D-Lib Magazine
January 1999

Volume 5 Number 1

ISSN 1082-9873

Clips & Pointers

8th DELOS Workshop on User Interfaces in Digital Libraries

Contributed by:
Preben Hansen, preben@sics.se
and Jussi Karlgren, jussi@sics.se
SICS - Swedish Institute of Computer Science
Human-Computer Interaction and Language Engineering Laboratory
Sweden

Introduction

The 8th DELOS Workshop on User Interfaces in Digital Libraries was held in Stockholm, Sweden, 21-23 October 1998. The DELOS Working Group is an action of the ERCIM Digital Library Initiative (http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/DELOS/). During the workshop, a "mini-workshop" was held, together with participants from the 4th ERCIM UI4All Workshop, another ERCIM Working Group, that was held 19 - 21 October 1998. Twenty-one participants, including guest speakers attended the workshop, and eleven presentations were made during the workshop.

The DELOS working group is funded by the ESPRIT Long Term Research Programme and has been promoted by ERCIM with the objective of supporting research in areas related to digital libraries. Specifically, the DELOS objectives are

  • to stimulate research activities in areas which are relevant for the efficient and cost-effective development of digital library systems,
  • to encourage collaboration between research teams working in the field of digital libraries, and
  • to establish links with on-going projects and activities in the field of digital libraries in industry and other public and private institutions.

A Digital Library is the integration of several different components and will include a range of content and services. It will also include a large and diverse group of users. It is important to develop an understanding of the overall tasks and interactions users are engaged in when entering a Digital Library. We interact constantly with our environment through different communication mechanisms and processes. Information seeking and retrieval in Digital Libraries is but a special case of such a process. Analysis and evaluation of user, systems, and interactions are needed to successfully build future Digital Libraries.

Presentations

The workshop started with a "Challenge paper" (Preben Hansen and Jussi Karlgren, SICS). The paper summarized some important research issues raised 25 years ago related to information retrieval (IR) and user interfaces (UI) and its relevance for the workshop. The authors found that some of the questions raised then are still valid today, such as the characteristics of the user, the task, the information content and medium, the computer and IR techniques and the role of evaluation and feedback in the redesign cycle, among others. New research areas have emerged since then, such as multimedia content, multimodal interaction, multilingual information and users and distributed systems and collections.

Our guest speaker, Professor Nicholas Belkin, Rutgers University, provided a "road-map" of important issues for Digital Libraries in his paper "Understanding and Supporting Multiple Information Seeking Behaviours in a Single Interface Framework". First, Belkin presented a definition of a Digital Library and what functions need to be supported in such a framework. Furthermore, Nick Belkin described his and his group's work within the third TIPSTER research program. The goal of the project is to identify and classify different information seeking strategies (ISSs), characterize sequential structures of ISSs, identify specific combinations of IR techniques appropriate for different ISSs, and construct and evaluate a system which adapts to support different ISSs in the course of a single information seeking episode.

Constantine Stephanidis, ICS-FORTH, our second guest speaker, raised some critical issues for interaction design in digital libraries in the light of HCI and Digital Libraries. Among the main issues and challenges mentioned were diverse user groups, variety in the context of use, and technological proliferation. The author also proposed a way to deal with the design of Digital Libraries containing 3 phases: Design processes and techniques, Implementation, and Evaluation.

The first two presentations focused on multilingual aspects. Nuno Miguel Antunes Freire, INESC, described a digital library project containing theses and dissertations, based on the LDAP technology, including Multilingual Classification Systems to allow a cross-language information retrieval service. Jarno Tenni (VTT) described the use of controlled languages for query translation in a legislative document retrieval system in the paper Automatic Translation in Multilingual User View to Legislative Databases.

Two papers addressed the issue of evaluation of information systems. The paper "WWW Interface Design, Driven by Heuristic Evaluation: The EINS-Web Project" presented by Silvana Mangiaracina, CNR, describe the experience of the evaluation and design of the EINS-Web user interface, using heuristic evaluation. Demosthenes Akoumianakis, ICS-FORTH, discussed principles for constructing user interfaces as multiple metaphor environments.

Kuldar Taveter (VTT) presented an agent-based system of semantical information retrieval IR system based on concepts and domains in his paper Intelligent Information Retrieval Based on Interconnected Concepts and Classes of Retrieval Domains. Maria Francesca Costabile (Bari University) discussed the issue of visualization and describe a technique for visualizing meta-information in the paper Information Visualization in the Interaction with Digital Libraries.

Three papers concerned the implementation of user interfaces. Two of them were based on the Dienst System. Implementing a Common User Interface for a Digital Library: the ETRDL experience presented by Donatella Castelli (CNR) discussed the design decisions and experiences underlying the design of the interface, and AQUA: An advanced user interface for the Dienst digital library system presented by László Kovács (MTA SZTAKI). Finally, based on empirically defined stylistics based genres and clustering, an interactive information retrieval interface with multi-dimensional presentation of search results which was developed in a joint project between SICS and Telia Research, was presented by Johan Dewe and Niklas Wolkert, now from Netsolutions AB.

Some important issues discussed during the workshop:

  1. Information seeking and retrieval. One important issue in Digital Library research is related to HCI and distributed information seeking and retrieval (ISR). We should consider information seeking and retrieval as embedded activities within Digital Libraries.
  2. Evaluation. Currently, a lot of different applications are being developed and used. We need techniques and methods to analyse, and evaluate different systems as well as different users, their behaviour, and tasks, when interacting with distributed information resources. This also includes developing new techniques and methods. It was also recognized that it was important to evaluate the ideas behind the systems developed.
  3. Support for interaction. We need to support interactions with information, such as texts and multimedia in information seeking activities. This includes access to multilingual information. It is also important to construct conceptual models and theories in order to understand the interactions in distributed Digital Libraries.
  4. Modalities. Future Digital Libraries will encompass alternative modalities for representations of information seeking activities.

We take this opportunity to thank the participants of the workshop and especially those who made presentations, for the many interesting discussions that took place and for making the workshop such a success. We also thank the ERCIM office for their valuable contribution to the organization of the workshop and the publication of these proceedings.

Workshop proceedings may be found at http://www.ercim.org/publication/workshop_reports.html

Please contact:
Preben Hansen
SICS - Swedish Institute of Computer Science
E-mail: preben@sics.se

The DELOS Working Group is a part of the ESPRIT Long Term Research Programme (LTR No. 21057) and is managed by ERCIM (European Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics)

The DELOS Partners are

ERCIM members:

CLRC - Central Laboratory of the Research Councils - United Kingdom
CWI - Centruum voor Wiskunde en Informatica - The Netherlands
CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Italy
FORTH - Foundation of Research and Technology - Hellas - Greece
GMD - Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung mbH - Germany
INRIA - Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique - France
INESC - Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores - Portugal
SICS - Swedish Institute of Computer Science - Sweden
ETH-SGFI - Schweizerische Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Informatik und ihrer Anwendungen - Switzerland
SINTEF DELAB - Stiftelsen for Industriell og Teknisk Forskning ved Norges Tekniske Høgskole - Norway
MTA SZTAKI - Magyar Tudományos Akadémia - Számítástechnikai és Automatizálási Kutató Intézete -Hungary
VTT - Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland

Non-ERCIM members:

University of Michigan, USA
Elsevier Sciences, The Netherlands

For additional information, please contact Costantino Thanos at:
Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Via Santa Maria 46
I-56126 Pisa
Tel: +39 50 593492
Fax: +39 50 554342
E-mail: thanos@iei.pi.cnr.it

DELOS homepage: http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/DELOS/

XER An Initiative to Define XML Encoding Rules

Contributed by:
Eliot Christian
U.S. Geological Survey
echristi@usgs.gov

The basic idea of XER (XML Encoding Rules) is to standardize rules that would allow for converting between ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language). An XER definition specifies the equivalence between appropriate ASN.1 encoded data structures and XML encoded data structures.

For developer communities making significant investments in XML, XER may leverage investments already made in ASN.1-based applications and thereby preserve the hard-won interoperability already achieved among such applications. For developer communities currently using ASN.1, XER may leverage investments being made in XML-based applications that are becoming widespread on the Internet.

The task of defining a standard set of rules to achieve loss-less and reversible transform between ASN.1 and XML is feasible because of the similarity in how each represents data structures. XML provides a facility for representing character string data structures. XML defines "markup" rules in which a data structure is encoded as a tag, value, and end-tag. ASN.1 expresses message structure types and data values. When BER (Basic Encoding Rules) is applied to the ASN.1 expressions, data structures are encoded as octets in the form of tag, length, and value (or an indefinite length value is delimited by an end-tag). To change an ASN.1/BER data structure to XML, an XML tag and end-tag are derived and the value is wrapped within. To change an XML structure into ASN.1/BER, the appropriate ASN.1/BER tag is derived and the value length is calculated.

Although ASN.1 is used in a variety of network environments, the initial focus of XER is on supporting client-server applications on the Internet using TCP/IP. Also, those currently involved in XER are working first on the ISO 23950 Information Search and Retrieval (Z39.50) protocol. It is expected that XER will be generic enough for use in other ASN.1 applications, including other Internet protocols such as LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol).

Further information about XER, including instructions for joining the discussion list, is available at <http://asf.gils.net/xer>.

  • NIST Progam Competition 99-01

    The Advanced Technology Program announces the opening of its 1999 competition to support innovative, cost-shared industrial research and development under the Advanced Technology Program. The ATP has approximately $66 million dollars in fiscal year 1999 for first- year funding of new projects.

    This year ATP is conducting one competiton, which is open to proposals from any area of technology. The subjects of the ATP research projects are proposed by industry. Awards are made on the basis of announced competitions that consider the technical and economic merits of the proposed projects. Though this competition is not targeted to any specific industry, it is open to all technologies including information technologies such as electronic publishing and related technical areas. See the ATP web site for further information about the competition. Proposals are due at 3:00 p.m. EST, 14 April 1999.

    In Print

    Point to Point

    • Cultural Heritage and European Commission Funding

      El.pub has announced the launch of the Cultural Heritage and EC Funding pages at the El.pub web site. Through the funding pages you can find information about Commission funding to cultural heritage institutions. The site provides not just a list of programs, but also information about the process and the heirarchies of funding bodies. For example, at one of the pages you find:

      "At the top end of this hierarchy are the "programmes" or "funds" with high-level objectives such as Research, Technology & Development or the Regional Development Funds. Broadly speaking, these are umbrellas for more targeted programmes run by the different Directorates General (DGs). The DGs roughly correspond to national governments' administration departments; just as the UK has its Department of Trade and Industry, so the EC has its DG III (Industry)."

      "Within each DG's programme are a number of action lines, such as DGXIII's Advanced Communication Technologies. These action lines come to be known by their acronyms (such as Ten Telecom or ACTS or Esprit) each with their own hierarchy of objectives, themes, actions, lines, and tasks. Calls for proposals are issued for a given task. Different tasks get called at different times."

      Pointers at the Cultural Heritage and EC Funding web site lead to:

      • EC funding: an introduction
      • EC funding: overview chart
      • Glossary of terms
      • Open calls
      • And many more useful sites

      El.pub is a weekly news alerter service. You may subscribe free of charge at the El.pub site. This service provides support to the advanced publishing research and development projects throughout Europe.

    • The AHDS Gateway

      The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) has announced a prototype gateway to distributed "catalogs" based on Dublin Core records. Through its Service Providers, the AHDS manages about 5000 high-quality data sources and provides access to many other complementary resources. The Gateway acts as a "union catalog" and through it you may query Service Provider collections catalogs.

      It is possible to search the Gateway through an ordinary connection to the website, and to see a list of search results, but further facilities become available to registered users. Registered users may browse or order data resources. (Resources are protected by copyright and in some cases there may be fees involved. See the agreement forms required for registration for details.) Some of the resources are full text with access available online.

      From the main Gateway page, you can access basic and advanced search forms as well as a user registration form.

    • Web IR & IE

      This site provides access to a collection of online resources for research in the field of information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE) from the web that are state of the art.

      Web techniques used at the site include traditional techniques, hypertext structure and meta-data, the structure and nature of the web, observed human behaviour on the web, other search engines, and more.

      Categories of links include:

      • Conferences
      • Online proceedings
      • Available systems
      • People
      • Working groups
      • Phd/MSc programs
      • Mailing lists
      • Newsgroups
      • Selected publications
      • PhD/MSc related work
      • Scholarships/Sponsorships
      • Internships
      • Related sites

    Deadline Reminders

    Goings On

    • Reference Service in a Digital Age: LC Next Steps, Open Discussion Session Sponsored by the Library of Congress, ALA Midwinter Meeting, 31 January 1999, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

      This discussion meeting is a follow-up to the Library of Congress June 1998 institute. It is planned as an open session to discuss the following projects that LC is considering:

      • Develop and manage a web site to serve as a clearinghouse of information about library and other projects and efforts related to digital libraries.
      • Initiate a pilot project in 1999 for a collaborative remote reference service among libraries using a variety of Internet communications technologies.
      • Pursue further discussions about core competencies for library reference staff in a digital age.

    • Management of the Library in the Electronic Era, Special Libraries Association (SLA) Mediterranean Conference, 26 - 27 February 1999, Barcelona, Spain.

      This conference is being held in cooperation with the Soceidad Espanola de Documentacion Informacion Cientifica (SEDIC), Spain; Doc6 Consultants in Information Resources, Spain; and Cenfor International Books, Italy.

      The official language of the conference is English. There will be no translation services available. Deadline for registration is 5 February 1999.

      Program Agenda

      Day 1

      • Copyright Issues in the Electronic Era (Online resources and the Web)
        • Will exceptions and limitations survive?
        • What are the implications of the new draft EU Copright Directive?
      • Licensing of Electronic Resources
        • What are the legal implications of a license?
        • How does it relate to your national copyright law?
        • What is typically included in a licensing agreement?
      • Building Library Consortia
        • How to structure a library consortium
        • Example from the U.S., U.K., and Spain
      • Explosion of the Internet
        • Quality of information
        • End-user searching
        • Preservation of Web-based products

      Day 2

      • Bringing in New Technology (first session)
        • Conducting a needs assessment
        • Deciding on which technology to purchase
        • How to find the best products
      • Bringing in New Technology (second session)
        • Budgeting
        • Helpful hints in preparing a Request for Proposal (RFP)
        • Questions to ask vendors

      The agenda for the afternoon will focus on training and customer support.

      See the web site at http://www.sla.org/professional/mediterranean.html for more information including how to register.

    • Workshop on Logical and Uncertainty Models for Information Systems, 5 - 6 July 1999, University College London, London, England. Deadline for papers is 12 February 1999.

      The purpose of this workshop is to promote discussion and interaction among members of the Information Systems community with research interests in logical and uncertainty models for the treatment of semi-structured and unstructured information. Of particular interest are papers which share experiences dealing with unstructured or poorly structured information, since a very large part of the information that will be available in future will be of this nature.

      The workshop aims at being an international forum for the presentation of both theoretical and applicative results. Papers describing application experiences are particularly encouraged.

      Papers are solicited dealing with, but not limited to, the following areas:

    • Information Retrieval
    • Information Filtering
    • Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval
    • Hypermedia
    • Digital Libraries
    • where information is modelled and/or managed using any of, but not limited to, the following approaches:

      Probabilistic Theory Non-standard Logics Default Reasoning
      Fuzzy Methods Non-monotonic Logics Knowledge Acquisition
      Theory of Evidence Meta Logics Knowledge Representation
      Belief Networks Situation Theory Machine Learning
      Possibility Theory Multivalued Logics Inductive Methods
      Rough Sets Description Logics Abductive Methods
      Approximate Reasoning Belief Revision Relevance Theory

      See the workshop web site for detailed submission guidelines.

    • 10th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA'99, 30 August - 3 September 1999, University of Florence, Florence, Italy. Call for papers with various deadlines in February and March 1999.

      The aim of DEXA 99 is to present both research contributions in the area of data and expert systems and a large spectrum of already implemented or just being developed applications. DEXA will offer the opportunity to extensively discuss requirements, problems, and solutions in the field. The workshop and conference should inspire a fruitful dialogue between developers in practice, users of database and expert systems, and scientists working in the field.

      This conference is made up of several workshops, each with a particular focus. Papers are solicited for the workshops, but as the submission deadline varies from workshop to workshop, please see the individual workshop descriptions for details:

      The main topics of DEXA 99 will include, but are not limited to:

      • Active and Deductive Databases
      • CIM - Applications
      • Client Server and Open Network Databases
      • Connectionist Models
      • Constraint Based Reasoning
      • CSCW
      • Databases in the Humanities
      • Digital Libraries
      • Distributed and Parallel Database Systems
      • Expert Systems Architecture
      • Hypertext / Hypermedia
      • Information Modelling
      • Information Retrieval
      • Interoperable Databases
      • Knowledge Acquisition
      • Knowledge Engineering
      • Legal Information Systems
      • Mobile Information Systems
      • Multimedia Databases
      • Natural Language Interfaces/Processing
      • Object-Oriented Databases
      • Office Information Systems
      • Qualitative Reasoning
      • Realtime Databases
      • Reverse Engineering
      • Scientific/Engineering Applications
      • Security
      • Social/Governmental Information Systems
      • Statistical Databases
      • Temporal and Spatial Databases
      • Uncertainty Handling
      • Uncertainty Reasoning
      • User Interfaces to Databases
      • Workflow and Process Automation
      • WWW Interfaces

    • Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration, IJCAI-99, 31 July 1999, Stockholm, Sweden. Call for papers. Deadline for submission: 1 March 1999.

      The growth of the Internet and other on-line information repositories has greatly simplified access to numerous sources of information, but this growth has vastly complicated tasks that involve finding, extracting, merging or synthesizing such information. The problem is one not of information distribution, but of information integration. Building tools to simplify access to the wealth of available information constitutes a significant challenge to computer science. Artificial Intelligence is well-suited to this challenge, with its emphasis on heuristic solutions, knowledge representation and knowledge-intensive techniques, explicit management of uncertainty, learning and adaptivity, planning, and so forth.

      Over the past several years, the "information integration" community in AI has been exploring these issues. The result has been substantial progress on problems such as representing information sources; planning information-gathering actions; handling semantic heterogeneity; optimizing queries; caching; exploiting ontological knowledge; tools for Web sites construction; resource discovery; automatically learning to access sources; and scaling information-gathering systems up to the "real world".

      Papers are sought for the IJCAI-99 Workshop on the following topics:

      • modeling the contents of information systems
      • flexible approaches to selecting relevant sources
      • approaches for efficient and flexible query planning
      • learning or constructing wrappers for extracting data
      • resolving inconsistencies in identifying objects
      • integration approaches using ontologies/contexts
      • design principles for ontologies used for integration
      • languages for information integration
      • advanced integration architectures
      • semantic, schematic, vocabulary, data heterogeneity
      • information sources in Internet, Intranet
      • classification schemes (for mediators, semantic heterogeneity, etc.)
      • tools for supporting information integration
      • reviews and evaluation of existing integration approaches
      • practical experience with integration approaches
      • theoretical perspectives of information integrations
      • ontology mapping, ontology algebras and context logic
      • intelligent information retrieval
      • security aspects
      • change management
      • federated databases and multi-databases
      • integration of uncertain or inaccurate sources

      A selected number of accepted papers from the workshop will be expanded and revised for inclusion in Knowledge and Information Systems: An International Journal (by Springer-Verlag) and the workshop proceedings will be available on-line.

    • ECDL99, Third European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries 22 - 24 September 1999, Paris, France. Call for papers. Deadline for submssion: 1 April 1999.

      ECDL will take place in Paris at the prestigious location of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It is the third of a series, partially funded by the European Commission's TMR Programme, of European conferences on research and technology for digital libraries. Its main objective is to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to present their work on enabling technologies for digital libraries. The conference also provides an opportunity for scientists to develop a research community in Europe focusing on digital library development. Conference organisers solicit papers, panels and tutorials on novel research on digital libraries, including but not limited to the following list of topics:

      • Digital library models, frameworks, and systems, interoperability, scalability
      • Information retrieval, navigation, indexing, catalogues
      • Multimedia information management, digitization (image, graphic, video, sound)
      • Electronic authoring, publishing, multilinguality
      • Metadata, knowledge representation, agent technologies
      • Experiments in DL system development, business models for digital libraries (pricing, etc.)
      • User interfaces, evaluation of these interfaces by users

      The conference is partially sponsored by ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) which will in particular provide some scholarships for young researchers attending the conference. Some selected papers will be published in the International Journal on Digital Libraries.

      For additional information, see the conference web site at http://www-rocq.inria.fr/EuroDL99/.

    • Electronic Serials From Acquisition To Access Institute, 16 - 17 April 1999, Portland, OR, USA.

      This Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) Institute is being organized to meet the needs of librarians from all types and sizes of libraries who handle electronic serials. The Institute plans include a keynote presentation, focused breakout sessions, and a panel discussion which will address both theoretical and practical aspects of electronic serials. The full program is expected to be available soon at http://www.ala.org/alcts/events/institutes/esi3.html.

    • International Symposium on Digital Libraries 1999 (ISDL'99) 28 - 29 September 1999, Tsukuba, Japan. Call for papers. Submission deadline: 20 May 1999.

      This symposium is sponsored by the University of Library and Information Science (ULIS), in Japan. It will provide an international forum for papers and discussions by researchers, developers and practitioners in and for Digital Libraries. The symposium topics are not limited, and may include:


      • Digital Libraries and wide-area and high-performance networks
      • Storage and communication technologies for a wide variety of and vast amounts of multimedia information,
      • Digital information in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences,
      • Editing, organizing, publishing, access, and computer-human interaction technologies for multimedia information,
      • Information technologies for multi-cultural and multi-lingual information for worldwide information sharing,
      • Digital library functions as a common ground for intellectual activities,
      • Roles of, and restrictions on, the digital library in communities,
      • Higher education environment for networked information society.

      Please see the ISDL'99 web site for submission guidelines and instructions.

    • Computer Policy and Law Annual Seminar, 13 - 16 July 1999, Cornell University Campus, Ithaca, NY, USA.

      Developing effective computer-use policies are often developed as a response to computer-abuse crises. This seminar provides the opportunity to obtain skills and knowledge needed to improve collaboration between technology specialists and legal counsel. It is aimed particularly at university attorneys, judicial officers, technology administrators, risk managers, webmasters, publications directors, and public administration administrators. Attendence is limited and past seminars have filled quickly.

    • Fourth International Summer School on the Digital Library, 15 - 27 August 1999, Tilburg, The Netherlands.

      Contributed by Jola Prinsen
      Deputy Manager
      Ticer B.V.

      Press Report

      Fourth International Summer School on the Digital Library

      The fourth International Summer School on the Digital Library will be held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, from Sunday 15 up to and including Friday 27 August 1999. The course is updated every year on the basis of the most recent developments. It provides an excellent refreshment opportunity for librarians (working at middle and higher management levels in university, college, research and business libraries) as well as for teachers at library schools. The course is also of value for publishers, subscription agents and other intermediaries.

      Some 30 lectures, case studies and demonstrations will be presented by international experts. In 1998, lecturers included:

      • William Y. Arms (Corporation for National Research Initiatives, USA)
      • Lynne J. Brindley (University of Leeds, UK)
      • Ronald J. Dietz (Elsevier Science, USA)
      • Hans Geleijnse (Katholieke Universiteit Brabant, NL)
      • Emanuella Giavarra (Chambers of Mark Watson-Gandy, UK)
      • John A. Hearty (OCLC, USA)
      • Richard Luce (Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA)
      • Prof. John Mackenzie Owen (Ticer B.V., NL)
      • Eugenie Prime (Hewlett Packard Company, USA)
      • Bas Savenije (Universiteit Utrecht, NL)
      • Herbert Van de Sompel (Universiteit van Gent, BE)

      In 1998, themes included:

      • the changing information chain (publishers, subscription agents, scientists)
      • the future role of libraries strategic planning
      • organisational, management and financial issues
      • electronic documents (formats, copyright, journals, research papers, licensing)
      • information technology (networks, CD-ROMs, integrated desktops)
      • Internet and WWW
      • users in an electronic environment
      • preparing your library staff

      Group discussions and workshops will enable you to apply the new information in your own situation.

      The first three Summer Schools were a great success. They were attended by 150 participants from 23 different countries. Ninety per cent of the participants indicated that they would recommend the Summer School to colleagues in the field.

      The Summer School is organized by Ticer (Tilburg Innovation Centre for Electronic Resources) in cooperation with Tilburg University. You can put in a request for a brochure on the Summer School at Ticer B.V., P.O. Box 4191, 5004 JD Tilburg, the Netherlands, telephone +31-13-4668310, telefax +31-13-4668383, electronic mail Ticer@kub.nl. The text of this brochure can also be found on the home page of Ticer: http://www.ticer.nl.

    Pointers in this Column

    10th International Conference and Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications, DEXA'99, 30 August - 3 September 1999, University of Florence, Florence, Italy. Call for papers with various deadlines in February and March 1999

    http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dexa99/

    3rd International Workshop on Query Processing in Multimedia Information Systems (QPMIDS '99)

    http://www.rd.nacsis.ac.jp/~andres/qpmids99.html

    8th DELOS Workshop on User Interfaces in Digital Libraries

    http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/DELOS/
    http://www.ercim.org/publications/ws-proceedings/

    A Novel Economic Approach to the Evaluation of Academic Research Libraries by Wonsik Shim and Paul B. Kantor, Alexandria Project Laboratory, School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, Rutgers University

    http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/research/alexandria/reports/dea_asis98.html

    Computer Policy and Law Annual Seminar, 13 - 16 July 1999, Cornell University Campus, Ithaca, NY, USA.

    http://www.sce.cornell.edu/EXEC/html/cpl.html

    Cultural Heritage and European Commission Funding

    http://inf2.pira.co.uk/pub/ecwebsite97.html

    Digital Libraries '99, The Fourth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, Sponsored by ACM SIGIR and SIGWEB. Deadline for paper submission: 8 February 1999. Deadline for tutorial, demonstration, panel, and workshop proposals: 15 February 1999.

    http://fox.cs.vt.edu/DL99

    Digital Libraries: a National Library Perspective by Warwick S. Cathro, National Library of Australia, for the Information Online & On Disc Conference, 19 - 21 January, Sydney, Australia.

    http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/cathro4.html

    ECDL99, Third European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, 22 - 24 September 1999, Paris, France. Call for papers. Deadline for submssion: 1 April 1999

    http://www-rocq.inria.fr/EuroDL99/

    Electronic Serials From Acquisition To Access Institute, 16 -17 April 1999, Portland, OR, USA.

    http://www.ala.org/alcts/events/institutes/esi3.html

    First International Workshop on Document Analysis and Understanding for Document Databases (DAUDD'99)

    http://mcculloch.ing.unifi.it/DAUDD99

    Fourth International Summer School on the Digital Library, 15 -27 August 1999, Tilburg, The Netherlands.

    http://www.ticer.nl

    Hypertext '99, 10th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 21 - 25 February, Darmstadt, Germany. Early registration deadline: 15 January 1999.

    http://www.kom.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/~ht99/
    http://www.kom.e-technik.tu-darmstadt.de/~ht99/html/registration.html

    International Workshop on Network-Based Information System (NBIS'99)

    http://www.takilab.k.dendai.ac.jp/conf/dexa99/nbis/

    International Workshop on Internet Data Management (IDM’99)

    http://www.cais.ntu.edu.sg:8000/conf/IDM'99.html

    International Workshop on Information Technologies for Electronic Commerce (ITeC'99)

    http://www.kti.ae.poznan.pl/dexa_itec/

    International Workshop on Legal Information Systems and Applications (LISA'99)

    http://www.idg.fi.cnr.it/dexa99/lisa/dexa99ws.htm

    International Workshop on Electronic Commerce and Security

    http://www.wi-inf.uni-essen.de/~dexa99ws/

    International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Databases: innovative applications and new architectures (PaDD'99)

    http://www.ifi.uni-klu.ac.at/~harald/padd99.html

    International Workshop on Similarity Search (IWOSS'99)

    http://www-db.deis.unibo.it/IWOSS99

    International Workshop on Web-Based Information Visualization (WebVis'99)

    http://www.informatik.uni-konstanz.de/swe/WebVis99.html

    International Workshop on Spatio-Temporal Data Models and Languages

    http://lbdwww.epfl.ch/e/conferences/DEXA/cfp.html

    International Workshop on Mobility in Databases and Distributed Systems (MDDS'99)

    http://www.ct.monash.edu.au/DPMC/mdds/mdds99/

    International Symposium on Digital Libraries 1999 (ISDL'99) 28 - 29 September 1999, Tsukuba, Japan. Call for papers. Submission deadline: 20 May 1999.

    http://www.DL.ulis.ac.jp/ISDL99/CFPE.html

    Management of the Library in the Electronic Era, Special Libraries Association (SLA) Mediterranean Conference, 26 - 27 February 1999, Barcelona, Spain. Deadline for registration: 5 February 1999.

    http://www.sla.org/professional/mediterranean.html

    Museums and the Web 1999, 11-14 March, New Orleans, LA, USA. Deadline for regular registration: 15 February 1999.

    http://www.archimuse.com/mw99/

    New Frontiers in Grey Literature, GL '99, 4 - 5 October 1999, Washington, DC, USA. Deadline for abstracts 1 February 1999.

    http://www.konbib.nl/infolev/greynet/gl99.htm

    Racing Toward Tomorrow: ACRL 9th National Conference, 8 - 11 April 1999, Detroit, MI, USA. Early bird registration deadline: 18 January 1999.

    http://www.ala.org/acrl/prendex.html
    https://www.cmsusa.com/acrl/

    Reference Service in a Digital Age: LC Next Steps, Open Discussion Session Sponsored by the Library of Congress, ALA Midwinter Meeting, 31 January 1999, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

     

    The AHDS Gateway

    http://prospero.ahds.ac.uk:8080/ahds_live/

    The First International Workshop on the Requirements Engineering Process (REP'99)

    http://panoramix.univ-paris1.fr/CRINFO/REP99/

    Virtually New - Creating the Digital Collection, A Review of Digitisation Projects in Local Authorities, Libraries and Archives, published by the Library and Information Commission

    http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/digitisation/

    Virtually New - Creating the Digital Collection, Executive Summary

    http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/digitisation/execsum.html

    Virtually New - Creating the Digital Collection, Press Release

    http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/lic/digitisation/press-release.html

    Web IR & IE

    http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/~einat/web_ir/

    Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration, IJCAI-99, 31 July 1999, Stockholm, Sweden. Call for papers. Deadline for submission: 1 March 1999.

    http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/WBS/dfe/iii99.html

    Workshop on Logical and Uncertainty Models for Information Systems, 5 - 6 July 1999, University College London, London, England. Deadline for submission of papers: 12 February 1999.

    http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/lumis99/

    XER (XML Encoding Rules)

    http://asf.gils.net/xer

    Copyright (c) 1999 Corporation for National Research Initiatives

    Correction made to DELOS hyperlink at the request of the author, The Editor, January 20, 1999 9:25 AM.

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    DOI: 10.1045/january99-clips