D-Lib has agreed to be a sponsor of the Metadata II invitational workshop. The first workshop was convened by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on March 1-3, 1995. Its work was reported in a paper by Stuart Weibel in D-Lib Magazine in July 1995. The second invitational workshop is being organized by OCLC and the United Kingdom Office for Library Networking (UKOLN) in April 1996. Further information will be posted by the D-Lib Working Group on Metadata.
The Web pages for D-Lib and D-Lib Magazine have been redesigned for us by Robert Kinneary of Kinneary Design Services.
Six D-Lib working groups are included in the program of the ACM DL '96 conference in Bethesda, MD on March 21 and 22. The groups and their chairs are:
Each working group is different, but the general principles are the same. The first three have had recent working meetings or have such meetings planned. For each of the others we plan to hold a meeting of key people early in 1996. Reports on the progress made at these meetings will be accessible through the D-Lib home page. The DL '96 sessions are being explicitly planned on the assumption that people read the materials before the sessions.
Please watch the D-Lib home page for news of these and other working groups.
D-Lib now has its own Internet domain name, "dlib.org". The D-Lib home page is:
One of the most important events in digital library research this year was a workshop sponsored by the U.S. Government's Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA) Working Group. The workshop brought together a number of leading researchers to create the agenda for digital library research. The workshop was chaired by Hector Garcia-Molina of Stanford University and Clifford Lynch of the Univeristy of California.
Everybody with serious interests in digital library research should read the report of the workshop. It is a long and thoughtful report, full of careful analysis and recommendations.
The Technology Playpen is a collection of new technology of interest to digital library researchers. Typically this is work that is not yet ready for wide spread deployment. It runs on a limited number of computer types and you may need to download specific software before you can use it.
Initially, we include demonstrations of two systems from CNRI. The first is a preview of the Grail user interface. This is a web browser written in Python. It has two great advantages over more normal browsers, such as Mosaic or Netscape. The first is that it is open; the source code is available to everybody. The second is that it is designed to be extensible. The extensibility is demonstrated with some simple Python applets. The second is the first two issues of D-Lib Magazine with the major items identified by handles, rather than URLs.
In addition, the playpen includes a link to Sun's new Java and HotJava systems. Java is a new object-oriented programming language developed at Sun Microsystems and HotJava is an extensible web browser that accepts applets written in Java.
Click here to go to the Technology
Playpen.
Please send questions and comments about D-Lib to: dlib@cnri.reston.va.us.
William Y. Arms
Chair, D-Lib
wya/af
Revised: February 5, 1996