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OA in Germany
by Subbiah Arunachalam 02 Oct '04

02 Oct '04

Friends: Here is a new German open access initiative. We should persude funding agencies in India to adopt such programmes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] --------------------------------- More on eSciDoc Bobby Pickering, German Government funds OA initiative <http://www.iwr.co.uk/IWR/1158510>, Information World Review, October 1, 2004. Excerpt: "The German government has awarded Euro 6.1m (£4.2m) to STM publisher FIZ Karlsruhe and the Max Planck Society (MPS) to develop a platform for web-based collaborative scientific work and self-publishing. The five-year eSciDoc project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), will provide another precedent for state funding of open access initiatives when the UK government responds to the HoC's Scientific Committee report released in June. MPS is a not-for-profit research organisation that signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities last October. The eSciDoc project will enable scientists in its 80 institutes to collaborate on research and publish their results on a long-term basis in open archives developed by FIZ Karlsruhe technology teams." OA in Germany Friends: Here is a new German open access initiative. We should persude funding agencies in India to adopt such programmes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] --------------------------------- More on eSciDoc Bobby Pickering, German Government funds OA initiative < http://www.iwr.co.uk/IWR/1158510 http://www.iwr.co.uk/IWR/1158510 > , Information World Review, October 1, 2004. Excerpt: "The German government has awarded Euro 6.1m (£4.2m) to STM publisher FIZ Karlsruhe and the Max Planck Society (MPS) to develop a platform for web-based collaborative scientific work and self-publishing. The five-year eSciDoc project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), will provide another precedent for state funding of open access initiatives when the UK government responds to the HoC's Scientific Committee report released in June. MPS is a not-for-profit research organisation that signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities last October. The eSciDoc project will enable scientists in its 80 institutes to collaborate on research and publish their results on a long-term basis in open archives developed by FIZ Karlsruhe technology teams."

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History of OA [in the past ten years]
by Subbiah Arunachalam 02 Oct '04

02 Oct '04

Friends: Here is a well-written article on the history of the Open access movement. I am sure you will find it enjoyable reading. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ------------------------------------------ Information Today Vol. 21 No. 9 - October 2004 Poynder on Point Ten Years After By Richard Poynder The open access (OA) movement has had some big wins this year: In July, a cross-party group of British politicians called on the U.K. government to make all publicly funded research accessible to everyone "free of charge, online." That same month, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations recommended that all NIH-funded research be made freely available 6 months after publication. But where did the OA movement come from, and where is it taking us? For the genesis of the OA movement, we need to step back 10 years, to June 1994, when professor of cognitive science Stevan Harnad posted what he called a "subversive proposal" to the Electronic Journals mailing list at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Harnad's post consisted of a simple but radical proposition: Since researchers' only interest in publishing is to share their ideas with as many of their peers as possible-and they are, therefore, happy to give their papers away-the price tag of journal subscriptions not only imposes an undesirable restriction on that sharing but, in the age of the Internet, is no longer even necessary. Consequently, he concluded, researchers should immediately start self-archiving their papers on the Internet, thereby maximizing the impact of their ideas and more effectively reaching "the eyes and minds of peers, fellow esoteric scientists and scholars the world over." While most mailing list messages instantly fall into justifiable oblivion, Harnad's proposal sparked a seminal online debate (one, ironically, was later published as a book) and immediately became the de facto manifesto of the embryonic OA movement. A decade later, OA is now threatening to overturn the $6 billion scholarly publishing industry and is forcing even the largest publishers against the ropes. Earlier this year, for instance, the CEO of Reed Elsevier was obliged to appear ignominiously before British politicians to explain why he thought it acceptable for publishers to make a 34-percent profit from selling publicly funded research back to the very people who had (freely) provided it in the first place: namely, researchers and their institutions. But how did the OA movement grow from one apparently random message on a mailing list to the powerful force for change that it represents today? Not the First Of course, Harnad was not the first to see the Internet's potential for enabling new ways of sharing research. Leaving aside pre-Web luminaries like Ted Nelson and Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, physicist Paul Ginsparg had founded the Internet's first preprint service, arXiv, 3 years prior to Harnad's message. Created to allow physicists to share their ideas more quickly than the lengthy process of publication permitted, arXiv had 20,000 users by the time Harnad posted the Subversive Proposal and was receiving 35,000 hits per day. For this reason, Harnad cited arXiv as a proof of concept, although his ambitions were somewhat grander. Nor was Harnad the first to climb over the access barrier imposed by journal subscriptions. Charles Oppenheim, professor of information science at Loughborough University, points out that librarians had been "banging on about the high costs of subscribing to journals published by commercial publishers" for a long time. As these costs increased, librarians were having to cancel journals, depriving faculty of access to them. Indeed, many trace the roots of the OA movement to the growing activism of librarians who, in pursuit of remedies to the growing problem of journal price inflation, founded the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) advocacy group in 1998. But where SPARC's initial focus was on advocating for alternative, less costly journals and arXiv was a central, discipline-based repository of preprints, Harnad wanted to see the entire corpus of scholarly literature made freely available on the Internet-a goal that he believes could be best achieved by researchers continuing to publish in traditional journals, but then self-archiving their articles locally. Moreover, obsessed with making the revolution happen-and blessed with a facility for rhetoric and augmentation that few can equal-Harnad has spent the last 10 years cajoling, hectoring, haranguing, and pleading with fellow researchers and verbally battering critics into submission (or at least bruised silence). Thus, while Harnad cannot claim to have invented the OA movement, his phenomenal energy and determination, coupled with a highly focused view of what is needed, undoubtedly earns him the title of chief architect of open access. Naiveté Indeed, over the years many others have "independently discovered" the self-evident logic of OA, but few have matched Harnad's focused energy-those who have often proved to be prone to naiveté. In 1999, for example, when Nobel prize winner-and the then-director of the NIH- Harold Varmus proposed a new biomedical research literature server called E-Biomed, he appeared to assume that publishers only needed to be asked to open their content vaults to the public. Modelled on arXiv, E-Biomed was mooted as "an electronic public library of medicine and other life sciences" consisting of a comprehensive, fully searchable free repository of full-text research articles, including both preprint and post-print texts. By the time it was launched as PubMed Central in February 2000, however, the project was a pale shadow of Varmus' initial concept. Why? Because, despite widespread support from scientists, publishers and learned societies mounted an aggressive campaign of opposition to E-Biomed. As a consequence, the preprint component was eliminated and delays were introduced between article publication and posting to the archive. Moreover, since publishers routinely acquire the copyright for papers that they publish, PubMed Central relied on publisher co-operation. Due to this fact, it's no surprise that 4 years after its launch, only 161 journals (most of which are freely available elsewhere on the Web) are currently archived with PubMed Central. Varmus evidently decided that publishers needed to have their arms twisted a little. Therefore, in November 2000, he founded the Public Library of Science (PLoS) with scientists Michael Eisen and Patrick Brown. The aim was to persuade fellow scientists to sign an open letter pledging to discontinue submitting papers to any journal that refused to make the research articles it published "available through online public libraries of science such as PubMed Central" 6 months after publication. PLoS was a great cause and it attracted nearly 34,000 signatures from scientists in 180 countries. But, while a small handful of publishers complied, most blithely ignored the PLoS letter. Worse, most of the scientist signatories were happy to forswear their own petition and continued publishing in the very journals that had turned a deaf ear to their request. What Varmus and his PLoS colleagues had failed to appreciate is that most publishers would rather give their eyeteeth than cooperate in any scheme that threatens their profits. More realistically, Harnad has always tended to assume that, rather than going cap-in-hand to publishers, researchers should simply "free the refereed literature" themselves. That said, there was a naive element to the Subversive Proposal, too, since Harnad's plan would have led to researchers posting their papers on thousands of isolated FTP sites. This would have meant that anyone wanting to access the papers would have needed prior knowledge of the papers' existence and the whereabouts of every relevant archive. They would then have had to search each archive separately. Today, Harnad concedes that "anonymous FTP sites and arbitrary Web sites are more like common graves, insofar as searching is concerned." Self-Archiving Toolkit For this reason, Harnad also became an ardent advocate for the creation of a self-archiving toolkit that could provide the OA movement with the means to compete with the electronic platforms that publishers were developing as they began to offer subscription-based online access to their journals. It is no accident that many of the OA tools subsequently produced were developed at Southampton University, where Harnad moved shortly after posting the Subversive Proposal. In 2000, for instance, Southampton University's Department of Electronics and Computer Science released EPrints software. Designed to enable institutions to create interoperable archives for researchers to post their papers, EPrints software utilizes common metadata-tagging standards developed under the JISC-funded Open Archives Initiative (OAI), thereby enabling multiple distributed archives to be treated as one virtual archive. And, to enable this virtual archive to be searched, a number of OAI "Googles" were developed-most notably the University of Michigan's OAIster. By regularly harvesting records from diverse OAI-compliant repositories, OAIster aggregates the content from the entire population of OAI-compliant archives, enabling them to be cross-searched via a single search interface. Once relevant articles have been discovered, researchers can then utilize Southampton University's ParaCite service to locate the most accessible full-text version available on the Web simply by pasting a paper's abstract into the ParaCite search box and following the links. And those wanting to assess the impact of self-archived papers can use Southampton University's CiteBase, which is able to rank self-archived articles by a number of factors, including most-cited author, paper, etc. Meanwhile, apparently oblivious to such developments, publishers were engaged in an orgy of consolidation, and, today, the two largest STM publishers, Elsevier and Springer, between them control around 40 percent of the STM journal market. Growing concerns about such consolidation, however, were to provide even greater rationale for OA. OA Publishing But one publisher did see the approaching storm. Conscious that the core issue was not costs, per se, but, rather, the barrier that the traditional subscription model imposed between reader and research, Vitek Tracz, the chairman of Current Science Group, decided that rather than posing a threat to publishers, OA offered a new opportunity. By shifting costs from the reader to the author, he concluded that publishers could make research articles freely available, yet still charge for publication. In 1998, therefore, Tracz sold a number of publishing businesses to Elsevier and founded the world's first commercial OA publisher, BioMed Central (BMC). Rather than charging readers (via subscriptions) to access its journals, BMC charges authors to publish their papers. Today, BMC publishes 110 Web-only journals in the biological and medical sciences-all of which are immediately released on the Web as well as archived in PubMed Central. The OA publishing model was a novel and creative response to the growing demands from OA advocates. "The fact that Vitek Tracz put his money where his mouth is by starting BioMed Central as an open access publishing company was a major commitment to open access that hadn't been there before, and a breakthrough," says BMC publisher Jan Velterop. To have a commercial publisher embrace OA also provided a powerful credibility boost to the movement. By now conscious of the limitations of advocacy and impressed with what BMC was doing, PLoS reinvented itself in 2001 as an OA publisher and set about establishing new OA journals. Last October, PLoS Biology was launched; this month (October), the first issue of its second journal, PLoS Medicine, will be published. "Public Library of Science began as an advocacy group for the NIH archive, PubMed Central," Varmus recently explained to The Scientist. "Subsequently, it became a publishing house." However, the development of OA publishing was to sow the seeds for future discord in the movement. It was, after all, a deviation from Harnad's original concept, which had assumed that researchers would continue to use traditional journals, but then self-archive their papers. True, Harnad had anticipated that publishers might eventually need to downsize, perhaps eventually to provide peer-review services alone, but OA publishing had created a new type of journal. While this met the growing calls for all published research articles to be freely available, Harnad became increasingly concerned that it could hamper progress. In 2002, however, there was sufficient good news to paper over any potential cracks in the movement. In December, PLoS received a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. More significantly, earlier in the year, philanthropist George Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI) had provided $3 million in funding for the movement, enabling the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) to be launched. In contrast to PLoS, BOAI was heavily focused on practical measures: Rather than asking people to sign a petition, it called on them to agree on "a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment." "It is clear in retrospect that most of those signing on to the PLoS boycott did so with their fingers crossed," Harnad commented to Information Today at the time. "But the BOAI is not another petition like the PLoS. Signing it does not mean that one supports the cause, or that one is asking someone else (e.g., the publishers) to do something. Signing means that one is oneself (whether individual or institution) committing to do something-either self-archiving or submitting to alternative journals or both." Moreover, with $3 million in the bank, it was now possible to make that commitment real. As Harnad pointed out to the BBC: "To start up and fill an institutional Eprint Archive costs less than $10,000; to start up and fill an alternative journal costs less than $50,000; so $3 million can do a lot of good." Importantly, the BOAI also articulated the first widely agreed definition of OA, which stipulates that OA research articles are freely available "on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself." And since the BOAI recognized that there were now two flavors of OA, it was more than a simple restatement of the Subversive Proposal. To this end, it outlined a two-pronged strategy: BOAI-1 was the self-archiving (or green) route outlined in the Subversive Proposal; BOAI-2 was OA publishing (the gold road), as practiced by BMC and PLoS. In short, the BOAI was a defining moment. Not only did it significantly raise the public profile of the movement, but it also accelerated its progress. "When you consider that we didn't have a commonly recognized name for 'open access' before the Budapest Open Access Initiative, I think the build-up of momentum in just the past two-and-a-half years has been astonishing," says Rick Johnson, director of SPARC. Shift of Focus But, with access to substantial funds, BMC and PLoS were now better equipped than Harnad to set the OA agenda. To promote their activities, for instance, the two publishers initiated a series of "me too" declarations and manifestos that added little to what had been expressed in the BOAI, but, in Harnad's view, laid disproportionate stress on OA publishing, and downplayed self-archiving. Thus, in June 2003, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing was announced. In October 2003 came the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Unfortunately, says Harnad, while these were "all excellent PR" for OA journal publishing, they did little for the self-archiving cause. For instance, he says, there was "no mention or understanding of BOAI-1 in the Berlin Declaration." To rub salt into Harnad's wounds, when earlier this year BOAI published a breakdown of how it was spending the Soros money, it transpired that 71 percent had gone to BOAI-2 and just 29 percent to BOAI-1. But, if the aim of the OA movement is to provide unfettered access to research on the Internet, does it matter whether this is achieved via OA publishing or through self-archiving? In the short term, yes, says Harnad, since placing too much stress on OA publishing threatens to slow the adoption of OA. Firstly, the author-pays model of OA publishing has become the bogeyman of OA. With costs ranging from $525 per paper at BMC to $1,500 at PLoS, author-pays is viewed by many as a strong disincentive to embrace OA. BMC and PLoS have been keen to stress that when an author cannot afford to pay, the charge will not be levied. They insist that the intention is for publishing fees to be paid by an author's institution or funder, not by individual authors. To formalize this, they have introduced annual "membership" schemes, allowing institutions to bulk-purchase the right for their researchers to publish future articles. However, many feel this is uncomfortably similar to the widely-criticized "big deal" site licenses introduced by traditional publishers seeking to sell online access to their journals. Thus, while Tracz's innovation provided credibility to the movement, it also introduced a hairball-one that cast doubt not only on OA publishing, but also, by implication, on the entire OA movement. Clearly conscious of this, in August BMC began consulting librarians and funders over future pricing models. Harnad worries that overplaying OA publishing could retard the movement in another way. As he frequently points out, only 1,000 of the 24,000 scholarly journals are currently OA. This means that OA publishers can, at the most, only make 5 percent of the total refereed research output freely available. If, on the other hand, all researchers were to immediately begin self-archiving the papers that they publish in the 23,000 traditional journals, then 95 percent of the research output could be made OA. As Harnad puts it: "Self-archiving can provide toll-free access to all 2,500,000 annual articles in all 24,000 journals, virtually overnight." Why, then, he asked Michael Eisen in a forthright online exchange in January, is PLoS "with its considerable resources promoting only open-access publishing (BOAI-2), instead of also promoting, at least as vigorously, the other road [BOAI-1]," which would almost certainly lead to universal open access? What was apparently worrying Harnad was that the Subversive Proposal was itself being subverted. Ironically, in the early days of OA, Harnad had himself proposed the author-pays model-a flirtation with OA publishing that he now regrets as "unnecessary and a strategic mistake on my part." As he explains: "[I]t is now much clearer that OA self-archiving is not only the path to OA, but also the eventual path to OA publishing (but only after 100 percent OA itself has prevailed-through self-archiving)." Darkest Before the Dawn By now, however, it had become evident that a far bigger challenge confronted the entire OA movement-both the gold and the green varieties. It turns out that offering exciting new publishing models, developing snazzy self-archiving tools, and extolling the virtues of OA all count for nothing if the primary agents of change-the researchers themselves-simply turn a deaf ear to the call. That they are doing, Harnad conceded in July on the American Scientist Open Access Forum that he moderates: "[O]nly about 20 percent of authors are providing OA to their articles any which-way today (whether by publishing in a gold journal [5 percent], or by publishing in a green journal and self-archiving [15 percent])." In short, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. What has become "abundantly clear," concluded Harnad, is that "universities and research funders must extend their existing publish-or-perish mandate to mandate that the publications must be made OA-either by publishing them in an OA journal, wherever possible (5 percent) or publishing them in a non-OA journal (95 percent) and self-archiving them." But here it seemed was yet another mountain to climb. Persuading universities and research funders to mandate researchers to embrace OA could take another 10 years. Increasingly gloomy, Harnad treated with skepticism last December's news that the U.K. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee was conducting an inquiry into STM publishing. His skepticism only increased when-despite his filing a written submission-the committee failed to call him to testify. Moreover, as the inquiry progressed, British politicians appeared to have little interest in or understanding of self-archiving. Posting to his own mailing list in March, Harnad complained that the committee continued "to propagate this planetary tidal wave [in which open access is being equated exclusively with open access 'publishing,' instead of with open access 'provision.'" Researchers giving evidence to the inquiry confirmed the general lack of interest in OA, with most arguing that there was no need to change the current system. As David Williams, professor of tissue engineering at the University of Liverpool, told the committee: "I do not see that there is any significant problem in S&T publishing at the present time. My staff, my post-docs, my students have immense access to a wide variety of publications with tremendous facility. Comparing that to 5 years ago, the time saved in technology is very, very significant." But the darkest hour, they say, comes just before the dawn. On July 20, when the Select Committee's report was published, it was immediately apparent that British politicians had indeed understood the difference between OA publishing and self-archiving. Moreover, while expressing some caution about OA publishing, they recommended that the U.K. government create a network of institutional repositories without delay and mandate all publicly funded researchers to deposit copies of their articles in those repositories, thereby making them accessible to all "free of charge, online." A Prophet Whose Time Has Come Harnad, who was attending a conference in Barcelona, could not have wished for more. What better way of fast-tracking OA than to have the government order researchers and their institutions to adopt self-archiving? Rushing to an Internet cafe, he triumphantly e-mailed that the news "could not have been better-though it could have come 10 years earlier." But the good news did not end there. The same month, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations recommended that NIH-the largest science funder in the U.S. federal government-draw up a plan to ensure that all research articles resulting from NIH-funded research be archived in PubMed Central 6 months after publication. At the time of this writing, similar proposals are being discussed in Canada, Scotland, Australia, India, and Norway. What we are witnessing, says Harnad, is "a historic race to see which nation actually implements the recommendation first." Despite all his frustrations, it seemed that the Harnadian view of the universe had finally begun to prevail. Ten years after posting the Subversive Proposal, lacking the financial resources of international corporations like Elsevier, or the powerful PR machines at the disposal of BMC and PLoS, but possessing all the energy and commitment of a true zealot, Harnad had apparently outgunned them all. "You must feel like a prophet whose time has come!" one of Harnad's supporters e-mailed from Australia. Ultimately, of course, the OA movement is a communal endeavor, not the work of one man alone, no matter how indefatigable that man may be. After all, disgruntled as Harnad may have become over the proliferation of manifestos and declarations, these did successfully attract the attention of politicians. The truth is that for OA to gain the mindshare that it enjoys today, it has taken the efforts of many-from the inspiration of individuals like Ginsparg, Varmus, and Tracz (to name a few) to the activism of librarians and the support (and funding) provided by a growing army of well-wishers. And, of course, without the Internet the very raison d'être of open access could not exist. That said, without Harnad's focus and energy, a movement that many now believe is set to revolutionize the process of scholarly communication could still be bogged down in a bitter wrangle over journal prices. But has the war truly been won? It is, after all, possible that the U.K. government will decline to implement the recommendations of the Science and Technology Committee and the NIH proposal may also fail or be emasculated. At the time of this writing, publishers and learned societies are mounting an even more aggressive campaign than the one that they conducted against E-Biomed. Might we once again see a spanner thrown in the works? Whatever transpires, it is clear that traditional publishers can no longer ignore open access. In Part Two, I will explore in more detail how publishers are responding and pose the question: Is the self-archiving roadmap as straightforward as Harnad claims, or even sustainable? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Richard Poynder is a U.K.-based freelance journalist who specializes in intellectual property and the information industry. His e-mail address is richard.poynder(a)journalist.co.uk. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- History of OA [in the past ten years] Friends: Here is a well-written article on the history of the Open access movement. I am sure you will find it enjoyable reading. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ------------------------------------------ Information Today Vol. 21 No. 9 - October 2004 Poynder on Point Ten Years After By Richard Poynder The open access (OA) movement has had some big wins this year: In July, a cross-party group of British politicians called on the U.K. government to make all publicly funded research accessible to everyone "free of charge, online." That same month, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations recommended that all NIH-funded research be made freely available 6 months after publication. But where did the OA movement come from, and where is it taking us? For the genesis of the OA movement, we need to step back 10 years, to June 1994, when professor of cognitive science Stevan Harnad posted what he called a "subversive proposal" to the Electronic Journals mailing list at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Harnad's post consisted of a simple but radical proposition: Since researchers' only interest in publishing is to share their ideas with as many of their peers as possible-and they are, therefore, happy to give their papers away-the price tag of journal subscriptions not only imposes an undesirable restriction on that sharing but, in the age of the Internet, is no longer even necessary. Consequently, he concluded, researchers should immediately start self-archiving their papers on the Internet, thereby maximizing the impact of their ideas and more effectively reaching "the eyes and minds of peers, fellow esoteric scientists and scholars the world over." While most mailing list messages instantly fall into justifiable oblivion, Harnad's proposal sparked a seminal online debate (one, ironically, was later published as a book) and immediately became the de facto manifesto of the embryonic OA movement. A decade later, OA is now threatening to overturn the $6 billion scholarly publishing industry and is forcing even the largest publishers against the ropes. Earlier this year, for instance, the CEO of Reed Elsevier was obliged to appear ignominiously before British politicians to explain why he thought it acceptable for publishers to make a 34-percent profit from selling publicly funded research back to the very people who had (freely) provided it in the first place: namely, researchers and their institutions. But how did the OA movement grow from one apparently random message on a mailing list to the powerful force for change that it represents today? Not the First Of course, Harnad was not the first to see the Internet's potential for enabling new ways of sharing research. Leaving aside pre-Web luminaries like Ted Nelson and Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, physicist Paul Ginsparg had founded the Internet's first preprint service, arXiv, 3 years prior to Harnad's message. Created to allow physicists to share their ideas more quickly than the lengthy process of publication permitted, arXiv had 20,000 users by the time Harnad posted the Subversive Proposal and was receiving 35,000 hits per day. For this reason, Harnad cited arXiv as a proof of concept, although his ambitions were somewhat grander. Nor was Harnad the first to climb over the access barrier imposed by journal subscriptions. Charles Oppenheim, professor of information science at Loughborough University, points out that librarians had been "banging on about the high costs of subscribing to journals published by commercial publishers" for a long time. As these costs increased, librarians were having to cancel journals, depriving faculty of access to them. Indeed, many trace the roots of the OA movement to the growing activism of librarians who, in pursuit of remedies to the growing problem of journal price inflation, founded the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) advocacy group in 1998. But where SPARC's initial focus was on advocating for alternative, less costly journals and arXiv was a central, discipline-based repository of preprints, Harnad wanted to see the entire corpus of scholarly literature made freely available on the Internet-a goal that he believes could be best achieved by researchers continuing to publish in traditional journals, but then self-archiving their articles locally. Moreover, obsessed with making the revolution happen-and blessed with a facility for rhetoric and augmentation that few can equal-Harnad has spent the last 10 years cajoling, hectoring, haranguing, and pleading with fellow researchers and verbally battering critics into submission (or at least bruised silence). Thus, while Harnad cannot claim to have invented the OA movement, his phenomenal energy and determination, coupled with a highly focused view of what is needed, undoubtedly earns him the title of chief architect of open access. Naiveté Indeed, over the years many others have "independently discovered" the self-evident logic of OA, but few have matched Harnad's focused energy-those who have often proved to be prone to naiveté. In 1999, for example, when Nobel prize winner-and the then-director of the NIH- Harold Varmus proposed a new biomedical research literature server called E-Biomed, he appeared to assume that publishers only needed to be asked to open their content vaults to the public. Modelled on arXiv, E-Biomed was mooted as "an electronic public library of medicine and other life sciences" consisting of a comprehensive, fully searchable free repository of full-text research articles, including both preprint and post-print texts. By the time it was launched as PubMed Central in February 2000, however, the project was a pale shadow of Varmus' initial concept. Why? Because, despite widespread support from scientists, publishers and learned societies mounted an aggressive campaign of opposition to E-Biomed. As a consequence, the preprint component was eliminated and delays were introduced between article publication and posting to the archive. Moreover, since publishers routinely acquire the copyright for papers that they publish, PubMed Central relied on publisher co-operation. Due to this fact, it's no surprise that 4 years after its launch, only 161 journals (most of which are freely available elsewhere on the Web) are currently archived with PubMed Central. Varmus evidently decided that publishers needed to have their arms twisted a little. Therefore, in November 2000, he founded the Public Library of Science (PLoS) with scientists Michael Eisen and Patrick Brown. The aim was to persuade fellow scientists to sign an open letter pledging to discontinue submitting papers to any journal that refused to make the research articles it published "available through online public libraries of science such as PubMed Central" 6 months after publication. PLoS was a great cause and it attracted nearly 34,000 signatures from scientists in 180 countries. But, while a small handful of publishers complied, most blithely ignored the PLoS letter. Worse, most of the scientist signatories were happy to forswear their own petition and continued publishing in the very journals that had turned a deaf ear to their request. What Varmus and his PLoS colleagues had failed to appreciate is that most publishers would rather give their eyeteeth than cooperate in any scheme that threatens their profits. More realistically, Harnad has always tended to assume that, rather than going cap-in-hand to publishers, researchers should simply "free the refereed literature" themselves. That said, there was a naive element to the Subversive Proposal, too, since Harnad's plan would have led to researchers posting their papers on thousands of isolated FTP sites. This would have meant that anyone wanting to access the papers would have needed prior knowledge of the papers' existence and the whereabouts of every relevant archive. They would then have had to search each archive separately. Today, Harnad concedes that "anonymous FTP sites and arbitrary Web sites are more like common graves, insofar as searching is concerned." Self-Archiving Toolkit For this reason, Harnad also became an ardent advocate for the creation of a self-archiving toolkit that could provide the OA movement with the means to compete with the electronic platforms that publishers were developing as they began to offer subscription-based online access to their journals. It is no accident that many of the OA tools subsequently produced were developed at Southampton University, where Harnad moved shortly after posting the Subversive Proposal. In 2000, for instance, Southampton University's Department of Electronics and Computer Science released EPrints software. Designed to enable institutions to create interoperable archives for researchers to post their papers, EPrints software utilizes common metadata-tagging standards developed under the JISC-funded Open Archives Initiative (OAI), thereby enabling multiple distributed archives to be treated as one virtual archive. And, to enable this virtual archive to be searched, a number of OAI "Googles" were developed-most notably the University of Michigan's OAIster. By regularly harvesting records from diverse OAI-compliant repositories, OAIster aggregates the content from the entire population of OAI-compliant archives, enabling them to be cross-searched via a single search interface. Once relevant articles have been discovered, researchers can then utilize Southampton University's ParaCite service to locate the most accessible full-text version available on the Web simply by pasting a paper's abstract into the ParaCite search box and following the links. And those wanting to assess the impact of self-archived papers can use Southampton University's CiteBase, which is able to rank self-archived articles by a number of factors, including most-cited author, paper, etc. Meanwhile, apparently oblivious to such developments, publishers were engaged in an orgy of consolidation, and, today, the two largest STM publishers, Elsevier and Springer, between them control around 40 percent of the STM journal market. Growing concerns about such consolidation, however, were to provide even greater rationale for OA. OA Publishing But one publisher did see the approaching storm. Conscious that the core issue was not costs, per se, but, rather, the barrier that the traditional subscription model imposed between reader and research, Vitek Tracz, the chairman of Current Science Group, decided that rather than posing a threat to publishers, OA offered a new opportunity. By shifting costs from the reader to the author, he concluded that publishers could make research articles freely available, yet still charge for publication. In 1998, therefore, Tracz sold a number of publishing businesses to Elsevier and founded the world's first commercial OA publisher, BioMed Central (BMC). Rather than charging readers (via subscriptions) to access its journals, BMC charges authors to publish their papers. Today, BMC publishes 110 Web-only journals in the biological and medical sciences-all of which are immediately released on the Web as well as archived in PubMed Central. The OA publishing model was a novel and creative response to the growing demands from OA advocates. "The fact that Vitek Tracz put his money where his mouth is by starting BioMed Central as an open access publishing company was a major commitment to open access that hadn't been there before, and a breakthrough," says BMC publisher Jan Velterop. To have a commercial publisher embrace OA also provided a powerful credibility boost to the movement. By now conscious of the limitations of advocacy and impressed with what BMC was doing, PLoS reinvented itself in 2001 as an OA publisher and set about establishing new OA journals. Last October, PLoS Biology was launched; this month (October), the first issue of its second journal, PLoS Medicine, will be published. "Public Library of Science began as an advocacy group for the NIH archive, PubMed Central," Varmus recently explained to The Scientist. "Subsequently, it became a publishing house." However, the development of OA publishing was to sow the seeds for future discord in the movement. It was, after all, a deviation from Harnad's original concept, which had assumed that researchers would continue to use traditional journals, but then self-archive their papers. True, Harnad had anticipated that publishers might eventually need to downsize, perhaps eventually to provide peer-review services alone, but OA publishing had created a new type of journal. While this met the growing calls for all published research articles to be freely available, Harnad became increasingly concerned that it could hamper progress. In 2002, however, there was sufficient good news to paper over any potential cracks in the movement. In December, PLoS received a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. More significantly, earlier in the year, philanthropist George Soros' Open Society Institute (OSI) had provided $3 million in funding for the movement, enabling the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) to be launched. In contrast to PLoS, BOAI was heavily focused on practical measures: Rather than asking people to sign a petition, it called on them to agree on "a statement of principle, a statement of strategy, and a statement of commitment." "It is clear in retrospect that most of those signing on to the PLoS boycott did so with their fingers crossed," Harnad commented to Information Today at the time. "But the BOAI is not another petition like the PLoS. Signing it does not mean that one supports the cause, or that one is asking someone else (e.g., the publishers) to do something. Signing means that one is oneself (whether individual or institution) committing to do something-either self-archiving or submitting to alternative journals or both." Moreover, with $3 million in the bank, it was now possible to make that commitment real. As Harnad pointed out to the BBC: "To start up and fill an institutional Eprint Archive costs less than $10,000; to start up and fill an alternative journal costs less than $50,000; so $3 million can do a lot of good." Importantly, the BOAI also articulated the first widely agreed definition of OA, which stipulates that OA research articles are freely available "on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself." And since the BOAI recognized that there were now two flavors of OA, it was more than a simple restatement of the Subversive Proposal. To this end, it outlined a two-pronged strategy: BOAI-1 was the self-archiving (or green) route outlined in the Subversive Proposal; BOAI-2 was OA publishing (the gold road), as practiced by BMC and PLoS. In short, the BOAI was a defining moment. Not only did it significantly raise the public profile of the movement, but it also accelerated its progress. "When you consider that we didn't have a commonly recognized name for 'open access' before the Budapest Open Access Initiative, I think the build-up of momentum in just the past two-and-a-half years has been astonishing," says Rick Johnson, director of SPARC. Shift of Focus But, with access to substantial funds, BMC and PLoS were now better equipped than Harnad to set the OA agenda. To promote their activities, for instance, the two publishers initiated a series of "me too" declarations and manifestos that added little to what had been expressed in the BOAI, but, in Harnad's view, laid disproportionate stress on OA publishing, and downplayed self-archiving. Thus, in June 2003, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing was announced. In October 2003 came the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Unfortunately, says Harnad, while these were "all excellent PR" for OA journal publishing, they did little for the self-archiving cause. For instance, he says, there was "no mention or understanding of BOAI-1 in the Berlin Declaration." To rub salt into Harnad's wounds, when earlier this year BOAI published a breakdown of how it was spending the Soros money, it transpired that 71 percent had gone to BOAI-2 and just 29 percent to BOAI-1. But, if the aim of the OA movement is to provide unfettered access to research on the Internet, does it matter whether this is achieved via OA publishing or through self-archiving? In the short term, yes, says Harnad, since placing too much stress on OA publishing threatens to slow the adoption of OA. Firstly, the author-pays model of OA publishing has become the bogeyman of OA. With costs ranging from $525 per paper at BMC to $1,500 at PLoS, author-pays is viewed by many as a strong disincentive to embrace OA. BMC and PLoS have been keen to stress that when an author cannot afford to pay, the charge will not be levied. They insist that the intention is for publishing fees to be paid by an author's institution or funder, not by individual authors. To formalize this, they have introduced annual "membership" schemes, allowing institutions to bulk-purchase the right for their researchers to publish future articles. However, many feel this is uncomfortably similar to the widely-criticized "big deal" site licenses introduced by traditional publishers seeking to sell online access to their journals. Thus, while Tracz's innovation provided credibility to the movement, it also introduced a hairball-one that cast doubt not only on OA publishing, but also, by implication, on the entire OA movement. Clearly conscious of this, in August BMC began consulting librarians and funders over future pricing models. Harnad worries that overplaying OA publishing could retard the movement in another way. As he frequently points out, only 1,000 of the 24,000 scholarly journals are currently OA. This means that OA publishers can, at the most, only make 5 percent of the total refereed research output freely available. If, on the other hand, all researchers were to immediately begin self-archiving the papers that they publish in the 23,000 traditional journals, then 95 percent of the research output could be made OA. As Harnad puts it: "Self-archiving can provide toll-free access to all 2,500,000 annual articles in all 24,000 journals, virtually overnight." Why, then, he asked Michael Eisen in a forthright online exchange in January, is PLoS "with its considerable resources promoting only open-access publishing (BOAI-2), instead of also promoting, at least as vigorously, the other road [BOAI-1]," which would almost certainly lead to universal open access? What was apparently worrying Harnad was that the Subversive Proposal was itself being subverted. Ironically, in the early days of OA, Harnad had himself proposed the author-pays model-a flirtation with OA publishing that he now regrets as "unnecessary and a strategic mistake on my part." As he explains: "[I]t is now much clearer that OA self-archiving is not only the path to OA, but also the eventual path to OA publishing (but only after 100 percent OA itself has prevailed-through self-archiving)." Darkest Before the Dawn By now, however, it had become evident that a far bigger challenge confronted the entire OA movement-both the gold and the green varieties. It turns out that offering exciting new publishing models, developing snazzy self-archiving tools, and extolling the virtues of OA all count for nothing if the primary agents of change-the researchers themselves-simply turn a deaf ear to the call. That they are doing, Harnad conceded in July on the American Scientist Open Access Forum that he moderates: "[O]nly about 20 percent of authors are providing OA to their articles any which-way today (whether by publishing in a gold journal [5 percent], or by publishing in a green journal and self-archiving [15 percent])." In short, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. What has become "abundantly clear," concluded Harnad, is that "universities and research funders must extend their existing publish-or-perish mandate to mandate that the publications must be made OA-either by publishing them in an OA journal, wherever possible (5 percent) or publishing them in a non-OA journal (95 percent) and self-archiving them." But here it seemed was yet another mountain to climb. Persuading universities and research funders to mandate researchers to embrace OA could take another 10 years. Increasingly gloomy, Harnad treated with skepticism last December's news that the U.K. House of Commons Science and Technology Committee was conducting an inquiry into STM publishing. His skepticism only increased when-despite his filing a written submission-the committee failed to call him to testify. Moreover, as the inquiry progressed, British politicians appeared to have little interest in or understanding of self-archiving. Posting to his own mailing list in March, Harnad complained that the committee continued "to propagate this planetary tidal wave [in which open access is being equated exclusively with open access 'publishing,' instead of with open access 'provision.'" Researchers giving evidence to the inquiry confirmed the general lack of interest in OA, with most arguing that there was no need to change the current system. As David Williams, professor of tissue engineering at the University of Liverpool, told the committee: "I do not see that there is any significant problem in S&T publishing at the present time. My staff, my post-docs, my students have immense access to a wide variety of publications with tremendous facility. Comparing that to 5 years ago, the time saved in technology is very, very significant." But the darkest hour, they say, comes just before the dawn. On July 20, when the Select Committee's report was published, it was immediately apparent that British politicians had indeed understood the difference between OA publishing and self-archiving. Moreover, while expressing some caution about OA publishing, they recommended that the U.K. government create a network of institutional repositories without delay and mandate all publicly funded researchers to deposit copies of their articles in those repositories, thereby making them accessible to all "free of charge, online." A Prophet Whose Time Has Come Harnad, who was attending a conference in Barcelona, could not have wished for more. What better way of fast-tracking OA than to have the government order researchers and their institutions to adopt self-archiving? Rushing to an Internet cafe, he triumphantly e-mailed that the news "could not have been better-though it could have come 10 years earlier." But the good news did not end there. The same month, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations recommended that NIH-the largest science funder in the U.S. federal government-draw up a plan to ensure that all research articles resulting from NIH-funded research be archived in PubMed Central 6 months after publication. At the time of this writing, similar proposals are being discussed in Canada, Scotland, Australia, India, and Norway. What we are witnessing, says Harnad, is "a historic race to see which nation actually implements the recommendation first." Despite all his frustrations, it seemed that the Harnadian view of the universe had finally begun to prevail. Ten years after posting the Subversive Proposal, lacking the financial resources of international corporations like Elsevier, or the powerful PR machines at the disposal of BMC and PLoS, but possessing all the energy and commitment of a true zealot, Harnad had apparently outgunned them all. "You must feel like a prophet whose time has come!" one of Harnad's supporters e-mailed from Australia. Ultimately, of course, the OA movement is a communal endeavor, not the work of one man alone, no matter how indefatigable that man may be. After all, disgruntled as Harnad may have become over the proliferation of manifestos and declarations, these did successfully attract the attention of politicians. The truth is that for OA to gain the mindshare that it enjoys today, it has taken the efforts of many-from the inspiration of individuals like Ginsparg, Varmus, and Tracz (to name a few) to the activism of librarians and the support (and funding) provided by a growing army of well-wishers. And, of course, without the Internet the very raison d'être of open access could not exist. That said, without Harnad's focus and energy, a movement that many now believe is set to revolutionize the process of scholarly communication could still be bogged down in a bitter wrangle over journal prices. But has the war truly been won? It is, after all, possible that the U.K. government will decline to implement the recommendations of the Science and Technology Committee and the NIH proposal may also fail or be emasculated. At the time of this writing, publishers and learned societies are mounting an even more aggressive campaign than the one that they conducted against E-Biomed. Might we once again see a spanner thrown in the works? Whatever transpires, it is clear that traditional publishers can no longer ignore open access. In Part Two, I will explore in more detail how publishers are responding and pose the question: Is the self-archiving roadmap as straightforward as Harnad claims, or even sustainable? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Poynder is a U.K.-based freelance journalist who specializes in intellectual property and the information industry. His e-mail address is richard.poynder(a)journalist.co.uk. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Open Access Institutional Archives for India
by Subbiah Arunachalam 02 Oct '04

02 Oct '04

Friends: Here is a comment by Peter Suber applauding the US NIH mandatory self-archiving plan and Stevan Harnad's response to it - actually suggesting that NIH should mandate self-archiving in the authors' own institutional archives. This appears to be something funding agencies in India [such as DST, DBT, DAE, CSIR, UGC] could follow. Now there are at least half a dozen studies showing that papers in the open access regime are cited far more often than papers in the toll-access regime. And, as has been pointed out by OA advocates, institutional archiving has many benefits apart from improving the visibility of the scientists and their work. Many of you might be interested in seeing Richard Poynder's 10-year history of the Open Access movement that has just appeared today in Information Today: http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Peter Suber has written an excellent FAQ on the House Appropriations Committee/NIH mandatory self-archiving plan: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm The FAQ is clear, comprehensive and on-target. I highly recommend it to anyone who is having any difficulty understanding the House/NIH recommendations. There is only one point on which I would disagree. Peter's FAQ says: Why PubMed Central [PMC]? PMC is maintained by the NIH; it already houses a very large body of medical literature; it has benefited from years of infrastructure refinements; it is committed to open access, long-term preservation, and interoperability. Some publishers object to the use of PMC and would like to see Congress allow grantees to put the literature elsewhere, either in multiple repositories or in any repository that meets certain conditions. If the report language were amended to meet these objections, open access would not suffer. At the same time, however, the high quality of PMC makes such amendments unnecessary. Peter is right that if the report were amended to allow grantees to deposit in any OAI-compliant archive, open access *to those papers* would not suffer. He is also right that this amendment would not be a *necessary* one. But such an amendment would make the recommendation a far *better* one. For it would generate far more Open Access (OA), in more disciplines and institutions, and sooner, if PMC were not stipulated as the mandatory locus of the self-archiving, only that the self-archiving must be done in an OAI-compliant OA Archive, preferably the author's own institutional OA Archive. The reason is that: (1) the self-archiving practice is far more likely to generalize to other disciplines at the same university if it is done at that university than if it is only done in PMC; (2) for functionality and quality the physical locus of the full-text makes no difference at all, as long as it is in an OAI-compliant OA Archive; (3) all OAI-compliant OA Archives (including PMC) are equivalent and interoperable; (4) the metadata of all OAI-complaint OA Archives are harvestable, hence they could be harvested into PMC too, if that was desired; (5) even the full-texts could be harvested into PMC, if that was desired; (6) PMC could (and should) be available as a backup locus for self-archiving for any grantee whose university does not yet have an OAI-compliant OA Archive. Another (very minor) reason for institutional rather than central self-archiving is that many of the 86% of journals that have already given their green light to author self-archiving have stipulated self-archiving at the author's own institution (so that their green light should not be legally construable as sanctioning 3rd-party free-riding by rival publishers). The publishers' worry is silly, but mandating PMC self-archiving just makes it into a further needless obstacle. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php So it is not just publishers who "would like to see Congress allow grantees to put the literature elsewhere": It is also those OA advocates (like myself) who hope to see the House/NIH self-archiving mandate's effect propagate far beyond just the NIH-funded biomedical research papers to all of OA, in all fields. "In a study in the UK which we have just completed for the Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC (a brief account of which will, referees permitting, be published in a forthcoming special issue of Serials Review), after quite exhaustive review of all aspects of e-prints archiving, we recommended a "harvesting model", in which full texts (and other digital objects) remain at distributed institutional (and other) archives, but metadata is harvested and processed centrally." --- Fytton Rowland http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3909.html See also: "Central vs. Distributed Archives" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html "Central versus institutional self-archiving" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3206.html Stevan Harnad Open Access Institutional Archives for India Friends: Here is a comment by Peter Suber applauding the US NIH mandatory self-archiving plan and Stevan Harnad's response to it - actually suggesting that NIH should mandate self-archiving in the authors' own institutional archives. This appears to be something funding agencies in India [such as DST, DBT, DAE, CSIR, UGC] could follow. Now there are at least half a dozen studies showing that papers in the open access regime are cited far more often than papers in the toll-access regime. And, as has been pointed out by OA advocates, institutional archiving has many benefits apart from improving the visibility of the scientists and their work. Many of you might be interested in seeing Richard Poynder's 10-year history of the Open Access movement that has just appeared today in Information Today: http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Peter Suber has written an excellent FAQ on the House Appropriations Committee/NIH mandatory self-archiving plan: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/nihfaq.htm The FAQ is clear, comprehensive and on-target. I highly recommend it to anyone who is having any difficulty understanding the House/NIH recommendations. There is only one point on which I would disagree. Peter's FAQ says: Why PubMed Central [PMC]? PMC is maintained by the NIH; it already houses a very large body of medical literature; it has benefited from years of infrastructure refinements; it is committed to open access, long-term preservation, and interoperability. Some publishers object to the use of PMC and would like to see Congress allow grantees to put the literature elsewhere, either in multiple repositories or in any repository that meets certain conditions. If the report language were amended to meet these objections, open access would not suffer. At the same time, however, the high quality of PMC makes such amendments unnecessary. Peter is right that if the report were amended to allow grantees to deposit in any OAI-compliant archive, open access *to those papers* would not suffer. He is also right that this amendment would not be a *necessary* one. But such an amendment would make the recommendation a far *better* one. For it would generate far more Open Access (OA), in more disciplines and institutions, and sooner, if PMC were not stipulated as the mandatory locus of the self-archiving, only that the self-archiving must be done in an OAI-compliant OA Archive, preferably the author's own institutional OA Archive. The reason is that: (1) the self-archiving practice is far more likely to generalize to other disciplines at the same university if it is done at that university than if it is only done in PMC; (2) for functionality and quality the physical locus of the full-text makes no difference at all, as long as it is in an OAI-compliant OA Archive; (3) all OAI-compliant OA Archives (including PMC) are equivalent and interoperable; (4) the metadata of all OAI-complaint OA Archives are harvestable, hence they could be harvested into PMC too, if that was desired; (5) even the full-texts could be harvested into PMC, if that was desired; (6) PMC could (and should) be available as a backup locus for self-archiving for any grantee whose university does not yet have an OAI-compliant OA Archive. Another (very minor) reason for institutional rather than central self-archiving is that many of the 86% of journals that have already given their green light to author self-archiving have stipulated self-archiving at the author's own institution (so that their green light should not be legally construable as sanctioning 3rd-party free-riding by rival publishers). The publishers' worry is silly, but mandating PMC self-archiving just makes it into a further needless obstacle. http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php So it is not just publishers who "would like to see Congress allow grantees to put the literature elsewhere": It is also those OA advocates (like myself) who hope to see the House/NIH self-archiving mandate's effect propagate far beyond just the NIH-funded biomedical research papers to all of OA, in all fields. "In a study in the UK which we have just completed for the Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC (a brief account of which will, referees permitting, be published in a forthcoming special issue of Serials Review), after quite exhaustive review of all aspects of e-prints archiving, we recommended a "harvesting model", in which full texts (and other digital objects) remain at distributed institutional (and other) archives, but metadata is harvested and processed centrally." --- Fytton Rowland http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3909.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3909.html See also: "Central vs. Distributed Archives" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0293.html "Central versus institutional self-archiving" http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3206.html http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3206.html Stevan Harnad

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Re: [LIS-Forum] Re: LIS-Forum Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1 Announcement of Gokhale Institute's OPAC on th
by salman haider 01 Oct '04

01 Oct '04

Dear Sir, The Web Opac is working fine giving all the details. The Web interface of SLIM++ software is also impressive. One other WebOpac worth looking is that of the Hyderabad based "Indian School of Busienss". Following is the link. Just do a little browsing of the library catalogue and you will apperciate the quantity of information that can be accessed online. <http://www.isb.edu/lrc/index.html> A digital library of documents relating to business management is also available. Regards, SALMAN HAIDER Consultant, Indian School of Business Library (LRC) Hyderabad On Fri, 01 Oct 2004 Jai Haravu wrote : >While congratulating the Gokhale Inst. for putting their library catalogue on the web, I must also express my disappointment that it looks like only the Institute's authorized users can search the OPAC. I think the Institute has such a rich collection of material that it should allow other scholars to at least search its collection and know if a particular publication is available or not. The whole purpose of putting a library's catalogue on the web is defeated if this is not done. > >cid:65519CDA-52A4-4314-A994-7F572CE46607 >L J Haravu >Trustee, Kesavan Institute of Information and Knowledge Management [http://www.kiikm.org/] >69 Krishnapuri Colony >West Marredpally >Sedcunderabad 500 026 >Tel: 91-40-27803947 >-------Original Message------- > > From: >mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Date: >10/01/04 11:12:27 >To: >mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Subject: >LIS-Forum Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1 > >Send LIS-Forum mailing list submissions to > mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > >To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum >or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > mailto:lis-forum-request@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum-request(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > >You can reach the person managing the list at > mailto:lis-forum-owner@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum-owner(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > >When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific >than "Re: Contents of LIS-Forum digest..." > > >Today's Topics: > > 1. RE: Request for Information (Monali Panchbhai) > 2. Announcement (N Murali) > 3. Unesco-eBook Workshop- September 16-Hotel Atria, > Bangalore-Report (Shalini R. Urs) > 4. FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web > (Subbiah Arunachalam) > > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > >Message: 1 >Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 08:46:50 +0000 > From: "Monali Panchbhai" < mailto:monalipanchbhai@hotmail.com monalipanchbhai(a)hotmail.com > > >Subject: RE: [LIS-Forum] Request for Information >To: mailto:ikishore@rediffmail.com, ikishore(a)rediffmail.com, >mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Message-ID: < mailto:BAY12-F22wGmAf0Mjka0001a01d@hotmail.com BAY12-F22wGmAf0Mjka0001a01d(a)hotmail.com > > >Content-Type: text/plain > >Dear Member, >The facility to restrict copy/paste/print is available through the Latest Acrobat-PDF 6.0 version. >You have to save that document with secutiry option which gives you the facility of the restricting diff. types of rights. >Try doing >Document ---> Security ---> Restrict opening & editing ---> >then set password and select the options for restriciting the rights. >Regards, >Monali Panchbhai >Librarian, >J V Gokal & Com. >Mumbai. > > >From: "Kishore Ingale" < mailto:ikishore@rediffmail.com ikishore(a)rediffmail.com > > > >Reply-To: Kishore Ingale < mailto:ikishore@rediffmail.com ikishore(a)rediffmail.com > > > >To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > >Subject: [LIS-Forum] Request for Information > >Date: 30 Sep 2004 04:34:30 -0000 > > > > > >Dear Colleagues, > > > >We are experimenting with providing access to our digital documents to users through web based server (using Greenstone). Collection mostly include MS WORD and PDF documents. > > > >Is it possible to implement security with which users will be able to view documents but not able to download / save these files at their end.. ? > > > >Kishore Ingale >& mailto:gt;ikishore@rediffmail.com gt;ikishore(a)rediffmail.com > >ForwardSourceID:NT000043C2 > >_______________________________________________ > >LIS-Forum mailing list >& mailto:gt;LIS-Forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in gt;LIS-Forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > > http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum >Millions of profiles from across the globe. http://g.msn.com/8HMBENIN/2737??PS=47575 http://g.msn.com/8HMBENIN/2737??PS=47575 >On BharatMatrimony.com > > >------------------------------ > >Message: 2 >Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 06:01:14 -0700 (PDT) > From: N Murali < mailto:murali_dhara@yahoo.com murali_dhara(a)yahoo.com > > >Subject: [LIS-Forum] Announcement >To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Message-ID: < mailto:20040930130114.72116.qmail@web51106.mail.yahoo.com 20040930130114.72116.qmail(a)web51106.mail.yahoo.com > > >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > >Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2004 15:07:39 +0100 > From: Prabhash Rath < mailto:prabhash@gipe.ernet.in prabhash(a)gipe.ernet.in > > >Subject: Announcement > >Please distribute this message to Lis-forum > >Dear professionals, > >We are happy to inform you that the Gokhale >Institute Library has successfully developed the >bibliographic database of its entire collection >which may be accessed through the following site: > >http://www.gipe.ernet.in/library/librarycatalogue.html http://www.gipe.ernet.in/library/librarycatalogue.html > >Gokhale Library might be the first to put up >bibliographic details of its entire collection on >the Web under the INFLIBNET automation programme >(1st Oct. 1999 to 30th Sept. 2004). > >A P Gadre >Librarian > > > > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around >http://mail.yahoo.com http://mail.yahoo.com > > >------------------------------ > >Message: 3 >Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:42:27 +0530 (IST) > From: "Shalini R. Urs" < mailto:shalini@vidyanidhi.org.in shalini(a)vidyanidhi.org.in > > >Subject: [LIS-Forum] Unesco-eBook Workshop- September 16-Hotel Atria, > Bangalore-Report >To: < mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > > >Message-ID: > < mailto:35160.210.212.200.228.1096553547.squirrel@mail.vidyanidhi.org.in 35160.210.212.200.228.1096553547.squirrel(a)mail.vidyanidhi.org.in > > >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 > >UNESCO Interactive Workshop on eBooks, Hotel Atria, Bangalore September >16, 2004 ( http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook >). >---------- >Envisioning the potential of eBooks in promoting and supporting >Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based- student centred >learning, UNESCO is engaged in a project on developing guidelines for >eBooks. The mission of this project is to carry out a scoping and >exploratory study of the eBooks and develop guidelines for the production, >promotion and usage of eBooks. This consultancy project involved three >phases- desk top research; questionnaire based user study and an >Interactive Workshop The Interactive Workshop on eBooks, was organised on >September 16, 2004 and held at Hotel Atria, Bangalore. >The Workshop was inaugurated by Dr.S.Ramakrishanan, Executive Director, >C-DAC, Pune. Dr. Lucy A Tedd of University of Wales gave the keynote and >Dr.Susanne Ornager, Advisor, Communication and Information for Asia and >the Pacific, UNESCO, New Delhi chaired the session. >The invitation only Workshop was an important milestone in the Project, >with more than seventy participants representing the diverse stakeholders >community. There were forty three information professionals; twenty four >end users and technologists; and six from the publishing/aggregator >industry in the Workshop, engaged in interacting, deliberating and >debating on the gamut of issues- from definitions to design to delivery >mechanisms. The format of the Workshop was designed to be interactive with >each session having speakers and a moderator to lead the discussions with >a set of issues/questions. >The inaugural session was followed by three sessions- user and technology >perspective; author and publisher perspective; and aggregator and library >perspective. Prof. R.Kalyana Krishnan of IIT, Chennai, Prof.G.Misra of >Indian Statistical Institute, Mr.Sanjiv Goswami of Springer, >N.V.Sathyanarayana of Informatics India, Dr.Primalini Kukanesan of >National Library of Malaysia and Dr. Deepali Talagala of Sri Lanka Library >Association were the speakers at these sessions. The three sessions were >moderated by Mr. Anand T. Byrappa of GE, Prof. I.K.Ravichandra Rao of >Indian Statistical Institute and Dr.Venkadesan of Indian Institute of >Science respectively. There were product presentations by John Wiley and >Springer. >The Workshop objective of gaining insights from different perspective was >achieved and the interactions helped in drawing meaningful conclusions >and providing the necessary inputs for the drafting of framework for the >guidelines document. >For more detailed report, presentations and details of the Project visit >the website http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook------------------ http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook------------------ > > > > >Dr. Shalini R. Urs >Director >Information and Communication Division >& >Professor and Chairperson >Department of Library and Information Science >University of Mysore >Mysore-570006 >India >Tele:91-821-2514699 >Fax :91-821-2519209 > > > > >------------------------------ > >Message: 4 >Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 10:33:48 +0530 > From: Subbiah Arunachalam < mailto:arun@mssrf.res.in arun(a)mssrf.res.in > > >Subject: [LIS-Forum] FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web >To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Message-ID: > < mailto:014BE5562FB3D511BA7A00508BCC23D47EF20E@swami.mssrf.res.in 014BE5562FB3D511BA7A00508BCC23D47EF20E(a)swami.mssrf.res.in > > >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" > >Friends: > >Here is an interesting article I received in the mail. Some of you may find >it interesting and useful. Best wishes. > >Arun >[Subbiah Arunachalam] > > >Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web >http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ > >The MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference featured a >keynote by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Promising >a one-hour talk in 30 minutes, Berners-Lee gave an animated, >rapid-fire presentation -- more like a 90-minute talk in 30 minutes -- >about the Semantic Web, his latest initiative. > >Berners-Lees early remarks focused on his development of the Web. >Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass >of things being developed on the Internet, including protocols such as >TCP/IP and other standards. All I had to do on top of that to create >the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was >rather arrogant. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web and the idea was >that it would minimally constraining. And HTML, the language he created >to drive the Web, would be the cloth on which a tapestry would be made > the jewels, the colors > >Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions >between them, whats come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come >and gone, new ways of thinking and more recently, wikis and blogs. >The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a >place where we can all meet and read and write. Collaborative things >are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows >theyre [embracing] its creative side. > >But from the very beginning of the Web, Berners-Lee had hoped that he >would be able to incorporate descriptive information into the Webs >fundamental design, but for various reasons it didnt make the cut. One >thing I wanted to put in the original design was the typing of links, >he said. For example, lets say you link your website to another site. >At the moment, the hyperlink connecting them contains very little >information: just an address to get to the other websites content. But >Berners-Lees idea was to include metadata with each hyperlink to >describe the relationship between the two sites. For example: do >the people linking their two websites know each other personally, >professionally, or not at all? If theyre colleagues, how are they >working together, and in what fields? Where are they working? > >When we put one link to another, a human being knows what that link may >mean, but a machine doesnt, he said. But this idea of embedding large >amounts of machine-readable metadata into HTML didnt make it into the >original Web standard. Now, hes trying to change that, with an >initiative called the Semantic Web. > >The Semantic Web looks at integrating data across the Web, Berners-Lee >said. As the <a href=" http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ >">World Wide Web >Consortium</a> explains, The Web can reach its full potential only if >it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated >tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs >must be able to share and process data even when these programs have >been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the >idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can >be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, >integration and reuse of data across various applications. > >For the Semantic Web to function properly, websites would be designed in >ways fundamentally different to traditional HTML. For example, in >traditional HTML, if I wanted to assign a page a particular color, I >would simply include a bit of code stating exactly what that color >should be. Color=Red, basically. But with the Semantic Web, you wouldnt > do this. Rather, youd tell the website to go to a URL that >defines a universal standard of what that color looks like. So >instead of coding a webpage to say Color=Red, youd say something like >Color= http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 > and your >website would know to connect to this site to identify the color. This >would hold true for all data you include in your website: color, >people, zipcodes, images, etc. Data would all be connected to URLs >containing descriptive information about that data. Information would >not be static or absolute; instead its an abstract concept that gets >sucked up from another website explaining exactly how to define it. > >An early example of the Semantic Web in action is the Creative Commons >initiative, which gives content publishers a simple way of clarifying >how their content may be used by others. The Creative Commons team has >created a collection of copyright licenses, each stating whether a >persons content can be used for commercial or noncommercial purposes, >can be redistributed or edited, with or without the owners permission, >etc. The system is very flexible, so a person may personalize their >license with different combinations of these elements. When a content >publisher, like a blogger, places a Creative Commons license on their >website, they do so by adding a piece of code to their sites HTML that >refers to their personalized license. This code is made of a collection >of URLs, each of which defines a particular element of the license, such >as the contents redistribution policy. So when search engines and other >automated tools pick up that bloggers website, theyll access these >URLs and understand your copyright policy as you intended it. > >Easy? Maybe not. But Berners-Lee is confident in his vision. The Web is >a tangle, your life is a tangle get used to it. > >Berners-Lee sees the Semantic Web having a range of uses. Online >information will connect seamlessly because of the common concepts they >share. Thats what its all about connecting things, he said. The >Semantic Web will help artificial intelligence projects, online >translators and other technologies that require access to large amounts >of descriptive data to work properly. Berners-Lee also offered a >real-world example. Sometimes, in an emergency, like when a virus >breaks out, you need to correlate data between a number of databases, >he said. The Semantic Web, he explained, will make this much easier. > >Its also helping build powerful social networking tools -- >friend-of-a-friend networks in which people write a little bit about >themselves as metadata, and connections get formed based on this >information. Who knows what sort of Google will be built on top of >this stuff, Berners-Lee wondered. Computers will be able to browse the >Web and find what were looking for based on what they know about our >needs and the descriptive metadata they find on relevant websites. A >human being browse the Web? That will be a little old fashioned, he joked. > >Berners-Lee noted that the success of the Semantic Web will depend on >royalty-free technical standards. Standards must be royalty free to >foster innovation and encourage the growth of new markets. It is very >important that we make sure we are not tripped up by proprietary >standards, he said. With so many ridiculous patents out there, theres >always the threat that an underwater patent will torpedo innovation. > >Following his speech, Berners-Lee took questions from the audience, >moderated by Ethernet inventor and 3Com co-founder Bob Metcalfe. >Berners-Lee said the Web was originally a play project that his bosses >at Switzerlands CERN laboratory let him explore in his spare time. The >structure of CERN, with its many groups of researchers working >independently, influenced the structure of the Web. Because it was a >lab, it acted more like a web in itself, so coming up with a virtual >web for CERN staff to share information with each other made a lot of >sense. > >Once he developed the idea, he started to promote it through Internet >discussion groups, though not necessarily the groups frequented by >fellow scientists. Hypertext wasnt considered real computing, so I >sent it out to alternative news groups, he said. Some people like the >University of Illinois Marc Andreesen embraced the idea and ran with >it; he went on to found Netscape. > >Others were less supportive because they didnt like the technical >structure behind it. Why do I have to use your horrible angle >brackets? they would say to him. > >Do you remember the names of these people? Metcalfe asked rather >mischievously. Berners-Lee laughed and waved off the question. > >Despite being the inventor of the Web, Berners-Lee didnt patent the >standard, allowing others to build upon it -- and profit on it. Some >people have said, Isnt it a shame all these commercial things came >about? he noted. But most people wanted a commercial browser. The >private sector helped spread the Web beyond the confines of research and >academia. The MarcAndreesens of the world contributed a lot to the >adoption of the Webm making it commercially viable, he noted. >Berners-Lee added that he still uses Netscape, despite its fall in >popularity, on a Mac with the OS X operating system, and has started >playing with Mozillas new open source Firefox browser as well. > >Berners-Lee also described how his work on the Web has changed over the >years from being a sole endeavor to a distributed effort with lots of >contributors. He waxed nostalgically over the days when he could make >all the decisions himself, acknowledging the challenges of achieving >consensus in distributed group projects. If you take little groups, >they form their own little cultures. And when you get these groups >together, they dont share their ideas, and have different values >towards how things should be built. This takes a lot more energy than >figuring out how to do it yourself. Making consensus, communicating >with other people is hard work. > >I had the luxury to do this myself with nobody there to object, he >continued. But now were doing things where there are lot of people >interested in getting involved. If you want to do something, do it >yourself. > >As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on >the Web as an educational tool. Id like to see lots of curricula like >the <a href=" http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html >">MIT Open Courseware >initiative</a> being picked up by K-12, he said. The tricky thing is >that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like >Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as The Font of All Knowledge). >You really need to keep education materials sown together. So Id love >to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, >following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts >to keep these things up to date, but Id [even] like to see teachers >help contribute to it. > >Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with >simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other, he >concluded. And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots >of technology Theres lots of work to do out there. > > >-- >-------------------------------------- >Andy Carvin >Program Director >EDC Center for Media & Community >acarvin @ edc . org >http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org >http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ >-------------------------------------- > Dear Sir, The Web Opac is working fine giving all the details. The Web interface of SLIM++ software is also impressive. One other WebOpac worth looking is that of the Hyderabad based "Indian School of Busienss". Following is the link. Just do a little browsing of the library catalogue and you will apperciate the quantity of information that can be accessed online. <http://www.isb.edu/lrc/index.html> A digital library of documents relating to business management is also available. Regards, SALMAN HAIDER Consultant, Indian School of Business Library (LRC) Hyderabad On Fri, 01 Oct 2004 Jai Haravu wrote : >While congratulating the Gokhale Inst. for putting their library catalogue on the web, I must also express my disappointment that it looks like only the Institute's authorized users can search the OPAC. I think the Institute has such a rich collection of material that it should allow other scholars to at least search its collection and know if a particular publication is available or not. The whole purpose of putting a library's catalogue on the web is defeated if this is not done. > >cid:65519CDA-52A4-4314-A994-7F572CE46607 >L J Haravu >Trustee, Kesavan Institute of Information and Knowledge Management [http://www.kiikm.org/] >69 Krishnapuri Colony >West Marredpally >Sedcunderabad 500 026 >Tel: 91-40-27803947 >-------Original Message------- > > From: >mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Date: >10/01/04 11:12:27 >To: >mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Subject: >LIS-Forum Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1 > >Send LIS-Forum mailing list submissions to > mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > >To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum >or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > mailto:lis-forum-request@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum-request(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > >You can reach the person managing the list at > mailto:lis-forum-owner@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum-owner(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > >When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific >than "Re: Contents of LIS-Forum digest..." > > >Today's Topics: > > 1. RE: Request for Information (Monali Panchbhai) > 2. Announcement (N Murali) > 3. Unesco-eBook Workshop- September 16-Hotel Atria, > Bangalore-Report (Shalini R. Urs) > 4. FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web > (Subbiah Arunachalam) > > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- > >Message: 1 >Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 08:46:50 +0000 > From: "Monali Panchbhai" < mailto:monalipanchbhai@hotmail.com monalipanchbhai(a)hotmail.com > > >Subject: RE: [LIS-Forum] Request for Information >To: mailto:ikishore@rediffmail.com, ikishore(a)rediffmail.com, >mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Message-ID: < mailto:BAY12-F22wGmAf0Mjka0001a01d@hotmail.com BAY12-F22wGmAf0Mjka0001a01d(a)hotmail.com > > >Content-Type: text/plain > >Dear Member, >The facility to restrict copy/paste/print is available through the Latest Acrobat-PDF 6.0 version. >You have to save that document with secutiry option which gives you the facility of the restricting diff. types of rights. >Try doing >Document ---> Security ---> Restrict opening & editing ---> >then set password and select the options for restriciting the rights. >Regards, >Monali Panchbhai >Librarian, >J V Gokal & Com. >Mumbai. > > >From: "Kishore Ingale" < mailto:ikishore@rediffmail.com ikishore(a)rediffmail.com > > > >Reply-To: Kishore Ingale < mailto:ikishore@rediffmail.com ikishore(a)rediffmail.com > > > >To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > >Subject: [LIS-Forum] Request for Information > >Date: 30 Sep 2004 04:34:30 -0000 > > > > > >Dear Colleagues, > > > >We are experimenting with providing access to our digital documents to users through web based server (using Greenstone). Collection mostly include MS WORD and PDF documents. > > > >Is it possible to implement security with which users will be able to view documents but not able to download / save these files at their end.. ? > > > >Kishore Ingale >& mailto:gt;ikishore@rediffmail.com gt;ikishore(a)rediffmail.com > >ForwardSourceID:NT000043C2 > >_______________________________________________ > >LIS-Forum mailing list >& mailto:gt;LIS-Forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in gt;LIS-Forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > > http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum >Millions of profiles from across the globe. http://g.msn.com/8HMBENIN/2737??PS=47575 http://g.msn.com/8HMBENIN/2737??PS=47575 >On BharatMatrimony.com > > >------------------------------ > >Message: 2 >Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 06:01:14 -0700 (PDT) > From: N Murali < mailto:murali_dhara@yahoo.com murali_dhara(a)yahoo.com > > >Subject: [LIS-Forum] Announcement >To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Message-ID: < mailto:20040930130114.72116.qmail@web51106.mail.yahoo.com 20040930130114.72116.qmail(a)web51106.mail.yahoo.com > > >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > >Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2004 15:07:39 +0100 > From: Prabhash Rath < mailto:prabhash@gipe.ernet.in prabhash(a)gipe.ernet.in > > >Subject: Announcement > >Please distribute this message to Lis-forum > >Dear professionals, > >We are happy to inform you that the Gokhale >Institute Library has successfully developed the >bibliographic database of its entire collection >which may be accessed through the following site: > >http://www.gipe.ernet.in/library/librarycatalogue.html http://www.gipe.ernet.in/library/librarycatalogue.html > >Gokhale Library might be the first to put up >bibliographic details of its entire collection on >the Web under the INFLIBNET automation programme >(1st Oct. 1999 to 30th Sept. 2004). > >A P Gadre >Librarian > > > > >__________________________________________________ >Do You Yahoo!? >Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around >http://mail.yahoo.com http://mail.yahoo.com > > >------------------------------ > >Message: 3 >Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:42:27 +0530 (IST) > From: "Shalini R. Urs" < mailto:shalini@vidyanidhi.org.in shalini(a)vidyanidhi.org.in > > >Subject: [LIS-Forum] Unesco-eBook Workshop- September 16-Hotel Atria, > Bangalore-Report >To: < mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > > >Message-ID: > < mailto:35160.210.212.200.228.1096553547.squirrel@mail.vidyanidhi.org.in 35160.210.212.200.228.1096553547.squirrel(a)mail.vidyanidhi.org.in > > >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 > >UNESCO Interactive Workshop on eBooks, Hotel Atria, Bangalore September >16, 2004 ( http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook >). >---------- >Envisioning the potential of eBooks in promoting and supporting >Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based- student centred >learning, UNESCO is engaged in a project on developing guidelines for >eBooks. The mission of this project is to carry out a scoping and >exploratory study of the eBooks and develop guidelines for the production, >promotion and usage of eBooks. This consultancy project involved three >phases- desk top research; questionnaire based user study and an >Interactive Workshop The Interactive Workshop on eBooks, was organised on >September 16, 2004 and held at Hotel Atria, Bangalore. >The Workshop was inaugurated by Dr.S.Ramakrishanan, Executive Director, >C-DAC, Pune. Dr. Lucy A Tedd of University of Wales gave the keynote and >Dr.Susanne Ornager, Advisor, Communication and Information for Asia and >the Pacific, UNESCO, New Delhi chaired the session. >The invitation only Workshop was an important milestone in the Project, >with more than seventy participants representing the diverse stakeholders >community. There were forty three information professionals; twenty four >end users and technologists; and six from the publishing/aggregator >industry in the Workshop, engaged in interacting, deliberating and >debating on the gamut of issues- from definitions to design to delivery >mechanisms. The format of the Workshop was designed to be interactive with >each session having speakers and a moderator to lead the discussions with >a set of issues/questions. >The inaugural session was followed by three sessions- user and technology >perspective; author and publisher perspective; and aggregator and library >perspective. Prof. R.Kalyana Krishnan of IIT, Chennai, Prof.G.Misra of >Indian Statistical Institute, Mr.Sanjiv Goswami of Springer, >N.V.Sathyanarayana of Informatics India, Dr.Primalini Kukanesan of >National Library of Malaysia and Dr. Deepali Talagala of Sri Lanka Library >Association were the speakers at these sessions. The three sessions were >moderated by Mr. Anand T. Byrappa of GE, Prof. I.K.Ravichandra Rao of >Indian Statistical Institute and Dr.Venkadesan of Indian Institute of >Science respectively. There were product presentations by John Wiley and >Springer. >The Workshop objective of gaining insights from different perspective was >achieved and the interactions helped in drawing meaningful conclusions >and providing the necessary inputs for the drafting of framework for the >guidelines document. >For more detailed report, presentations and details of the Project visit >the website http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook------------------ http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook------------------ > > > > >Dr. Shalini R. Urs >Director >Information and Communication Division >& >Professor and Chairperson >Department of Library and Information Science >University of Mysore >Mysore-570006 >India >Tele:91-821-2514699 >Fax :91-821-2519209 > > > > >------------------------------ > >Message: 4 >Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 10:33:48 +0530 > From: Subbiah Arunachalam < mailto:arun@mssrf.res.in arun(a)mssrf.res.in > > >Subject: [LIS-Forum] FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web >To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Message-ID: > < mailto:014BE5562FB3D511BA7A00508BCC23D47EF20E@swami.mssrf.res.in 014BE5562FB3D511BA7A00508BCC23D47EF20E(a)swami.mssrf.res.in > > >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" > >Friends: > >Here is an interesting article I received in the mail. Some of you may find >it interesting and useful. Best wishes. > >Arun >[Subbiah Arunachalam] > > >Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web >http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ > >The MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference featured a >keynote by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Promising >a one-hour talk in 30 minutes, Berners-Lee gave an animated, >rapid-fire presentation -- more like a 90-minute talk in 30 minutes -- >about the Semantic Web, his latest initiative. > >Berners-Lees early remarks focused on his development of the Web. >Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass >of things being developed on the Internet, including protocols such as >TCP/IP and other standards. All I had to do on top of that to create >the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was >rather arrogant. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web and the idea was >that it would minimally constraining. And HTML, the language he created >to drive the Web, would be the cloth on which a tapestry would be made > the jewels, the colors > >Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions >between them, whats come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come >and gone, new ways of thinking and more recently, wikis and blogs. >The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a >place where we can all meet and read and write. Collaborative things >are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows >theyre [embracing] its creative side. > >But from the very beginning of the Web, Berners-Lee had hoped that he >would be able to incorporate descriptive information into the Webs >fundamental design, but for various reasons it didnt make the cut. One >thing I wanted to put in the original design was the typing of links, >he said. For example, lets say you link your website to another site. >At the moment, the hyperlink connecting them contains very little >information: just an address to get to the other websites content. But >Berners-Lees idea was to include metadata with each hyperlink to >describe the relationship between the two sites. For example: do >the people linking their two websites know each other personally, >professionally, or not at all? If theyre colleagues, how are they >working together, and in what fields? Where are they working? > >When we put one link to another, a human being knows what that link may >mean, but a machine doesnt, he said. But this idea of embedding large >amounts of machine-readable metadata into HTML didnt make it into the >original Web standard. Now, hes trying to change that, with an >initiative called the Semantic Web. > >The Semantic Web looks at integrating data across the Web, Berners-Lee >said. As the <a href=" http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ >">World Wide Web >Consortium</a> explains, The Web can reach its full potential only if >it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated >tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs >must be able to share and process data even when these programs have >been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the >idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can >be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, >integration and reuse of data across various applications. > >For the Semantic Web to function properly, websites would be designed in >ways fundamentally different to traditional HTML. For example, in >traditional HTML, if I wanted to assign a page a particular color, I >would simply include a bit of code stating exactly what that color >should be. Color=Red, basically. But with the Semantic Web, you wouldnt > do this. Rather, youd tell the website to go to a URL that >defines a universal standard of what that color looks like. So >instead of coding a webpage to say Color=Red, youd say something like >Color= http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 > and your >website would know to connect to this site to identify the color. This >would hold true for all data you include in your website: color, >people, zipcodes, images, etc. Data would all be connected to URLs >containing descriptive information about that data. Information would >not be static or absolute; instead its an abstract concept that gets >sucked up from another website explaining exactly how to define it. > >An early example of the Semantic Web in action is the Creative Commons >initiative, which gives content publishers a simple way of clarifying >how their content may be used by others. The Creative Commons team has >created a collection of copyright licenses, each stating whether a >persons content can be used for commercial or noncommercial purposes, >can be redistributed or edited, with or without the owners permission, >etc. The system is very flexible, so a person may personalize their >license with different combinations of these elements. When a content >publisher, like a blogger, places a Creative Commons license on their >website, they do so by adding a piece of code to their sites HTML that >refers to their personalized license. This code is made of a collection >of URLs, each of which defines a particular element of the license, such >as the contents redistribution policy. So when search engines and other >automated tools pick up that bloggers website, theyll access these >URLs and understand your copyright policy as you intended it. > >Easy? Maybe not. But Berners-Lee is confident in his vision. The Web is >a tangle, your life is a tangle get used to it. > >Berners-Lee sees the Semantic Web having a range of uses. Online >information will connect seamlessly because of the common concepts they >share. Thats what its all about connecting things, he said. The >Semantic Web will help artificial intelligence projects, online >translators and other technologies that require access to large amounts >of descriptive data to work properly. Berners-Lee also offered a >real-world example. Sometimes, in an emergency, like when a virus >breaks out, you need to correlate data between a number of databases, >he said. The Semantic Web, he explained, will make this much easier. > >Its also helping build powerful social networking tools -- >friend-of-a-friend networks in which people write a little bit about >themselves as metadata, and connections get formed based on this >information. Who knows what sort of Google will be built on top of >this stuff, Berners-Lee wondered. Computers will be able to browse the >Web and find what were looking for based on what they know about our >needs and the descriptive metadata they find on relevant websites. A >human being browse the Web? That will be a little old fashioned, he joked. > >Berners-Lee noted that the success of the Semantic Web will depend on >royalty-free technical standards. Standards must be royalty free to >foster innovation and encourage the growth of new markets. It is very >important that we make sure we are not tripped up by proprietary >standards, he said. With so many ridiculous patents out there, theres >always the threat that an underwater patent will torpedo innovation. > >Following his speech, Berners-Lee took questions from the audience, >moderated by Ethernet inventor and 3Com co-founder Bob Metcalfe. >Berners-Lee said the Web was originally a play project that his bosses >at Switzerlands CERN laboratory let him explore in his spare time. The >structure of CERN, with its many groups of researchers working >independently, influenced the structure of the Web. Because it was a >lab, it acted more like a web in itself, so coming up with a virtual >web for CERN staff to share information with each other made a lot of >sense. > >Once he developed the idea, he started to promote it through Internet >discussion groups, though not necessarily the groups frequented by >fellow scientists. Hypertext wasnt considered real computing, so I >sent it out to alternative news groups, he said. Some people like the >University of Illinois Marc Andreesen embraced the idea and ran with >it; he went on to found Netscape. > >Others were less supportive because they didnt like the technical >structure behind it. Why do I have to use your horrible angle >brackets? they would say to him. > >Do you remember the names of these people? Metcalfe asked rather >mischievously. Berners-Lee laughed and waved off the question. > >Despite being the inventor of the Web, Berners-Lee didnt patent the >standard, allowing others to build upon it -- and profit on it. Some >people have said, Isnt it a shame all these commercial things came >about? he noted. But most people wanted a commercial browser. The >private sector helped spread the Web beyond the confines of research and >academia. The MarcAndreesens of the world contributed a lot to the >adoption of the Webm making it commercially viable, he noted. >Berners-Lee added that he still uses Netscape, despite its fall in >popularity, on a Mac with the OS X operating system, and has started >playing with Mozillas new open source Firefox browser as well. > >Berners-Lee also described how his work on the Web has changed over the >years from being a sole endeavor to a distributed effort with lots of >contributors. He waxed nostalgically over the days when he could make >all the decisions himself, acknowledging the challenges of achieving >consensus in distributed group projects. If you take little groups, >they form their own little cultures. And when you get these groups >together, they dont share their ideas, and have different values >towards how things should be built. This takes a lot more energy than >figuring out how to do it yourself. Making consensus, communicating >with other people is hard work. > >I had the luxury to do this myself with nobody there to object, he >continued. But now were doing things where there are lot of people >interested in getting involved. If you want to do something, do it >yourself. > >As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on >the Web as an educational tool. Id like to see lots of curricula like >the <a href=" http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html >">MIT Open Courseware >initiative</a> being picked up by K-12, he said. The tricky thing is >that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like >Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as The Font of All Knowledge). >You really need to keep education materials sown together. So Id love >to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, >following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts >to keep these things up to date, but Id [even] like to see teachers >help contribute to it. > >Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with >simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other, he >concluded. And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots >of technology Theres lots of work to do out there. > > >-- >-------------------------------------- >Andy Carvin >Program Director >EDC Center for Media & Community >acarvin @ edc . org >http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org >http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ >-------------------------------------- >

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Re: LIS-Forum Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1 Announcement of Gokhale Institute's OPAC on the Web
by Jai Haravu 01 Oct '04

01 Oct '04

While congratulating the Gokhale Inst. for putting their library catalogue on the web, I must also express my disappointment that it looks like only the Institute's authorized users can search the OPAC. I think the Institute has such a rich collection of material that it should allow other scholars to at least search its collection and know if a particular publication is available or not. The whole purpose of putting a library's catalogue on the web is defeated if this is not done. L J Haravu Trustee, Kesavan Institute of Information and Knowledge Management [http://www.kiikm.org/] 69 Krishnapuri Colony West Marredpally Sedcunderabad 500 026 Tel: 91-40-27803947 -------Original Message------- From: lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Date: 10/01/04 11:12:27 To: lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Subject: LIS-Forum Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1 Send LIS-Forum mailing list submissions to lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to lis-forum-request(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in You can reach the person managing the list at lis-forum-owner(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of LIS-Forum digest..." Today's Topics: 1. RE: Request for Information (Monali Panchbhai) 2. Announcement (N Murali) 3. Unesco-eBook Workshop- September 16-Hotel Atria, Bangalore-Report (Shalini R. Urs) 4. FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web (Subbiah Arunachalam) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 08:46:50 +0000 From: "Monali Panchbhai" <monalipanchbhai(a)hotmail.com> Subject: RE: [LIS-Forum] Request for Information To: ikishore(a)rediffmail.com, lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Message-ID: <BAY12-F22wGmAf0Mjka0001a01d(a)hotmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain Dear Member, The facility to restrict copy/paste/print is available through the Latest Acrobat-PDF 6.0 version. You have to save that document with secutiry option which gives you the facility of the restricting diff. types of rights. Try doing Document ---> Security ---> Restrict opening & editing ---> then set password and select the options for restriciting the rights. Regards, Monali Panchbhai Librarian, J V Gokal & Com. Mumbai. >From: "Kishore Ingale" <ikishore(a)rediffmail.com> >Reply-To: Kishore Ingale <ikishore(a)rediffmail.com> >To: lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Subject: [LIS-Forum] Request for Information >Date: 30 Sep 2004 04:34:30 -0000 > > >Dear Colleagues, > >We are experimenting with providing access to our digital documents to users through web based server (using Greenstone). Collection mostly include MS WORD and PDF documents. > >Is it possible to implement security with which users will be able to view documents but not able to download / save these files at their end.. ? > >Kishore Ingale >ikishore(a)rediffmail.com >ForwardSourceID:NT000043C2 >_______________________________________________ >LIS-Forum mailing list >LIS-Forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum Millions of profiles from across the globe. http://g.msn com/8HMBENIN/2737??PS=47575 On BharatMatrimony.com ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 06:01:14 -0700 (PDT) From: N Murali <murali_dhara(a)yahoo.com> Subject: [LIS-Forum] Announcement To: lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Message-ID: <20040930130114.72116.qmail(a)web51106.mail.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2004 15:07:39 +0100 From: Prabhash Rath <prabhash(a)gipe.ernet.in> Subject: Announcement Please distribute this message to Lis-forum Dear professionals, We are happy to inform you that the Gokhale Institute Library has successfully developed the bibliographic database of its entire collection which may be accessed through the following site: http://www.gipe.ernet.in/library/librarycatalogue.html Gokhale Library might be the first to put up bibliographic details of its entire collection on the Web under the INFLIBNET automation programme (1st Oct. 1999 to 30th Sept. 2004). A P Gadre Librarian __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:42:27 +0530 (IST) From: "Shalini R. Urs" <shalini(a)vidyanidhi.org.in> Subject: [LIS-Forum] Unesco-eBook Workshop- September 16-Hotel Atria, Bangalore-Report To: <lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in> Message-ID: <35160.210.212.200.228.1096553547.squirrel(a)mail.vidyanidhi.org.in> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 UNESCO Interactive Workshop on eBooks, Hotel Atria, Bangalore September 16, 2004 (http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook) ---------- Envisioning the potential of eBooks in promoting and supporting Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based- student centred learning, UNESCO is engaged in a project on developing guidelines for eBooks. The mission of this project is to carry out a scoping and exploratory study of the eBooks and develop guidelines for the production, promotion and usage of eBooks. This consultancy project involved three phases- desk top research; questionnaire based user study and an Interactive Workshop The Interactive Workshop on eBooks, was organised on September 16, 2004 and held at Hotel Atria, Bangalore. The Workshop was inaugurated by Dr.S.Ramakrishanan, Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune. Dr. Lucy A Tedd of University of Wales gave the keynote and Dr.Susanne Ornager, Advisor, Communication and Information for Asia and the Pacific, UNESCO, New Delhi chaired the session. The invitation only Workshop was an important milestone in the Project, with more than seventy participants representing the diverse stakeholders community. There were forty three information professionals; twenty four end users and technologists; and six from the publishing/aggregator industry in the Workshop, engaged in interacting, deliberating and debating on the gamut of issues- from definitions to design to delivery mechanisms. The format of the Workshop was designed to be interactive with each session having speakers and a moderator to lead the discussions with a set of issues/questions. The inaugural session was followed by three sessions- user and technology perspective; author and publisher perspective; and aggregator and library perspective. Prof. R.Kalyana Krishnan of IIT, Chennai, Prof.G.Misra of Indian Statistical Institute, Mr.Sanjiv Goswami of Springer, N.V.Sathyanarayana of Informatics India, Dr.Primalini Kukanesan of National Library of Malaysia and Dr. Deepali Talagala of Sri Lanka Library Association were the speakers at these sessions. The three sessions were moderated by Mr. Anand T. Byrappa of GE, Prof. I.K.Ravichandra Rao of Indian Statistical Institute and Dr.Venkadesan of Indian Institute of Science respectively. There were product presentations by John Wiley and Springer. The Workshop objective of gaining insights from different perspective was achieved and the interactions helped in drawing meaningful conclusions and providing the necessary inputs for the drafting of framework for the guidelines document. For more detailed report, presentations and details of the Project visit the website http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook------------------ Dr. Shalini R. Urs Director Information and Communication Division & Professor and Chairperson Department of Library and Information Science University of Mysore Mysore-570006 India Tele:91-821-2514699 Fax :91-821-2519209 ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 10:33:48 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> Subject: [LIS-Forum] FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web To: lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Message-ID: <014BE5562FB3D511BA7A00508BCC23D47EF20E(a)swami.mssrf.res.in> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Friends: Here is an interesting article I received in the mail. Some of you may find it interesting and useful. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ The MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference featured a keynote by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Promising a one-hour talk in 30 minutes, Berners-Lee gave an animated, rapid-fire presentation -- more like a 90-minute talk in 30 minutes -- about the Semantic Web, his latest initiative. Berners-Lees early remarks focused on his development of the Web. Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass of things being developed on the Internet, including protocols such as TCP/IP and other standards. All I had to do on top of that to create the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was rather arrogant. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web and the idea was that it would minimally constraining. And HTML, the language he created to drive the Web, would be the cloth on which a tapestry would be made the jewels, the colors Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions between them, whats come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come and gone, new ways of thinking and more recently, wikis and blogs. The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write. Collaborative things are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows theyre [embracing] its creative side. But from the very beginning of the Web, Berners-Lee had hoped that he would be able to incorporate descriptive information into the Webs fundamental design, but for various reasons it didnt make the cut. One thing I wanted to put in the original design was the typing of links, he said. For example, lets say you link your website to another site. At the moment, the hyperlink connecting them contains very little information: just an address to get to the other websites content. But Berners-Lees idea was to include metadata with each hyperlink to describe the relationship between the two sites. For example: do the people linking their two websites know each other personally, professionally, or not at all? If theyre colleagues, how are they working together, and in what fields? Where are they working? When we put one link to another, a human being knows what that link may mean, but a machine doesnt, he said. But this idea of embedding large amounts of machine-readable metadata into HTML didnt make it into the original Web standard. Now, hes trying to change that, with an initiative called the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web looks at integrating data across the Web, Berners-Lee said. As the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/">World Wide Web Consortium</a> explains, The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. For the Semantic Web to function properly, websites would be designed in ways fundamentally different to traditional HTML. For example, in traditional HTML, if I wanted to assign a page a particular color, I would simply include a bit of code stating exactly what that color should be. Color=Red, basically. But with the Semantic Web, you wouldnt do this. Rather, youd tell the website to go to a URL that defines a universal standard of what that color looks like. So instead of coding a webpage to say Color=Red, youd say something like Color=http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 and your website would know to connect to this site to identify the color. This would hold true for all data you include in your website: color, people, zipcodes, images, etc. Data would all be connected to URLs containing descriptive information about that data. Information would not be static or absolute; instead its an abstract concept that gets sucked up from another website explaining exactly how to define it. An early example of the Semantic Web in action is the Creative Commons initiative, which gives content publishers a simple way of clarifying how their content may be used by others. The Creative Commons team has created a collection of copyright licenses, each stating whether a persons content can be used for commercial or noncommercial purposes, can be redistributed or edited, with or without the owners permission, etc. The system is very flexible, so a person may personalize their license with different combinations of these elements. When a content publisher, like a blogger, places a Creative Commons license on their website, they do so by adding a piece of code to their sites HTML that refers to their personalized license. This code is made of a collection of URLs, each of which defines a particular element of the license, such as the contents redistribution policy. So when search engines and other automated tools pick up that bloggers website, theyll access these URLs and understand your copyright policy as you intended it. Easy? Maybe not. But Berners-Lee is confident in his vision. The Web is a tangle, your life is a tangle get used to it. Berners-Lee sees the Semantic Web having a range of uses. Online information will connect seamlessly because of the common concepts they share. Thats what its all about connecting things, he said. The Semantic Web will help artificial intelligence projects, online translators and other technologies that require access to large amounts of descriptive data to work properly. Berners-Lee also offered a real-world example. Sometimes, in an emergency, like when a virus breaks out, you need to correlate data between a number of databases, he said. The Semantic Web, he explained, will make this much easier. Its also helping build powerful social networking tools -- friend-of-a-friend networks in which people write a little bit about themselves as metadata, and connections get formed based on this information. Who knows what sort of Google will be built on top of this stuff, Berners-Lee wondered. Computers will be able to browse the Web and find what were looking for based on what they know about our needs and the descriptive metadata they find on relevant websites. A human being browse the Web? That will be a little old fashioned, he joked. Berners-Lee noted that the success of the Semantic Web will depend on royalty-free technical standards. Standards must be royalty free to foster innovation and encourage the growth of new markets. It is very important that we make sure we are not tripped up by proprietary standards, he said. With so many ridiculous patents out there, theres always the threat that an underwater patent will torpedo innovation. Following his speech, Berners-Lee took questions from the audience, moderated by Ethernet inventor and 3Com co-founder Bob Metcalfe. Berners-Lee said the Web was originally a play project that his bosses at Switzerlands CERN laboratory let him explore in his spare time. The structure of CERN, with its many groups of researchers working independently, influenced the structure of the Web. Because it was a lab, it acted more like a web in itself, so coming up with a virtual web for CERN staff to share information with each other made a lot of sense. Once he developed the idea, he started to promote it through Internet discussion groups, though not necessarily the groups frequented by fellow scientists. Hypertext wasnt considered real computing, so I sent it out to alternative news groups, he said. Some people like the University of Illinois Marc Andreesen embraced the idea and ran with it; he went on to found Netscape. Others were less supportive because they didnt like the technical structure behind it. Why do I have to use your horrible angle brackets? they would say to him. Do you remember the names of these people? Metcalfe asked rather mischievously. Berners-Lee laughed and waved off the question. Despite being the inventor of the Web, Berners-Lee didnt patent the standard, allowing others to build upon it -- and profit on it. Some people have said, Isnt it a shame all these commercial things came about? he noted. But most people wanted a commercial browser. The private sector helped spread the Web beyond the confines of research and academia. The MarcAndreesens of the world contributed a lot to the adoption of the Webm making it commercially viable, he noted. Berners-Lee added that he still uses Netscape, despite its fall in popularity, on a Mac with the OS X operating system, and has started playing with Mozillas new open source Firefox browser as well. Berners-Lee also described how his work on the Web has changed over the years from being a sole endeavor to a distributed effort with lots of contributors. He waxed nostalgically over the days when he could make all the decisions himself, acknowledging the challenges of achieving consensus in distributed group projects. If you take little groups, they form their own little cultures. And when you get these groups together, they dont share their ideas, and have different values towards how things should be built. This takes a lot more energy than figuring out how to do it yourself. Making consensus, communicating with other people is hard work. I had the luxury to do this myself with nobody there to object, he continued. But now were doing things where there are lot of people interested in getting involved. If you want to do something, do it yourself. As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on the Web as an educational tool. Id like to see lots of curricula like the <a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html">MIT Open Courseware initiative</a> being picked up by K-12, he said. The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as The Font of All Knowledge). You really need to keep education materials sown together. So Id love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things up to date, but Id [even] like to see teachers help contribute to it. Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other, he concluded. And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots of technology Theres lots of work to do out there. -- -------------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ -------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web Friends: Here is an interesting article I received in the mail. Some of you may find it interesting and useful. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject org/andy/blog/ The MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference featured a keynote by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Promising a one-hour talk in 30 minutes, Berners-Lee gave an animated, rapid-fire presentation -- more like a 90-minute talk in 30 minutes -- about the Semantic Web, his latest initiative. Berners-Lees early remarks focused on his development of the Web. Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass of things being developed on the Internet, including protocols such as TCP/IP and other standards. All I had to do on top of that to create the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was rather arrogant. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web and the idea was that it would minimally constraining. And HTML, the language he created to drive the Web, would be the cloth on which a tapestry would be made the jewels, the colors Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions between them, whats come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come and gone, new ways of thinking and more recently, wikis and blogs. The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write. Collaborative things are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows theyre [embracing] its creative side. But from the very beginning of the Web, Berners-Lee had hoped that he would be able to incorporate descriptive information into the Webs fundamental design, but for various reasons it didnt make the cut. One thing I wanted to put in the original design was the typing of links, he said. For example, lets say you link your website to another site. At the moment, the hyperlink connecting them contains very little information: just an address to get to the other websites content. But Berners-Lees idea was to include metadata with each hyperlink to describe the relationship between the two sites. For example: do the people linking their two websites know each other personally, professionally, or not at all? If theyre colleagues, how are they working together, and in what fields? Where are they working? When we put one link to another, a human being knows what that link may mean, but a machine doesnt, he said. But this idea of embedding large amounts of machine-readable metadata into HTML didnt make it into the original Web standard. Now, hes trying to change that, with an initiative called the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web looks at integrating data across the Web, Berners-Lee said. As the <a href=" http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ http://www.w3 org/2001/sw/ ">World Wide Web Consortium</a> explains, The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. For the Semantic Web to function properly, websites would be designed in ways fundamentally different to traditional HTML. For example, in traditional HTML, if I wanted to assign a page a particular color, I would simply include a bit of code stating exactly what that color should be. Color=Red, basically. But with the Semantic Web, you wouldnt do this. Rather, youd tell the website to go to a URL that defines a universal standard of what that color looks like. So instead of coding a webpage to say Color=Red, youd say something like Color= http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 and your website would know to connect to this site to identify the color. This would hold true for all data you include in your website: color, people, zipcodes, images, etc. Data would all be connected to URLs containing descriptive information about that data. Information would not be static or absolute; instead its an abstract concept that gets sucked up from another website explaining exactly how to define it. An early example of the Semantic Web in action is the Creative Commons initiative, which gives content publishers a simple way of clarifying how their content may be used by others. The Creative Commons team has created a collection of copyright licenses, each stating whether a persons content can be used for commercial or noncommercial purposes, can be redistributed or edited, with or without the owners permission, etc. The system is very flexible, so a person may personalize their license with different combinations of these elements. When a content publisher, like a blogger, places a Creative Commons license on their website, they do so by adding a piece of code to their sites HTML that refers to their personalized license. This code is made of a collection of URLs, each of which defines a particular element of the license, such as the contents redistribution policy. So when search engines and other automated tools pick up that bloggers website, theyll access these URLs and understand your copyright policy as you intended it. Easy? Maybe not. But Berners-Lee is confident in his vision. The Web is a tangle, your life is a tangle get used to it. Berners-Lee sees the Semantic Web having a range of uses. Online information will connect seamlessly because of the common concepts they share. Thats what its all about connecting things, he said. The Semantic Web will help artificial intelligence projects, online translators and other technologies that require access to large amounts of descriptive data to work properly. Berners-Lee also offered a real-world example. Sometimes, in an emergency, like when a virus breaks out, you need to correlate data between a number of databases, he said. The Semantic Web, he explained, will make this much easier. Its also helping build powerful social networking tools -- friend-of-a-friend networks in which people write a little bit about themselves as metadata, and connections get formed based on this information. Who knows what sort of Google will be built on top of this stuff, Berners-Lee wondered. Computers will be able to browse the Web and find what were looking for based on what they know about our needs and the descriptive metadata they find on relevant websites. A human being browse the Web? That will be a little old fashioned, he joked. Berners-Lee noted that the success of the Semantic Web will depend on royalty-free technical standards. Standards must be royalty free to foster innovation and encourage the growth of new markets. It is very important that we make sure we are not tripped up by proprietary standards, he said. With so many ridiculous patents out there, theres always the threat that an underwater patent will torpedo innovation. Following his speech, Berners-Lee took questions from the audience, moderated by Ethernet inventor and 3Com co-founder Bob Metcalfe. Berners-Lee said the Web was originally a play project that his bosses at Switzerlands CERN laboratory let him explore in his spare time. The structure of CERN, with its many groups of researchers working independently, influenced the structure of the Web. Because it was a lab, it acted more like a web in itself, so coming up with a virtual web for CERN staff to share information with each other made a lot of sense. Once he developed the idea, he started to promote it through Internet discussion groups, though not necessarily the groups frequented by fellow scientists. Hypertext wasnt considered real computing, so I sent it out to alternative news groups, he said. Some people like the University of Illinois Marc Andreesen embraced the idea and ran with it; he went on to found Netscape. Others were less supportive because they didnt like the technical structure behind it. Why do I have to use your horrible angle brackets? they would say to him. Do you remember the names of these people? Metcalfe asked rather mischievously. Berners-Lee laughed and waved off the question. Despite being the inventor of the Web, Berners-Lee didnt patent the standard, allowing others to build upon it -- and profit on it. Some people have said, Isnt it a shame all these commercial things came about? he noted. But most people wanted a commercial browser. The private sector helped spread the Web beyond the confines of research and academia. The MarcAndreesens of the world contributed a lot to the adoption of the Webm making it commercially viable, he noted. Berners-Lee added that he still uses Netscape, despite its fall in popularity, on a Mac with the OS X operating system, and has started playing with Mozillas new open source Firefox browser as well. Berners-Lee also described how his work on the Web has changed over the years from being a sole endeavor to a distributed effort with lots of contributors. He waxed nostalgically over the days when he could make all the decisions himself, acknowledging the challenges of achieving consensus in distributed group projects. If you take little groups, they form their own little cultures. And when you get these groups together, they dont share their ideas, and have different values towards how things should be built. This takes a lot more energy than figuring out how to do it yourself. Making consensus, communicating with other people is hard work. I had the luxury to do this myself with nobody there to object, he continued. But now were doing things where there are lot of people interested in getting involved. If you want to do something, do it yourself. As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on the Web as an educational tool. Id like to see lots of curricula like the <a href=" http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html ">MIT Open Courseware initiative</a> being picked up by K-12, he said. The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as The Font of All Knowledge). You really need to keep education materials sown together. So Id love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things up to date, but Id [even] like to see teachers help contribute to it. Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other, he concluded. And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots of technology Theres lots of work to do out there. -- -------------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject org/andy/blog/ -------------------------------------- ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ LIS-Forum mailing list LIS-Forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum End of LIS-Forum Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1 **************************************** While congratulating the Gokhale Inst. for putting their library catalogue on the web, I must also express my disappointment that it looks like only the Institute's authorized users can search the OPAC. I think the Institute has such a rich collection of material that it should allow other scholars to at least search its collection and know if a particular publication is available or not. The whole purpose of putting a library's catalogue on the web is defeated if this is not done. cid:65519CDA-52A4-4314-A994-7F572CE46607 L J Haravu Trustee, Kesavan Institute of Information and Knowledge Management [http://www.kiikm.org/] 69 Krishnapuri Colony West Marredpally Sedcunderabad 500 026 Tel: 91-40-27803947 -------Original Message------- From: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Date: 10/01/04 11:12:27 To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Subject: LIS-Forum Digest, Vol 19, Issue 1 Send LIS-Forum mailing list submissions to mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to mailto:lis-forum-request@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum-request(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in You can reach the person managing the list at mailto:lis-forum-owner@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum-owner(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of LIS-Forum digest..." Today's Topics: 1. RE: Request for Information (Monali Panchbhai) 2. Announcement (N Murali) 3. Unesco-eBook Workshop- September 16-Hotel Atria, Bangalore-Report (Shalini R. Urs) 4. FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web (Subbiah Arunachalam) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 08:46:50 +0000 From: "Monali Panchbhai" < mailto:monalipanchbhai@hotmail.com monalipanchbhai(a)hotmail.com > Subject: RE: [LIS-Forum] Request for Information To: mailto:ikishore@rediffmail.com, ikishore(a)rediffmail.com, mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Message-ID: < mailto:BAY12-F22wGmAf0Mjka0001a01d@hotmail.com BAY12-F22wGmAf0Mjka0001a01d(a)hotmail.com > Content-Type: text/plain Dear Member, The facility to restrict copy/paste/print is available through the Latest Acrobat-PDF 6.0 version. You have to save that document with secutiry option which gives you the facility of the restricting diff. types of rights. Try doing Document ---> Security ---> Restrict opening & editing ---> then set password and select the options for restriciting the rights. Regards, Monali Panchbhai Librarian, J V Gokal & Com. Mumbai. >From: "Kishore Ingale" < mailto:ikishore@rediffmail.com ikishore(a)rediffmail.com > >Reply-To: Kishore Ingale < mailto:ikishore@rediffmail.com ikishore(a)rediffmail.com > >To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in >Subject: [LIS-Forum] Request for Information >Date: 30 Sep 2004 04:34:30 -0000 > > >Dear Colleagues, > >We are experimenting with providing access to our digital documents to users through web based server (using Greenstone). Collection mostly include MS WORD and PDF documents. > >Is it possible to implement security with which users will be able to view documents but not able to download / save these files at their end.. ? > >Kishore Ingale & mailto:gt;ikishore@rediffmail.com gt;ikishore(a)rediffmail.com >ForwardSourceID:NT000043C2 >_______________________________________________ >LIS-Forum mailing list & mailto:gt;LIS-Forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in gt;LIS-Forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum http://ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/mailman/listinfo/lis-forum Millions of profiles from across the globe. http://g.msn.com/8HMBENIN/2737??PS=47575 http://g.msn.com/8HMBENIN/2737??PS=47575 On BharatMatrimony.com ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 06:01:14 -0700 (PDT) From: N Murali < mailto:murali_dhara@yahoo.com murali_dhara(a)yahoo.com > Subject: [LIS-Forum] Announcement To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Message-ID: < mailto:20040930130114.72116.qmail@web51106.mail.yahoo.com 20040930130114.72116.qmail(a)web51106.mail.yahoo.com > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2004 15:07:39 +0100 From: Prabhash Rath < mailto:prabhash@gipe.ernet.in prabhash(a)gipe.ernet.in > Subject: Announcement Please distribute this message to Lis-forum Dear professionals, We are happy to inform you that the Gokhale Institute Library has successfully developed the bibliographic database of its entire collection which may be accessed through the following site: http://www.gipe.ernet.in/library/librarycatalogue.html http://www.gipe.ernet.in/library/librarycatalogue.html Gokhale Library might be the first to put up bibliographic details of its entire collection on the Web under the INFLIBNET automation programme (1st Oct. 1999 to 30th Sept. 2004). A P Gadre Librarian __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 19:42:27 +0530 (IST) From: "Shalini R. Urs" < mailto:shalini@vidyanidhi.org.in shalini(a)vidyanidhi.org.in > Subject: [LIS-Forum] Unesco-eBook Workshop- September 16-Hotel Atria, Bangalore-Report To: < mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in > Message-ID: < mailto:35160.210.212.200.228.1096553547.squirrel@mail.vidyanidhi.org.in 35160.210.212.200.228.1096553547.squirrel(a)mail.vidyanidhi.org.in > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 UNESCO Interactive Workshop on eBooks, Hotel Atria, Bangalore September 16, 2004 ( http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook ). ---------- Envisioning the potential of eBooks in promoting and supporting Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based- student centred learning, UNESCO is engaged in a project on developing guidelines for eBooks. The mission of this project is to carry out a scoping and exploratory study of the eBooks and develop guidelines for the production, promotion and usage of eBooks. This consultancy project involved three phases- desk top research; questionnaire based user study and an Interactive Workshop The Interactive Workshop on eBooks, was organised on September 16, 2004 and held at Hotel Atria, Bangalore. The Workshop was inaugurated by Dr.S.Ramakrishanan, Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune. Dr. Lucy A Tedd of University of Wales gave the keynote and Dr.Susanne Ornager, Advisor, Communication and Information for Asia and the Pacific, UNESCO, New Delhi chaired the session. The invitation only Workshop was an important milestone in the Project, with more than seventy participants representing the diverse stakeholders community. There were forty three information professionals; twenty four end users and technologists; and six from the publishing/aggregator industry in the Workshop, engaged in interacting, deliberating and debating on the gamut of issues- from definitions to design to delivery mechanisms. The format of the Workshop was designed to be interactive with each session having speakers and a moderator to lead the discussions with a set of issues/questions. The inaugural session was followed by three sessions- user and technology perspective; author and publisher perspective; and aggregator and library perspective. Prof. R.Kalyana Krishnan of IIT, Chennai, Prof.G.Misra of Indian Statistical Institute, Mr.Sanjiv Goswami of Springer, N.V.Sathyanarayana of Informatics India, Dr.Primalini Kukanesan of National Library of Malaysia and Dr. Deepali Talagala of Sri Lanka Library Association were the speakers at these sessions. The three sessions were moderated by Mr. Anand T. Byrappa of GE, Prof. I.K.Ravichandra Rao of Indian Statistical Institute and Dr.Venkadesan of Indian Institute of Science respectively. There were product presentations by John Wiley and Springer. The Workshop objective of gaining insights from different perspective was achieved and the interactions helped in drawing meaningful conclusions and providing the necessary inputs for the drafting of framework for the guidelines document. For more detailed report, presentations and details of the Project visit the website http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook------------------ http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook------------------ Dr. Shalini R. Urs Director Information and Communication Division & Professor and Chairperson Department of Library and Information Science University of Mysore Mysore-570006 India Tele:91-821-2514699 Fax :91-821-2519209 ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2004 10:33:48 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam < mailto:arun@mssrf.res.in arun(a)mssrf.res.in > Subject: [LIS-Forum] FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web To: mailto:lis-forum@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in lis-forum(a)ncsi.iisc.ernet.in Message-ID: < mailto:014BE5562FB3D511BA7A00508BCC23D47EF20E@swami.mssrf.res.in 014BE5562FB3D511BA7A00508BCC23D47EF20E(a)swami.mssrf.res.in > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" Friends: Here is an interesting article I received in the mail. Some of you may find it interesting and useful. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ The MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference featured a keynote by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Promising a one-hour talk in 30 minutes, Berners-Lee gave an animated, rapid-fire presentation -- more like a 90-minute talk in 30 minutes -- about the Semantic Web, his latest initiative. Berners-Lees early remarks focused on his development of the Web. Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass of things being developed on the Internet, including protocols such as TCP/IP and other standards. All I had to do on top of that to create the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was rather arrogant. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web and the idea was that it would minimally constraining. And HTML, the language he created to drive the Web, would be the cloth on which a tapestry would be made the jewels, the colors Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions between them, whats come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come and gone, new ways of thinking and more recently, wikis and blogs. The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write. Collaborative things are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows theyre [embracing] its creative side. But from the very beginning of the Web, Berners-Lee had hoped that he would be able to incorporate descriptive information into the Webs fundamental design, but for various reasons it didnt make the cut. One thing I wanted to put in the original design was the typing of links, he said. For example, lets say you link your website to another site. At the moment, the hyperlink connecting them contains very little information: just an address to get to the other websites content. But Berners-Lees idea was to include metadata with each hyperlink to describe the relationship between the two sites. For example: do the people linking their two websites know each other personally, professionally, or not at all? If theyre colleagues, how are they working together, and in what fields? Where are they working? When we put one link to another, a human being knows what that link may mean, but a machine doesnt, he said. But this idea of embedding large amounts of machine-readable metadata into HTML didnt make it into the original Web standard. Now, hes trying to change that, with an initiative called the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web looks at integrating data across the Web, Berners-Lee said. As the <a href=" http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ ">World Wide Web Consortium</a> explains, The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications. For the Semantic Web to function properly, websites would be designed in ways fundamentally different to traditional HTML. For example, in traditional HTML, if I wanted to assign a page a particular color, I would simply include a bit of code stating exactly what that color should be. Color=Red, basically. But with the Semantic Web, you wouldnt do this. Rather, youd tell the website to go to a URL that defines a universal standard of what that color looks like. So instead of coding a webpage to say Color=Red, youd say something like Color= http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 and your website would know to connect to this site to identify the color. This would hold true for all data you include in your website: color, people, zipcodes, images, etc. Data would all be connected to URLs containing descriptive information about that data. Information would not be static or absolute; instead its an abstract concept that gets sucked up from another website explaining exactly how to define it. An early example of the Semantic Web in action is the Creative Commons initiative, which gives content publishers a simple way of clarifying how their content may be used by others. The Creative Commons team has created a collection of copyright licenses, each stating whether a persons content can be used for commercial or noncommercial purposes, can be redistributed or edited, with or without the owners permission, etc. The system is very flexible, so a person may personalize their license with different combinations of these elements. When a content publisher, like a blogger, places a Creative Commons license on their website, they do so by adding a piece of code to their sites HTML that refers to their personalized license. This code is made of a collection of URLs, each of which defines a particular element of the license, such as the contents redistribution policy. So when search engines and other automated tools pick up that bloggers website, theyll access these URLs and understand your copyright policy as you intended it. Easy? Maybe not. But Berners-Lee is confident in his vision. The Web is a tangle, your life is a tangle get used to it. Berners-Lee sees the Semantic Web having a range of uses. Online information will connect seamlessly because of the common concepts they share. Thats what its all about connecting things, he said. The Semantic Web will help artificial intelligence projects, online translators and other technologies that require access to large amounts of descriptive data to work properly. Berners-Lee also offered a real-world example. Sometimes, in an emergency, like when a virus breaks out, you need to correlate data between a number of databases, he said. The Semantic Web, he explained, will make this much easier. Its also helping build powerful social networking tools -- friend-of-a-friend networks in which people write a little bit about themselves as metadata, and connections get formed based on this information. Who knows what sort of Google will be built on top of this stuff, Berners-Lee wondered. Computers will be able to browse the Web and find what were looking for based on what they know about our needs and the descriptive metadata they find on relevant websites. A human being browse the Web? That will be a little old fashioned, he joked. Berners-Lee noted that the success of the Semantic Web will depend on royalty-free technical standards. Standards must be royalty free to foster innovation and encourage the growth of new markets. It is very important that we make sure we are not tripped up by proprietary standards, he said. With so many ridiculous patents out there, theres always the threat that an underwater patent will torpedo innovation. Following his speech, Berners-Lee took questions from the audience, moderated by Ethernet inventor and 3Com co-founder Bob Metcalfe. Berners-Lee said the Web was originally a play project that his bosses at Switzerlands CERN laboratory let him explore in his spare time. The structure of CERN, with its many groups of researchers working independently, influenced the structure of the Web. Because it was a lab, it acted more like a web in itself, so coming up with a virtual web for CERN staff to share information with each other made a lot of sense. Once he developed the idea, he started to promote it through Internet discussion groups, though not necessarily the groups frequented by fellow scientists. Hypertext wasnt considered real computing, so I sent it out to alternative news groups, he said. Some people like the University of Illinois Marc Andreesen embraced the idea and ran with it; he went on to found Netscape. Others were less supportive because they didnt like the technical structure behind it. Why do I have to use your horrible angle brackets? they would say to him. Do you remember the names of these people? Metcalfe asked rather mischievously. Berners-Lee laughed and waved off the question. Despite being the inventor of the Web, Berners-Lee didnt patent the standard, allowing others to build upon it -- and profit on it. Some people have said, Isnt it a shame all these commercial things came about? he noted. But most people wanted a commercial browser. The private sector helped spread the Web beyond the confines of research and academia. The MarcAndreesens of the world contributed a lot to the adoption of the Webm making it commercially viable, he noted. Berners-Lee added that he still uses Netscape, despite its fall in popularity, on a Mac with the OS X operating system, and has started playing with Mozillas new open source Firefox browser as well. Berners-Lee also described how his work on the Web has changed over the years from being a sole endeavor to a distributed effort with lots of contributors. He waxed nostalgically over the days when he could make all the decisions himself, acknowledging the challenges of achieving consensus in distributed group projects. If you take little groups, they form their own little cultures. And when you get these groups together, they dont share their ideas, and have different values towards how things should be built. This takes a lot more energy than figuring out how to do it yourself. Making consensus, communicating with other people is hard work. I had the luxury to do this myself with nobody there to object, he continued. But now were doing things where there are lot of people interested in getting involved. If you want to do something, do it yourself. As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on the Web as an educational tool. Id like to see lots of curricula like the <a href=" http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html ">MIT Open Courseware initiative</a> being picked up by K-12, he said. The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as The Font of All Knowledge). You really need to keep education materials sown together. So Id love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things up to date, but Id [even] like to see teachers help contribute to it. Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other, he concluded. And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots of technology Theres lots of work to do out there. -- -------------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ --------------------------------------

2 1

Library Traineeship in the Resource Centre at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar
by ts kumbar 01 Oct '04

01 Oct '04

Dear Colleagues, Kindly bring it to the notice of interested Graduates in Library and Information Science and recommend potential candidates. Regards Dr. Kumbar Resource centre DA-IICT Gandhinagar -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Openings for the position of Library Trainees in the Resource Centre at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar. Gujarat Dear Sir/Madam, We take this opportunity to inform you that Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), situated at Gandhinagar, Gujarat, is promoted by the Dhirubhai Ambani Foundation. It has been established on a 50-acre of land in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. The Government of Gujarat has granted it the University Status under the State Act. The Institute has started functioning since August 2001 with a batch size of 240 students at Undergraduate level in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It also offers a variety of masters' and doctoral programs in ICT and allied areas. The Institute takes young and dynamic postgraduate freshers with minimum first class in Library Science, well versed in Computer application to Library Services.Duration of Training is for a period of 10 months. However, guarantee of continued employment cannot be given. The trainees gets a fixed stipend between Rs.5000 to Rs.6000 depending on their quality etc, per month with no other facilities / benefits, as applicable to regular employees, excepting casual leave. Library is kept open till mid night on all working days during the semester and is open on holidays and Sundays. Selected trainees may have to work during these extended hours on rotation basis. Based on sustained and good performance the trainees can be given regular positions. The remuneration for the regular position is at par with the leading Institutions across the country. The Institute has fully computerized Library and provides access to digital collection, catering to the needs of the Faculty/ Staff and students. Plans are on to convert this library into a complete Digital Library. Recently our library has implemented the electromagnetic technology based security system. The interested students are requested to send in their biodata via email at ts_kumbar(a)da-iict.org and directly come to the Institute for a written test and the interview on the 18h October 2004 at 9.00am . The biodata and confirmation about attending the test and interview should reach on or before 14th October, 2004. Yours sincerely Executive Registrar Dhirubhai Ambani Instiute of Information and Communication Technology Post Bag. No.4 Near Indroda Circle Gandhinagar 382009 Gujarat ================================================================= Dear Colleagues, Kindly bring it to the notice of interested Graduates in Library and Information Science and recommend potential candidates. Regards Dr. Kumbar Resource centre DA-IICT Gandhinagar -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Openings for the position of Library Trainees in the Resource Centre at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandhinagar. Gujarat Dear Sir/Madam, We take this opportunity to inform you that Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), situated at Gandhinagar, Gujarat, is promoted by the Dhirubhai Ambani Foundation. It has been established on a 50-acre of land in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. The Government of Gujarat has granted it the University Status under the State Act. The Institute has started functioning since August 2001 with a batch size of 240 students at Undergraduate level in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It also offers a variety of masters’ and doctoral programs in ICT and allied areas. The Institute takes young and dynamic postgraduate freshers with minimum first class in Library Science, well versed in Computer application to Library Services.Duration of Training is for a period of 10 months. However, guarantee of continued employment cannot be given. The trainees gets a fixed stipend between Rs.5000 to Rs.6000 depending on their quality etc, per month with no other facilities / benefits, as applicable to regular employees, excepting casual leave. Library is kept open till mid night on all working days during the semester and is open on holidays and Sundays. Selected trainees may have to work during these extended hours on rotation basis. Based on sustained and good performance the trainees can be given regular positions. The remuneration for the regular position is at par with the leading Institutions across the country. The Institute has fully computerized Library and provides access to digital collection, catering to the needs of the Faculty/ Staff and students. Plans are on to convert this library into a complete Digital Library. Recently our library has implemented the electromagnetic technology based security system. The interested students are requested to send in their biodata via email at mailto:ts_kumbar@da-iict.org ts_kumbar(a)da-iict.org and directly come to the Institute for a written test and the interview on the 18h October 2004 at 9.00am . The biodata and confirmation about attending the test and interview should reach on or before 14th October, 2004. Yours sincerely Executive Registrar Dhirubhai Ambani Instiute of Information and Communication Technology Post Bag. No.4 Near Indroda Circle Gandhinagar 382009 Gujarat =================================================================

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Vivisimo Launches New Clusty Search Engine
by Farooque Shaheen 01 Oct '04

01 Oct '04

Clusty offers several different categories of search; initial search categories include News, Web, Images, and Gossip . A Customize! tab gives you the option to add eBay, Slashdot, or Blogs search tabs –You can also create your own search tabs (which didn’t work in Opera but worked okay in Mozilla); you’re given a list of available search engines and you can check which ones you want to include in your custom tab. Nice to see resources like Gigablast and Librarian’s Index to the Internet included here. You can get it at http://www.clusty.com ; as you might suspect it’s in beta. Thanks & Regards, Farooque Shaheen, Sr. Executive- Information Services Caritor (India) Pvt Ltd. Bangalore, Tel. 080-26678388 # 4105 Mobile-080-34007449

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FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web
by Subbiah Arunachalam 01 Oct '04

01 Oct '04

Friends: Here is an interesting article I received in the mail. Some of you may find it interesting and useful. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ The MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference featured a keynote by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Promising “a one-hour talk in 30 minutes,” Berners-Lee gave an animated, rapid-fire presentation -- more like a 90-minute talk in 30 minutes -- about the Semantic Web, his latest initiative. Berners-Lee’s early remarks focused on his development of the Web. “Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass of things being developed on the Internet,” including protocols such as TCP/IP and other standards. “All I had to do on top of that to create the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was rather arrogant…. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web… and the idea was that it would minimally constraining.” And HTML, the language he created to drive the Web, would be “the cloth on which a tapestry would be made – the jewels, the colors…” Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions between them, what’s come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come and gone, new ways of thinking – and more recently, wikis and blogs. “The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write…. Collaborative things are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows they’re [embracing] its creative side.” But from the very beginning of the Web, Berners-Lee had hoped that he would be able to incorporate descriptive information into the Web’s fundamental design, but for various reasons it didn’t make the cut. “One thing I wanted to put in the original design was the ‘typing’ of links,” he said. For example, let’s say you link your website to another site. At the moment, the hyperlink connecting them contains very little information: just an address to get to the other website’s content. But Berners-Lee’s idea was to include “metadata” with each hyperlink to describe the relationship between the two sites. For example: do the people linking their two websites know each other personally, professionally, or not at all? If they’re colleagues, how are they working together, and in what fields? Where are they working? “When we put one link to another, a human being knows what that link may mean, but a machine doesn’t,” he said. But this idea of embedding large amounts of machine-readable metadata into HTML didn’t make it into the original Web standard. Now, he’s trying to change that, with an initiative called the Semantic Web. “The Semantic Web looks at integrating data across the Web,” Berners-Lee said. As the <a href="http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/">World Wide Web Consortium</a> explains, “The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications.” For the Semantic Web to function properly, websites would be designed in ways fundamentally different to traditional HTML. For example, in traditional HTML, if I wanted to assign a page a particular color, I would simply include a bit of code stating exactly what that color should be. Color=Red, basically. But with the Semantic Web, you wouldn’t do this. Rather, you’d tell the website to go to a URL that defines a universal standard of what that color looks like. So instead of coding a webpage to say “Color=Red,” you’d say something like “Color=http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2” and your website would know to connect to this site to identify the color. This would hold true for all data you include in your website: color, people, zipcodes, images, etc. Data would all be connected to URLs containing descriptive information about that data. Information would not be static or absolute; instead it’s “an abstract concept” that gets sucked up from another website explaining exactly how to define it. An early example of the Semantic Web in action is the Creative Commons initiative, which gives content publishers a simple way of clarifying how their content may be used by others. The Creative Commons team has created a collection of copyright licenses, each stating whether a person’s content can be used for commercial or noncommercial purposes, can be redistributed or edited, with or without the owner’s permission, etc. The system is very flexible, so a person may personalize their license with different combinations of these elements. When a content publisher, like a blogger, places a Creative Commons license on their website, they do so by adding a piece of code to their site’s HTML that refers to their personalized license. This code is made of a collection of URLs, each of which defines a particular element of the license, such as the content’s redistribution policy. So when search engines and other automated tools pick up that blogger’s website, they’ll access these URLs and “understand” your copyright policy as you intended it. Easy? Maybe not. But Berners-Lee is confident in his vision. “The Web is a tangle, your life is a tangle – get used to it.” Berners-Lee sees the Semantic Web having a range of uses. Online information will connect seamlessly because of the common concepts they share. “That’s what it’s all about – connecting things,” he said. The Semantic Web will help artificial intelligence projects, online translators and other technologies that require access to large amounts of descriptive data to work properly. Berners-Lee also offered a real-world example. “Sometimes, in an emergency, like when a virus breaks out, you need to correlate data between a number of databases,” he said. The Semantic Web, he explained, will make this much easier. It’s also helping build powerful social networking tools -- friend-of-a-friend networks in which people write a little bit about themselves as metadata, and connections get formed based on this information. “Who knows what sort of Google will be built on top of this stuff,” Berners-Lee wondered. Computers will be able to browse the Web and find what we’re looking for based on what they know about our needs and the descriptive metadata they find on relevant websites. “A human being browse the Web? That will be a little old fashioned,” he joked. Berners-Lee noted that the success of the Semantic Web will depend on royalty-free technical standards. “Standards must be royalty free” to foster innovation and encourage the growth of new markets. “It is very important that we make sure we are not tripped up” by proprietary standards, he said. “With so many ridiculous patents out there, there’s always the threat” that an “underwater patent will torpedo innovation.” Following his speech, Berners-Lee took questions from the audience, moderated by Ethernet inventor and 3Com co-founder Bob Metcalfe. Berners-Lee said the Web was originally a “play project” that his bosses at Switzerland’s CERN laboratory let him explore in his spare time. The structure of CERN, with its many groups of researchers working independently, influenced the structure of the Web. “Because it was a lab, it acted more like a web in itself,” so coming up with a virtual web for CERN staff to share information with each other made a lot of sense. Once he developed the idea, he started to promote it through Internet discussion groups, though not necessarily the groups frequented by fellow scientists. “Hypertext wasn’t considered ‘real’ computing, so I sent it out to alternative news groups,” he said. Some people like the University of Illinois’ Marc Andreesen embraced the idea and ran with it; he went on to found Netscape. Others were less supportive because they didn’t like the technical structure behind it. “Why do I have to use your horrible angle brackets?” they would say to him. “Do you remember the names of these people?” Metcalfe asked rather mischievously. Berners-Lee laughed and waved off the question. Despite being the inventor of the Web, Berners-Lee didn’t patent the standard, allowing others to build upon it -- and profit on it. “Some people have said, ‘Isn’t it a shame all these commercial things came about?’” he noted. “But most people wanted a commercial browser.” The private sector helped spread the Web beyond the confines of research and academia. The MarcAndreesens of the world contributed a lot to the adoption of the Webm making it commercially viable, he noted. Berners-Lee added that he still uses Netscape, despite its fall in popularity, on a Mac with the OS X operating system, and has started playing with Mozilla’s new open source Firefox browser as well. Berners-Lee also described how his work on the Web has changed over the years from being a sole endeavor to a distributed effort with lots of contributors. He waxed nostalgically over the days when he could make all the decisions himself, acknowledging the challenges of achieving consensus in distributed group projects. “If you take little groups, they form their own little cultures. And when you get these groups together, they don’t share their ideas, and have different values towards how things should be built…. This takes a lot more energy than figuring out how to do it yourself…. Making consensus, communicating with other people is hard work.” “I had the luxury to do this myself… with nobody there to object,” he continued. “But now we’re doing things … where there are lot of people interested in getting involved. … If you want to do something, do it yourself.” As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on the Web as an educational tool. “I’d like to see lots of curricula like the <a href="http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html">MIT Open Courseware initiative</a> being picked up by K-12,” he said. “The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as “The Font of All Knowledge”). You really need to keep education materials sown together. So I’d love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things up to date, but I’d [even] like to see teachers help contribute to it.” “Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other,” he concluded. “And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots of technology… There’s lots of work to do out there.” -- -------------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ -------------------------------------- FW: [DDN] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web Friends: Here is an interesting article I received in the mail. Some of you may find it interesting and useful. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving a Semantic Web http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ The MIT Technology Review Emerging Technologies conference featured a keynote by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Promising “a one-hour talk in 30 minutes,” Berners-Lee gave an animated, rapid-fire presentation -- more like a 90-minute talk in 30 minutes -- about the Semantic Web, his latest initiative. Berners-Lee’s early remarks focused on his development of the Web. “Making the Web was really simple because there was already this morass of things being developed on the Internet,” including protocols such as TCP/IP and other standards. “All I had to do on top of that to create the Web was to create a single global space, which some people said was rather arrogant…. HTTP was a new scheme for the Web… and the idea was that it would minimally constraining.” And HTML, the language he created to drive the Web, would be “the cloth on which a tapestry would be made – the jewels, the colors…” Based on this fast-growing morass of websites and the interactions between them, what’s come out of it? Dot-com companies that have come and gone, new ways of thinking – and more recently, wikis and blogs. “The original thing I wanted to do was make it a collaborative medium, a place where we can all meet and read and write…. Collaborative things are exciting, and the fact people are doing wikis and blogs shows they’re [embracing] its creative side.” But from the very beginning of the Web, Berners-Lee had hoped that he would be able to incorporate descriptive information into the Web’s fundamental design, but for various reasons it didn’t make the cut. “One thing I wanted to put in the original design was the ‘typing’ of links,” he said. For example, let’s say you link your website to another site. At the moment, the hyperlink connecting them contains very little information: just an address to get to the other website’s content. But Berners-Lee’s idea was to include “metadata” with each hyperlink to describe the relationship between the two sites. For example: do the people linking their two websites know each other personally, professionally, or not at all? If they’re colleagues, how are they working together, and in what fields? Where are they working? “When we put one link to another, a human being knows what that link may mean, but a machine doesn’t,” he said. But this idea of embedding large amounts of machine-readable metadata into HTML didn’t make it into the original Web standard. Now, he’s trying to change that, with an initiative called the Semantic Web. “The Semantic Web looks at integrating data across the Web,” Berners-Lee said. As the <a href=" http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ ">World Wide Web Consortium</a> explains, “The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications.” For the Semantic Web to function properly, websites would be designed in ways fundamentally different to traditional HTML. For example, in traditional HTML, if I wanted to assign a page a particular color, I would simply include a bit of code stating exactly what that color should be. Color=Red, basically. But with the Semantic Web, you wouldn’t do this. Rather, you’d tell the website to go to a URL that defines a universal standard of what that color looks like. So instead of coding a webpage to say “Color=Red,” you’d say something like “Color= http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 http://internationalcolorstandardsite.org/colors/red/v2 ” and your website would know to connect to this site to identify the color. This would hold true for all data you include in your website: color, people, zipcodes, images, etc. Data would all be connected to URLs containing descriptive information about that data. Information would not be static or absolute; instead it’s “an abstract concept” that gets sucked up from another website explaining exactly how to define it. An early example of the Semantic Web in action is the Creative Commons initiative, which gives content publishers a simple way of clarifying how their content may be used by others. The Creative Commons team has created a collection of copyright licenses, each stating whether a person’s content can be used for commercial or noncommercial purposes, can be redistributed or edited, with or without the owner’s permission, etc. The system is very flexible, so a person may personalize their license with different combinations of these elements. When a content publisher, like a blogger, places a Creative Commons license on their website, they do so by adding a piece of code to their site’s HTML that refers to their personalized license. This code is made of a collection of URLs, each of which defines a particular element of the license, such as the content’s redistribution policy. So when search engines and other automated tools pick up that blogger’s website, they’ll access these URLs and “understand” your copyright policy as you intended it. Easy? Maybe not. But Berners-Lee is confident in his vision. “The Web is a tangle, your life is a tangle – get used to it.” Berners-Lee sees the Semantic Web having a range of uses. Online information will connect seamlessly because of the common concepts they share. “That’s what it’s all about – connecting things,” he said. The Semantic Web will help artificial intelligence projects, online translators and other technologies that require access to large amounts of descriptive data to work properly. Berners-Lee also offered a real-world example. “Sometimes, in an emergency, like when a virus breaks out, you need to correlate data between a number of databases,” he said. The Semantic Web, he explained, will make this much easier. It’s also helping build powerful social networking tools -- friend-of-a-friend networks in which people write a little bit about themselves as metadata, and connections get formed based on this information. “Who knows what sort of Google will be built on top of this stuff,” Berners-Lee wondered. Computers will be able to browse the Web and find what we’re looking for based on what they know about our needs and the descriptive metadata they find on relevant websites. “A human being browse the Web? That will be a little old fashioned,” he joked. Berners-Lee noted that the success of the Semantic Web will depend on royalty-free technical standards. “Standards must be royalty free” to foster innovation and encourage the growth of new markets. “It is very important that we make sure we are not tripped up” by proprietary standards, he said. “With so many ridiculous patents out there, there’s always the threat” that an “underwater patent will torpedo innovation.” Following his speech, Berners-Lee took questions from the audience, moderated by Ethernet inventor and 3Com co-founder Bob Metcalfe. Berners-Lee said the Web was originally a “play project” that his bosses at Switzerland’s CERN laboratory let him explore in his spare time. The structure of CERN, with its many groups of researchers working independently, influenced the structure of the Web. “Because it was a lab, it acted more like a web in itself,” so coming up with a virtual web for CERN staff to share information with each other made a lot of sense. Once he developed the idea, he started to promote it through Internet discussion groups, though not necessarily the groups frequented by fellow scientists. “Hypertext wasn’t considered ‘real’ computing, so I sent it out to alternative news groups,” he said. Some people like the University of Illinois’ Marc Andreesen embraced the idea and ran with it; he went on to found Netscape. Others were less supportive because they didn’t like the technical structure behind it. “Why do I have to use your horrible angle brackets?” they would say to him. “Do you remember the names of these people?” Metcalfe asked rather mischievously. Berners-Lee laughed and waved off the question. Despite being the inventor of the Web, Berners-Lee didn’t patent the standard, allowing others to build upon it -- and profit on it. “Some people have said, ‘Isn’t it a shame all these commercial things came about?’” he noted. “But most people wanted a commercial browser.” The private sector helped spread the Web beyond the confines of research and academia. The MarcAndreesens of the world contributed a lot to the adoption of the Webm making it commercially viable, he noted. Berners-Lee added that he still uses Netscape, despite its fall in popularity, on a Mac with the OS X operating system, and has started playing with Mozilla’s new open source Firefox browser as well. Berners-Lee also described how his work on the Web has changed over the years from being a sole endeavor to a distributed effort with lots of contributors. He waxed nostalgically over the days when he could make all the decisions himself, acknowledging the challenges of achieving consensus in distributed group projects. “If you take little groups, they form their own little cultures. And when you get these groups together, they don’t share their ideas, and have different values towards how things should be built…. This takes a lot more energy than figuring out how to do it yourself…. Making consensus, communicating with other people is hard work.” “I had the luxury to do this myself… with nobody there to object,” he continued. “But now we’re doing things … where there are lot of people interested in getting involved. … If you want to do something, do it yourself.” As a final question, Metcalfe asked Berners-Lee about his thoughts on the Web as an educational tool. “I’d like to see lots of curricula like the <a href=" http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html ">MIT Open Courseware initiative</a> being picked up by K-12,” he said. “The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia (which he earlier referred to as “The Font of All Knowledge”). You really need to keep education materials sown together. So I’d love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things up to date, but I’d [even] like to see teachers help contribute to it.” “Students can work together [on the Web] when they can interact with simulations, with teachers, but particularly with each other,” he concluded. “And for that we need lots of tools, lots of standards, lots of technology… There’s lots of work to do out there.” -- -------------------------------------- Andy Carvin Program Director EDC Center for Media & Community acarvin @ edc . org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.digitaldividenetwork.org http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/ --------------------------------------

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Center for the Digital Future Identifies the 10 Major Trends Eme rging in the Internet's First Decade of Public Use
by Subbiah Arunachalam 01 Oct '04

01 Oct '04

Friends: I received this message today in the mail. Some of you may find the information useful. Best wishes. Arun ---- Subject: Center for the Digital Future Identifies the 10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet's First Decade of Public Use A report from USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future. Here's a snippet from the press release: "Among the findings from Year Four of the Digital Future Project: * Internet access has risen to its highest level ever. About three-quarters of Americans now go online. * The number of hours spent online continues to increase, rising to an average of 12.5 hours per week - the highest level in the study thus far. * Although the Internet has become the most important source of current information for users, the initially high level of credibility of information on the Internet began to drop in the third year of the study, and declined even further in Year Four. * The number of users who believe that only about half of the information on the Internet is accurate and reliable is growing and has now passed 40 percent of users for the first time. * The study showed that most users trust information on the websites they visit regularly, and on pages created by established media and the government. * Information pages posted by individuals have the lowest credibility: only 9.5 percent of users say information on those sites is reliable and accurate. * Television viewing continues to decline among Internet users, raising the question: "What will happen as a nation that once spent an extremely large portion of time in a passive activity (watching television) transfers increasingly large portions of that time to an interactive activity (the Internet)?" Read more at: http://www.digitalcenter.org/pages/news_content.asp?intGlobalId=125&intTypeI d=1http://www.digitalcenter.org/pages/news_content.asp?intGlobalId=125&intTy peId=1 or the tiny version: http://tinyurl.com/54n84 (found via Instructional Technology Resources and Musings: http://mariettatitleiii.blogspot.com/) Center for the Digital Future Identifies the 10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet's First Decade of Public Use Friends: I received this message today in the mail. Some of you may find the information useful. Best wishes. Arun ---- Subject: Center for the Digital Future Identifies the 10 Major Trends Emerging in the Internet's First Decade of Public Use A report from USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future. Here's a snippet from the press release: "Among the findings from Year Four of the Digital Future Project: * Internet access has risen to its highest level ever. About three-quarters of Americans now go online. * The number of hours spent online continues to increase, rising to an average of 12.5 hours per week - the highest level in the study thus far. * Although the Internet has become the most important source of current information for users, the initially high level of credibility of information on the Internet began to drop in the third year of the study, and declined even further in Year Four. * The number of users who believe that only about half of the information on the Internet is accurate and reliable is growing and has now passed 40 percent of users for the first time. * The study showed that most users trust information on the websites they visit regularly, and on pages created by established media and the government. * Information pages posted by individuals have the lowest credibility: only 9.5 percent of users say information on those sites is reliable and accurate. * Television viewing continues to decline among Internet users, raising the question: "What will happen as a nation that once spent an extremely large portion of time in a passive activity (watching television) transfers increasingly large portions of that time to an interactive activity (the Internet)?" Read more at: http://www.digitalcenter.org/pages/news_content.asp?intGlobalId=125&intTypeI http://www.digitalcenter.org/pages/news_content.asp?intGlobalId=125&intTypeI d=1 http://www.digitalcenter.org/pages/news_content.asp?intGlobalId=125&intTy http://www.digitalcenter.org/pages/news_content.asp?intGlobalId=125&intTy peId=1 or the tiny version: http://tinyurl.com/54n84 http://tinyurl.com/54n84 (found via Instructional Technology Resources and Musings: http://mariettatitleiii.blogspot.com/ http://mariettatitleiii.blogspot.com/ )

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Unesco-eBook Workshop- September 16-Hotel Atria, Bangalore-Report
by Shalini R. Urs 30 Sep '04

30 Sep '04

UNESCO Interactive Workshop on eBooks, Hotel Atria, Bangalore September 16, 2004 (http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook) ---------- Envisioning the potential of eBooks in promoting and supporting Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based- student centred learning, UNESCO is engaged in a project on developing guidelines for eBooks. The mission of this project is to carry out a scoping and exploratory study of the eBooks and develop guidelines for the production, promotion and usage of eBooks. This consultancy project involved three phases- desk top research; questionnaire based user study and an Interactive Workshop The Interactive Workshop on eBooks, was organised on September 16, 2004 and held at Hotel Atria, Bangalore. The Workshop was inaugurated by Dr.S.Ramakrishanan, Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune. Dr. Lucy A Tedd of University of Wales gave the keynote and Dr.Susanne Ornager, Advisor, Communication and Information for Asia and the Pacific, UNESCO, New Delhi chaired the session. The invitation only Workshop was an important milestone in the Project, with more than seventy participants representing the diverse stakeholders community. There were forty three information professionals; twenty four end users and technologists; and six from the publishing/aggregator industry in the Workshop, engaged in interacting, deliberating and debating on the gamut of issues- from definitions to design to delivery mechanisms. The format of the Workshop was designed to be interactive with each session having speakers and a moderator to lead the discussions with a set of issues/questions. The inaugural session was followed by three sessions- user and technology perspective; author and publisher perspective; and aggregator and library perspective. Prof. R.Kalyana Krishnan of IIT, Chennai, Prof.G.Misra of Indian Statistical Institute, Mr.Sanjiv Goswami of Springer, N.V.Sathyanarayana of Informatics India, Dr.Primalini Kukanesan of National Library of Malaysia and Dr. Deepali Talagala of Sri Lanka Library Association were the speakers at these sessions. The three sessions were moderated by Mr. Anand T. Byrappa of GE, Prof. I.K.Ravichandra Rao of Indian Statistical Institute and Dr.Venkadesan of Indian Institute of Science respectively. There were product presentations by John Wiley and Springer. The Workshop objective of gaining insights from different perspective was achieved and the interactions helped in drawing meaningful conclusions and providing the necessary inputs for the drafting of framework for the guidelines document. For more detailed report, presentations and details of the Project visit the website http://www.vidyanidhi.org.in/ebook------------------ Dr. Shalini R. Urs Director Information and Communication Division & Professor and Chairperson Department of Library and Information Science University of Mysore Mysore-570006 India Tele:91-821-2514699 Fax :91-821-2519209

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