CNI Presents Program At Task Force Meeting

Citation

Rader, H.B. (1999), "CNI Presents Program At Task Force Meeting", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 16 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.1999.23916cac.003

CNI Presents Program At Task Force Meeting

Hannelore B. Rader

Introduction

The 1998 Fall CNI (Coalition of Networked Information)[1] Task Force Meeting, held December 7-8 in Seattle, Washington, was attended by close to 300 representatives from research universities, publishers, and information technology. The task force presented its program, a joint effort between the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE in order to advance scholarship and intellectual productivity.

Clifford Lynch, CNI Executive Director, opened the meeting by giving an overview of the latest developments in digital publishing, electronic information access and copyright legislation. He referred to programs and showcase presentations, as described below, in terms of developing standards for creating and decoding digital objects from archives in such places as the New York Public Library. He summarized concerns about the restrictive effect of the latest copyright legislation on electronic access to research materials.

Janet Murray, Professor at MIT and author of Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, offered important insights on new genres for digital media and the construction of instructional technology content as well as a new look at how people read and learn in the digital culture. Some of her work can be located at web.mit.edu/jhmurray/www/

Brewster Kahle, President of Alexa Internet http://www.alexa.com and founder and chair of the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org offered his views on directions for digital libraries and for network navigation. He expressed a deep concern for the lack of preservation of Internet information. Information such as Web page content changes continuously and most of such information is not archived or saved and thus lost for the future.

Sessions

Thirty separate sessions offered attendees a variety of opportunities for discussion on the following topics:

Distance Education and Instructional Media

Beginning in January 1999, the California Digital Library (CDL) was described as a virtual library serving nine campuses and, eventually, all citizens of California. CDL's vision, its design, its organizational structure, and its experience in collection building through licensing, digitization, technology transfer, and data-based development were discussed.

Library support for the University of Toronto's distance education programs was described. Challenges faced by the library staff in serving distance users were discussed and a new project was described to provide interactive, Web-based support. Experimentation with the use of commercial software such as Bali Soft and Net Effects was discussed. The following URLs provide additional information about this software: http://www.balifoft.com and http://www.neteffects.com

The Committee on Instructional Cooperation (CIC), founded in 1958, is a consortium of the big ten universities including the University of Chicago. http://www/coc/uiuc.edu The CIC discussed how the virtual electronic library will link their online catalogs using Z39.50. The next phase will involve interlibrary loan-related items such as:

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  automating patron authentication;

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  copyright tracking;

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  remote circulation; and

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  statistics.

The Western Governors University began enrolling students in September 1998 and recently awarded a contract for a central library to serve students and faculty. They recognized that comprehensive library resources and services are critical elements in supporting distance education programs. http://www.wgu.edu

Currently 300 courses are offered by 13 institutions. New mechanisms have been established for formal recognition of learning by promoting competency-based education.

Digital Initiatives

Research libraries, archives, museums, and others are involved in creating digital libraries. A number of examples were described and discussed at the meeting. The Making of America (MoA II) project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is setting standards for creating and encoding digital objects from different types of archives. More discussion is needed to proceed on the project. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/moa2/

The ARL Digital Initiatives Database is a collaboration between the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Association of Research Libraries. It is a Web-based registry for descriptions of digital initiatives in or involving libraries. It tries to capture basic information for a wide range of digital initiatives. http://www.arl.org/did/

Digital Theses/Dissertations

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University explained their Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) project, funded for the past three years by a FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement for Post Secondary Education) grant.Their students have submitted more than 1,200 dissertations in electronic format. These students received training and used the Web page in order to comply. http://www.ndltd.org/

Forty institutions from the USA and other countries have joined the project already; several of these institutions are accepting electronic versions of dissertations from their students. Students and faculty are concerned with such issues as plagiarism, relations with publishers, and long-term archiving.

UMI provided a progress report on their ProQuest Digital Dissertation project. Since 1938 UMI has been involved in dissertation archiving for the North American academic community. Included in this major project are reference and on-demand copy services. The UMI database now includes 1.5 million citations for dissertations dating to 1861. More than one million titles are available in full text, and 55,000 titles are added annually.

ProQuest Digital Dissertations is a new program offered by UMI to provide dissertation access through the World Wide Web. http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations

More than 100,000 citations and abstracts are now available for searching on the Web and most of these are available in full text. Institutions publishing with UMI will have free access to online full text in PDF format for their dissertations and theses. Additionally, free 24-page previews of other dissertations submitted from 1997 forward and a unique Web URL will be provided that links them to listings of citations, abstracts, and 24-page previews.

Copyright/Licensing Information

A discussion of the CNI White Paper on enabling access in digital libraries outlined various challenges:

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  questions of privacy, legal expertise to draft decisions on managing digital data in relation to questions of privacy;

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  legal expertise to draft contracts and licenses for implementation through technical mechanisms authentication and authorization;

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  technology experience to design new software for controlling electronic use and misuse; and

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  publishers and librarians who provide information and balance copyright with access to cultural records of knowledge.

Overall, the discussion focussed on managing access to published knowledge in digital form within the context of the research library. Ultimately, all citizens must be concerned with issues of privacy, protection, authorization, and authentication.

A discussion on online intellectual property centered on:

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  when it is legal to use;

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  when it constitutes illegal use of information such as using commercial publications of Web material without permission, and how linking to sites may contain illicit reproduced material; and

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  the concept of fair use in the era of a newly passed Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Much information is available on this new Copyright Act but the academic and research communities have just begun to discuss how the Act will affect teaching and research. Related studies and reports are available at the Copyright Management Center at Indiana University by Kenneth D. Crews and others. http://www.iupui.edu/it/copyinfo

Additional topics of discussion at the meeting centered on Internet II, adapting Internet research technology, and creating more coordinated access to information on the Internet.

The meeting was informative and presented more information than an individual could absorb. However, good summaries and handouts helped. Most useful were the interactions with peers.

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  Note

  1. The Coalition for Networked Information was founded in 1990 by the Association of Research Libraries, CAUSE, and Educom to address concerns regarding use of information technology in higher education. CNI aims to build partnerships among scholarship, research, education, and technology and hopes to further collaborations to explore new roles for these partners in the era of electronic information and technology.

Hannelore B. Rader is university librarian, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. rader@louisville.edu