infor­ mal netw orking w ith colleagues, an d a re­ ception on the evening of D ecem ber 7. CNI w as fo unded in 1990 by the Associa­ tion of R esearch L ibraries, CAUSE, a n d Educom. ACRL is a task force m em ber and w as represented by Betsy Wilson, ACRL presi­ dent, and Mary Ellen Davis, ACRL senior as­ sociate executive director. CNI E xecutive D irector Clifford Lynch kicked off th e m eeting an d the o p ening ple­ nary w ith a high-level technology an d envi­ ronm ental 10-year retrospective and a review of the issues CNI is currently pursuing. These issues form the basis for the new ly issued P ro g ra m P la n fo r 20 0 0 -0 1 a v a ila b le at http: / / w w w . cni. o rg /p ro g ram /. T he Program Plan is organized a ro u n d th ree them es: 1) D eveloping and Managing N etw orked Inform ation Content; 2) Trans­ form ing Organizations, Professions and Indi­ viduals; and 3) Building Technology, Stan­ dards an d Infrastructure. D onald Waters, program officer for Schol­ arly C o m m u n icatio n s at th e A n d rew W. Mellon Foundation, joined Lynch o n the p o ­ dium an d ro u n d ed out the opening plenary w ith a presentation of som e of the initiatives the foundation is undertaking in the area o f About th e a u th o rs Betsy Wilson is director o f libraries at the University o f Washington a nd president o f ACRL, e-mail: betsyw@u.washington.edu; Janet McCue is director o f the Mann Library a n d associate university librarian fo r the Life Sciences a t Cornell University, e­ mail: jam7@cornell.edu; Gloriana St. Clair is university librarian at Carnegie Mellon University, e-mail: gstclair@andrew.cmu.edu; Patricia la n n u zzi is associate university librarian a n d d ire cto r o f the Doe/Mo ffitt Library at the University o f California, Berkeley, e-mail: piannuzz@library.berkeley.edu; Nancy Baker is university librarian a t the University o f Iowa, e-mail: nancy l-baker@uiowa.edu; Hannelore B. Rader is university librarian at the University o f Louisville, e-mail: h. rader@louisville. e d u; Thomas Hickerson is associate university librarian at Cornell University, e-mail: hth2@cornell.edu http://www.cni.org/program/ mailto:betsyw@u.washingtDn.edu mailto:jam7@cornell.edu mailto:gstclair@andrew.cmu.edu mailto:piannuzz@library.berkeley.edu mailto:nancy-l-baker@uiowa.edu mailto:nancy-l-baker@uiowa.edu mailto:h.rader@louisville.edu 182 / C&RL News ■ February 2001 n etw o rk ed inform ation an d scholarly com ­ m unication.— Betsy Wilson SFX H erbert v an d e Som pel (Cornell University) and O ren Beit-Arie (Ex-Libris) provided a fas­ cinating overview o f the integration o f the o p en URL fram ew ork an d th e SFX software. The goal o f these technologies is to allow a user to search an inform ation resource and link to distributed resources. To illustrate the integration, Rick Luce (Los Alamos N ational Laboratory) d em onstrated the LANL im plem entation. H ere a u ser can launch a search in Biosis, retrieve relevant citations, an d link to the full text of the ar­ ticles—from any of the full-text resources that are available to th e LANL com m unity. W hether the article is available in Proquest o r IDEAL, an ISI database o r Ovid, the o p e n URL fram ew ork an d the SFX server provide the interoperability m echanism to allow o p en linking. T he SFX server takes the o p e n URL input an d associated m etadata, evaluates a p ­ propriate sites, an d th e n com pletes the links to th e targets. It provides a single p oint o f adm inistration for all of these services. Th e SFX serv er has b e e n im p le m e n te d at th e University o f G hent an d at LANL a n d is in beta test at a nu m b er of institutions. For more inform ation, visit w w w .sfxit.com or w ww . sfxit.com /OpenURL.—J a n e t M cCue Questia Will students on your campus pay about $20 a month to use an electronic collection of about 50,000 books and to have footnote and other support in creating their term papers and projects? Q uestia has convinced venture capitalists to give th em $165 million to prove that stu­ d e n ts will p a y fo r this service. Similarly, Q uestia has b e e n actively recruiting publish­ ers to give th em up-to-date content. The re­ w ard incentives for publishers include a p e r­ centage of the revenues. T hese revenues will be calculated b ased o n the n u m b er of pages that th e students using Q uestia view in their search for information. Q uestia will feature scanned im ages w ith extensive m ark u p so that student searches will take th em precisely to th e sentences they n eed to d o their assignm ents. W hile search­ ing will b e free, w h en students begin to dow n­ load inform ation to create their o w n papers, they will have to b eco m e subscribers to the service for a m onth o r a sem ester. Q uestia will b e m arketed directly to students using a sophisticated p lan that is still u n d e r d ev elo p ­ m ent. Q uestia has only recently b e g u n to think o f libraries as a possible m arket for this product. Troy Williams, CEO, is a graduate o f the H arvard Law School, w here his service as a law review editor im pressed him w ith the difficulties o f creating goo d footnotes. H e has re c ru ite d an a s to u n d in g te a m , in c lu d in g Stanley C hodorow , w h o will h e a d th e aca­ dem ic side o f the com pany; Carol Hughes, w h o has led Q uestia’s collection developm ent operations; an d several executives from dif­ ferent com panies, including Disney. Q uestia will offer a co nvenient alterna­ tive to com ing into th e library, photocopying th e inform ation n eed ed , an d typing it into a co m p u ter to create a term paper. Students d em o n strate a love o f co n v e­ nience thro u g h m any o f their life choices. Will they subscribe o r will they realize that their cam pus library m ay offer a no-charge alternative also available to them in their own lodgings?— G loriana St. Clair Open Archives In itia tive (OAI) This initiative is also an exciting one. Like Q uestia, its function is to m ake m ore effec­ tive use o f content available online. Unlike Q uestia, its audiences are primarily the fac­ ulty w h o use prep rin t servers, such as the G insparg preprint server at Los Alamos. OAI’s p u rp o s e is to en h an ce access to e-print ar­ chives as a m eans o f increasing th e availabil­ ity o f scholarly com m unications. OAI will describe a m etadata harvesting protocol. This protocol will allow users to find inform ation that is currently shut off from their searching. The data harvested from these large electronic archives will be u sed to build higher-level, user-oriented services, such as catalogs an d portals to materials distributed at m ultiple e-print sites. OAI w as d ev elo p e d at a Santa Fe conven­ tion an d amplified at a technical m eeting held at Cornell University. A public com m ent day w as h eld o n Jan u ary 23, 2001, in Washing­ ton, an d a E uropean com m ent day will be h eld in Berlin in the first q uarter o f 2001. Com m ents can also be sent to openarchives@ o p en arch iv es.o rg . http://www.sfxit.com openarchives.org C&RL News ■ February 2001 / 183 Certainly, having better access to the e print sites around the country is quite an ex­ citing developm ent. But OAI may have fur­ ther applications. Many believe that it will also be adapted to harvest the metadata from other kinds of digital collections. Then, the many institutions that have built large digital depositories will have a new m ethod for at­ tracting users to them .— Gloriana St. Clair Pacific Bell/UCLA initiative Howard Besser, associate professor at UCLA’s School o f Education and Information Studies (GSE&IS), introduced the audience to the Pacific Bell/UCLA Initiative for 21st Century Literacies (www.newliteracies.gseis.ucla.edu) Besser serves as co-director of the initiative with Aimee Dorr, d ean an d p rofessor at GSE&IS. Pacific Bell aw arded a $1 million grant for the two-year project that will ad­ dress the n eed for multiple literacies in the 21st century. Three areas that will be ad­ dressed by the initiative are educating the user; improving the information system; and addressing policy issues. Expected outcom es for the initiative include: • developm ent o f guidelines for informa­ tion-literate students and for teachers and li­ brarians w orking w ith students; • guidelines for design professionals and others w ho develop information systems and materials; and • policy research that will be disseminated to policymakers and the broader public to inform public discussion. Three h u n d re d sixty participants from education, librarianship, public policy, and industry w ere invited to participate in the Pacific Bell/UCLA Summit: New Technolo­ gies, New Literacies— a Wonderful Learning Experience! The summit w as held o n O cto­ ber 21, 2000, w ith representatives from the California G overnor’s Office and the Califor­ nia State D epartm ent of Education in atten­ dance. A new , snappy eight-minute video on information literacy w as p ro d u ced by Pacific Bell and is now available. Besser critiqued “traditional” information literacy approaches developed to date and addressed the n eed to build adaptive sys­ tems based u p o n good design principles that are customized for different user com m uni­ ties. He outlined that the next step for the project is a literature review and analysis of Students demonstrate a love of convenience through many of their life choices. Will they subscribe or w ill they realize th a t their campus library may offer a no-charge alternative also available to them in their own lodgings? research and publications related to informa­ tion, media, visual, cultural and other relevant 21st century literacies. GSE&IS faculty will also explore how to best design systems to match literacy levels and develop principles for sys­ tems design. Finally, GSE&IS faculty will also research policy issues related to this project, including information literacy standards, is­ sues regarding the “Digital Divide,” and pri­ vacy an d o w n ersh ip co n cern s.— Patricia I a n n u z z i Collaborations among inform ational professionals This lively session, lead by Joan Lippincott, associate executive director o f CNI, and Su­ san Perry, college librarian an d director of Library and Information Technology Services at Mount Holyoke College, w as formatted to encourage audience discussion o n three re­ lated topics: examples of collaboration at their institutions; com m ents on current CNI initia­ tives that foster collaboration; and sugges­ tions for future CNI initiatives in support of collaboration. Lippincott provided the context by pre­ senting an excellent introduction to defining a true collaborative venture, emphasizing that collaborations require a com m on vision, a shared vocabulary, resources contributed by both parties, and agreem ent on w ork proce­ dures. “Exchange relationships” are often mis­ nam ed as collaborations, and som e other at­ tem pts to collaborate fail because one party im poses a vision o n the other group instead o f creating a shared vision. Lippincott also provided a quick overview o f current CNI initiatives, including the New Learning Communities, the Electronic Disser­ tation Project, the Assessing the Academic http://www.newliteracies.gseis.ucla.edu 184 / C&RL News ■ February 2001 N etw orked Environm ent initiative an d the Working Together project. Further information about CNI projects is located at w w w .cni.org/ archives/. A udience m em bers shared experiences about campus collaborations, and one of the dominant them es that em erged w as the need for collaboration w ith the academ ic side of campus technology programs: teaching and learning w ith technology initiatives; instruc­ tional technologists; and campus centers for faculty developm ent for excellence in teach­ ing. Some discussion centered o n cam pus col­ laborations that focus on student learning out­ comes that include information literacy. Suggestions w ere m ade for CNI to offer w orkshops for cam pus teams, similar to CNI’s Working Together w orkshops originally tar­ geted to senior library and information tech­ nology leaders w ho attended as team s to de­ velop campus plans. The most recent Work­ ing Together w orkshops have included archi­ vists, records managers, and information tech­ nologists. Suggestions w ere m ade to expand these w orkshops to bring together librarians and instructional technologists and academics to address pedagogical issues related to teach­ ing and learning w ith technology.— Patricia I a n n u z z i IMS E-Learning specifications This project briefing featured a technical u p ­ date on the IMS E-Learning Specifications by Thomas D. Wason, technical liaison, and Ed Walker, CEO o f the IMS Global Learning Con­ sortium, Inc. (IMS). IMS is concerned w ith standards for learn­ ing servers, learning content, and the integra­ tion of such capabilities. Although IMS was initiated in the higher-education environment, it now includes corporate an d governm ent training, K—12, and continuing education. IMS is developing specifications to address key problems and challenges in distributed learn­ ing environments. The project briefing provided discussed the specifications’ potential use in mechanisms for locating, retrieving, and using netw orked learn­ ing objects. IMS specifications and instructional designs enable the learning process. IMS specifications will enable content from multiple publishers to run o n multiple m an­ agement systems such as content metadata, student profile and perform ance information, an d course structure. An exam ple w ould be LAN-based training modules surrounded by an Internet-compatible launcher object. IMS W orking G roups gather functional require­ ments and technical capabilities from en d us­ ers, purchasers, an d m anagers and consoli­ date these into one or m ore specifications. IMS mem bers include such organizations as Apple Computers, Blackboard, universities, Educause, Cisco, Microsoft, governm ent agen­ cies, and many others. IMS is working on speci­ fications to address basic functionality o f la­ beling and finding content, moving content from one place to another, running content, and tracking student perform ance data. In the future, specs will support additional features. IMS specifications and tools are free to the public. The developed specifications are tech­ nical standards, not academic o r pedagogical standards. IMS metadata can help evaluate ma­ terials a n d e sta b lish re p o s ito rie s o f IMS metadata containing reviews and certifications o f products. This briefing, although “technologically challenging,” helped me understand better the complexities of teaching and learning support in the electronic environm ent, specifically, since I use Blackboard in som e graduate teach­ ing. For additional information about IMS see www.imsproject.org.— H annelore B. Rader Web preservation During the project briefing o n a W eb preser­ vation project entitled “Oh, W hat a Tangled W orld Wide W eb We W eave,” Cassy Ammen from the Library o f Congress (LC) discussed tw o recent projects at LC to collect and pre­ serve a selective group o f W eb sites. The first prototype project focuses on more than 25 Web sites on a variety o f subjects and content types. T hrough this project, LC plans to explore the complex issues surrounding Web archiving and develop procedures that will enable the pro­ totype to be scaled u p to a m ore comprehen­ sive level. The second project concentrated o n more than 150 Web sites pertaining to the 2000 presi­ dential election. This project required the daily capture o f text, images, and complementary software related to the presidential election until th e site activity ceased o r Inauguration 2001. A m m en discussed th e m any technical is­ s u e s a n d c h a ll e n g e s in v o lv e d in Web http://www.cni.org/ C&RL News ■ February 2001 / 185 archiving, including how often to capture, how to handle im bedded external links, problems with multiple languages on a site, copyright issues, levels of cataloging, an d long-term archiving/preservation. The project briefing on Scientific Commu­ nities: Evolving Options Online, provided an update on tw o SPARC initiatives for effective and affordable scholarly communication. The first, Project Euclid, is a new initiative from Cornell and Duke University Presses to help independent journals in theoretical and ap­ plied mathematics and statistics by setting up an infrastructure to em pow er the participating journals to publish over the Web. The project is funded by a grant from the A ndrew W. Mellon Foundation, aided by the developm ent partners, and supported by the participating scholarly s o c ie tie s , SPARC, a n d S un Microsystems. Project Euclid seeks to support an afford­ able and vibrant online information comm u­ nity with fast dissemination o f high-quality papers, the ability to search across all journals at once, and the inclusion of rich reference linkages. In addition, these journals will have better visibility and long-term preservation of their digital archive. This project is in the very early stages o f development. More informa­ tion is available from http ://eu clid .lib rary . cornell.edu/project/. The second project, BioOne, will facilitate Web access to the full text of high-impact bio­ science research journals published by pro­ fessional societies w hose publications have only been available in paper. Currently 31 jour­ nals have licensed with BioOne with more in the pipeline. The project will include current issues and o n e-to-tw o years o f backfiles. BioOne is a project o f the American Institute for Biological Sciences, SPARC, the Big 12+ Library Consortium, Allen Press, and the Uni­ versity of Kansas, w hich hosts the online ser­ vice. BioOne is planning to launch its beta re­ lease on March 1, 2001. The journals will be sold as a package. For more information, see http://www.bioone.org/.— N ancy Baker Accounting for Archiving: Who Will Pay? In the session “Accounting for Archiving: W ho Will Pay?,” Kevin Guthrie, president of JSTOR, fust presented a clear picture o f costs associ­ ated with housing and servicing scholarly jour- Van de Sompel warned that libraries as organizations are slow moving, hosted by slowly moving institutions; th a t libraries are slow to recognize th a t a new technology may allow fo r new modes of operating; and th a t the inform ation w orld runs on Internet time. nals in library stacks and in remote storage, followed by a convincing description of the costs and benefits of digital storage and ac­ cess. He then challenged attendees to recog­ nize and fund digital preservation and access through a coordinated strategy supported by both acquisition and long-term collection main­ tenance expenditures, urging that library ad­ ministrators convince university provosts and presidents that monies be diverted from “bricks and mortar” expenses to technological infra­ structure an d collaborative digital archiving solutions. Session attendance was relatively small, but the attentive audience was largely comprised of senior library administrators including sev­ eral library directors, most of w hom seem ed to be directly confronting these issues. The most noteworthy aspect of the session was that it was largely conducted as a dialogue among all of those in attendance, rather than in a pre- senter/audience format. From the initial moments, participants, while agreeing w ith several of Guthrie’s basic asser­ tions, questioned the likelihood that institu­ tional funding could be reallocated in the m anner proposed. Others questioned w hether library administrators w ere themselves pre­ pared to publicly question “bricks and mor­ tar” expenditures, in spite of their underlying assumptions about the information future. The session provided a fascinating glimpse of cur­ rent complexities, and discussions continued well into the evening.— Thomas Hickerson Metadata harvesting and implications for scholarly communications Herbert van de Sompel, visiting professor in the C om puter Science D epartm ent at Cornell University and form er head of Library Au­ http://euclid.library cornell.edu/project/ http://www.bioone.org/.%e2%80%94Nancy 186 / C&RL News ■ February 2001 tomation at the University of Ghent in Bel­ gium, delivered the closing plenary address on the O pen Archives Metadata Harvesting (OAMH) protocol and implications for schol­ arly communication. His presentation can be found on the CNI Web site at www.cni.org. Van de Sompel described the OAMH pro­ tocol as “a low-barrier interoperability specifi­ cation for the recurrent exchange o f metadata between systems.” The OAMH protocol allows for federated services such as SDI, alerting, and linking services; database synchronization; and harvesting the deep Web. The OAHM pro­ tocol advances the interoperability of electronic preprints as a means to prom ote their global acceptance as a “decom posed” scholarly com­ munication system. Van de Sompel posited that in the current scholarly communication system, it is increas­ ingly difficult for libraries to fulfill their funda­ mental role o f safeguarding equality of access to scholarly information. He encouraged librar- ( “Teaching stu d en ts.. ” continued fr o m pag 143) 4. Leilani Hall, “A hom egrow n program for raising faculty information com petence,” Computers in Libraries 19, no. 8 (1999): 28- 34. 5. Pixey Anne Mosley, “Creating a library assignment w orkshop for university faculty, The J o u rn a l o f A cadem ic Librarianship 24, no. 1 (1998): 33-41. e ” ( “C om m unity sciences … con tin u ed fr o m page 162) • M ed L in e. This is the prim er biom edi­ cal database from the National Institutes of Health, w hich comprises the Index Medicus, Dental Literature Index, and the International Nursing Index. It provides the m ost com ­ prehensive coverage from m ore than 3,500 journals in all areas o f m edicine. Access: ( “B uilding co m m u n ity … ” cont. fr o m page 167) U nderstanding our potential future users’ re­ sults in better programs and services. Part­ nerships often save m oney and labor and attract increased funding. Final recommendations A final recom m endation is the University o f ies to rethink themselves and to become pro­ active in exploring alternatives for scholarly communications, like the OAI (see http://www. openarchives.org/). Concluding that there are new opportuni­ ties for shaping a sustainable scholarly com­ munication system, van de Sompel outlined the advantages libraries bring to the mix. Li­ braries are close to authors; are in a good p o ­ sition to archive institutional materials; are quick to embrace new technologies; have veiy knowledgable people; provide a level of re­ dundancy in services that is no longer required in a digital environment; and safeguard equity of access through global representation. Van de Sompel w arned that libraries as organizations are slow moving, hosted by slowly moving institutions; that libraries are slow to recognize that a new technology may allow for new m odes of operating; and that th e in fo rm a tio n w o rld ru n s o n In tern et time.-—Betsy Wilson ■ 6. Gloria J. Leckie, “Desperately seeking citations: U ncovering faculty assum ptions about the undergraduate research process,” The J o u rn a l o f A cadem ic Librarianship 22 (1996): 201-08. 7. Janet R. Cottrell, “Information literacy, com puter literacy, and good teaching prac­ tices: Firm foundations for faculty develop­ m ent.” A cadem ic Exchange Quarterly 3 (Fall 1999): 43-51. ■ h t t p : / / w w w . n l m . n i h . g o v / d a t a b a s e s / freemedl.html. • U n C over. Table of Content and fee- based fax document delivery service to more than 18,000 journal tides from 1988 to the present. Use the UnCover “Com plete service for older material. UnCover also offers articles from more than 2,500 journals via UnCover D esktop Image Deliv­ ery. Access: http://uncw eb.carl.org/. ■ C onnecticut Libraries Partnerships guide. It includes “Selected Examples of Current Part­ n e rs h ip s”; “Form ing New Partnerships: A G uide”; “Library Criteria for New Partner­ ships”; “Reviewing Existing Partnerships”; and a “P a r t n e r s h i p P r o p o s a l Form" ( h ttp ://s p irit.lib .u c o n n .e d u /in fo r m a tio n / PartnershipDocument.html). ■ http://www.cni.org openarchives.org/ http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/ http://uncweb.carl.org/ http://spirit.lib.uconn.edu/information/ C&RL News ■ February 2001 / 187 188 / C&RL News ■ February 2001