D-Lib Magazine
November 1996

ISSN 1082-9873

Clips and Pointers

Workshop Summary: Second DELOS Workshop -- Interoperability and Metadata

Thomas H. Baker, German National Research Center for Information Technology

Some thirty experts in databases and librarianship met at an ERCIM-sponsored workshop on interoperability and metadata that took place 7-8 October 1996 in Bad Honnef, near Bonn, Germany. The workshop was organized by Thomas Baker of the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) as the second in a series of workshops on strategic issues for the DELOS Working Group, a European Union-sponsored initiative of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), University of Michigan, and Elsevier. The goal was to bring together diverse communities oriented to "interoperability" (database experts) and "metadata" (more library scientists) in order to identify objectives held in common, though couched perhaps in different terms.

The Dublin Core -- a simple but extensible set of descriptive metadata elements -- was discussed both by its designers and by several German organizations currently using it to catalog Web materials. Researchers described how "thesauri" or "ontologies" or "attribute models" or "inheritance hierarchies of attributes" could be used to generate "asset models" or "conspectuses" for use by intelligent agents or in middleware. Of particular interest was the Warwick Framework for managing diverse metadata sets as packages within containers. Other speakers related these issues to catalog convergence among European national libraries, metadata of hypertext links, integrating text and relational databases, Z39.50, and payment schemes.

The workshop Web page, which includes a list of attendees, position papers, and links to related articles and Web sites, can be found at the Web site of the ERCIM Digital Library Initiative. A brief summary of the workshop will appear in issue 28 of ERCIM News.


Workshop Summary: Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives

Stephen Chapman and Anne R. Kenney, Cornell University

The Cornell University Library Department of Preservation and Conservation held its seventh digital imaging workshop, October 13-18, 1996. The class of sixteen included librarians, archivists, records managers, and service bureau representatives from the United States and Australia. Participants convened in Ithaca, New York for theoretical and technical overviews to access, quality, and cost issues associated with the digital reformatting of library and archival materials.

The Cornell workshop emphasizes a managerial approach to imaging, and seeks to provide information managers with decision-making approaches to create, manage, and make available digital collections of long-term value. The curriculum combines lectures, discussion, and hands-on training in directed labs. Benchmarking image quality, vendor relations and RFP development, and hybrid approaches to imaging were among the specialized topics discussed. Carl Lagoze led the session on organizing and indexing digital objects, and James Reilly addressed issues associated with scanning photographs.

Throughout the week, participants worked with sample documents representing the wide range of materials in libraries and archives. In their final reports, each group emphasized that digital imaging projects are acts of collaboration. Making decisions about selection, reformatting, and access requires negotiation, and no single approach brings multiple parties into easy agreement. The organizers of the Cornell workshop hope that the "alumni" who go on to initiate their own projects will continue these discussions in a number of forums, and participate in collective efforts to adopt standards and best practices for digital library development.

For further information about the Cornell workshop series, contact Anne R. Kenney, Associate Director of the Department of Preservation and Conservation ark3@cornell.edu.


Point-to-Point


In Print


Goings On


Pointers in This Column:

2nd ACM International Conference
on Digital Libraries
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
July 23 - 26, 1997
Call for papers
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~diglib97/
16th Annual Minnesota State, Local Government and Education
Computer and Information Management Symposium
http://www.state.mn.us/ebranch/admin/iisac/conf/comsym96.html
American Anthropological Association and
Computing Research Association
Workshop on Culture, Society, and Advanced
Information Technology
June 1-2, 1995
Proceedings (Postscript) and Executive Summary
http://cra.org/Reports/Aspects/
Canadian Government Information
Locator Service (GILS) Pilot Project
http://gils.gc.ca/
Charles H. Bailey
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography
http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html.
Digitization Activities at the National Library
of Canada-Bibliotheque nationale du canada
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/digiproj/edigiact.htm
ERCIM, Special issue on
digital libraries
Digital Libraries site
http://www- ercim.inria.fr/publication/Ercim_News/en.html
http://www.area.pi.cnr.it/ErcimDL/
ICSU/UNESCO Conference
Electronic Publishing in Science
Proceedings
http://www.thomson.com:8866/icsu/Informati on/icsu.html
IMAGES 1:
The National Library of Australia's Documentary Images
http://www2.nla.gov.au/imagecoll//
Jack London Collection
Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE (tm)
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/
Journal of Internet Cataloging:
The International Quarterly of Digital Organization, Classification and Access (JIC)
http://jic.libraries.psu.edu
Learning to Live with E-Journals:
Some Practical Solutions
November 21, 1996
http://epip.lboro.ac.uk/uksg/hi/diary.htm.
Licensing Electronic Resources:
The State of the Evolving Art
December 8-9, 1996
http://arl.cni.org/scomm/licpr.html.
SIGIR-96 Workshop
on Networked Information Retrieval
http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/nir96

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