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FW: Current Cites, March 2004
by Mailing List Manager 02 Apr '04

02 Apr '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2004 07:33:44 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> Friends: Here is something most lis-forum members would find useful. Best wishes and happy reading. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] Current Cites Volume 15, no. 3, March 2004 Edited by [2]Roy Tennant The Library, University of California, Berkeley, 94720 ISSN: 1060-2356 - http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/2004/cc04.15.3.html Contributors: [3]Charles W. Bailey, Jr., [4]Terry Huwe, [5]Shirl Kennedy, [6]Leo Robert Klein, [7]Roy Tennant [8]Nature Web Focus: Access to the Literature: The Debate Continues (2004) - Nature is offering a new series of freely available commissioned papers by noted authors on open access and other innovative publishing business models. Current contributions include "[9]Open Access and Learned Societies"; "[10]Open Access and Not-for-Profit Publishers"; "[11]Open Access: Yes, No, Maybe"; "[12]Universities' Own Electronic Repositories Yet to Impact on Open Access"; "[13]Why Electronic Publishing Means People Will Pay Different Prices"; and other papers. There are also useful links to related articles and resources. Like prior Nature debates on electronic publishing issues, this one is lively and very interesting. - [14]CB [15]Computers in Libraries 2004 Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2004. (http://www.infotoday.com/cil2004/presentations/). - Many of the presentations from this conference, held March 10-12, 2004 in Washington DC are available in either PowerPoint or Adobe Acrobat format, or both. Handouts are also often available, as well as the occasional Perl script. The topics range widely from strategies for keeping up to blogs to dead and emerging technologies. There is, in other words, something here for just about anyone. - [16]RT [17]Museums and the Web 2004 Toronto, ON: Archives and Museums Informatics, 2004. (http://www.archimuse.com/mw2004/sessions/). - A number of the presentations at this conference are online in HTML as contributed papers. Although many of the topics are perhaps of interest mostly to museums or archives, there are other topics (e.g., building accessible web sites) that cross those boundaries. - [18]RT [19]Thinking Beyond Digital Libraries - Designing the Information Strategy for the Next Decade: Proceedings of the 7th International Bielefeld Conference Bielefeld, Germany: Bielefeld University Library, February 2004. (http://conference.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/proceedings/). - The presentations from this conference are available in PowerPoint format. A few also have the speakers remarks available in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. Speakers include university professors, academic library directors, and high-level managers of library-related non-profits and commercial companies (e.g., Jay Jordan, President and CEO of OCLC). - [20]RT [21]METS Opening Day Washington, DC: Library of Congress, October 2003. (http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/od1_ppts.html). - A number of the PowerPoint presentations from the first "METS Opening Day" for the emerging standard Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) are available. Topics include an introduction to METS, building METS by hand, METS profiles, METS repositories, and METS case studies. A second METS Opening Day will be occuring on April 8 and 9 at Stanford University, with those presentations likely to be available shortly thereafter at the [22]METS web site. - [23]RT Christiansen, Donald. "[24]Ephemera for Engineers and Scientists" [25]Today's Engineer (IEEE) (February 2004) (http://www.todaysengineer.org/feb04/backscatter.asp). - It's not news to those of us in the information profession -- the fact that when it comes to Web-based resources, it's too often a case of here today, gone tomorrow. How many times have you spotted an interesting article while out surfing and, when you wanted to go back to it later on, you could no longer find it? Even if you saved the link, the link no longer works. While this is an annoyance when it comes to our everyday web browsing, it can be a disaster for resarch and scholarship. "Many technical articles now include references to Internet addresses, as opposed to hard-copy resources," the author correctly points out. But when authors or readers attempt to access these URLs at a later time, they have effectively vanished into cyberspace. The author cites a [26]study done at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in which researchers checked articles that appeared in Science, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. They found "that 3.8 percent of Internet references were inactive three months after journal publication, 10 percent after 15 months and 13 percent after 27 months." While there are ways of tracking these things down after the fact -- the author gives some suggestions, most would agree that this is a tremendous waste of time and energy. A solution, he says, may come in the form of "Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), the Uniform Resource Name (URN) syntax or the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator (PURL)." - [27]SK Dilevko, Juris, and Lisa Gottlieb. "Selection and Cataloging of Adult Pornography Web Sites for Academic Libraries" [28]Journal of Academic Librarianship 30(1) (January 2004): 36-50. - The authors argue that as interest in adult porn studies proliferates on campus, librarians are challenged to provide support material. The authors delineate various criteria for selecting subject-specific Web sites, reminding us that while the sites themselves may not be scholarly, they may still "represent a type of cultural artifact worthy of (and currently the subject of) scholarly inquiry." Catalogers will appreciate the extensive discussion on subject access in this area. The inclusion of material like this in the academic library's catalog would, we are told, "facilitate scholarly research in this area and fill a prominent gap in the library's collection." (Available through ScienceDirect.) - [29]LRK Ebare, Sean. "[30]Digital Music and Subculture: Sharing Files, Sharing Styles" [31]First Monday 9(2) (2 February 2004) (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_2/ebare/index.html). - The author takes a fresh look at online music sharing communities, applying theories from popular music studies and cyberethnography. He explores how identity and difference, subculture and genre lifespans, and the political economy of technology and music production combine to influence the use of music on the Internet. Identity is more fluid, and anonymity more prevalent, making the music sharing community somewhat unique. He argues that the subculture of music sharing user-driven and that the ability to forecast how this community behaves will be invaluable for both music publishers and social scientists. He offers his own forecast on the future marketplace for music sharing, arguing that it will depend upon an understanding of the diversity of the members, their need for self-determination, and the mandate to allow these communities to exercise a substantial degree of independence within their online experience. - [32]TH Feldman, Susan. "[33]The High Cost of Not Finding Information" [34]KMWorld Magazine 13(3) (March 2004) (http://www.kmworld.com/publications/magazine/index.cfm?action=read article&Article_ID=1725&Publication_ID=108). - "There are all kinds of information disasters. Some are caused by wrong information. Some are caused by outdated information.... Missing or incomplete information plagues many projects..... Finally, there is the increasing problem of too much in formation." Some interesting statistics here: -- "(R)oughly 50% of most Web searches are abandoned." -- "Knowledge workers spend from 15% to 35% of their time searching for information." -- "Searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less...." -- "40% of corporate users reported that they can not find the information they need to do their jobs on their intranets." -- "Not locating and retrieving information has an opportunity cost of more than $15 million annually." -- "Some studies suggest that 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists." - [35]SK Fiehn, Barbara. "[36]Federated Searching: A Viable Alternative to Web Surfing" [37]TechNewsWorld (21 March 2004) (http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/33160.html). - You'll be hearing lots more about federated search. Simple definition -- searching a variety of resources (databases, OPACs, the Web) from a single interface. This article (which originally appeared in the April 2004 issue of [38]MultiMedia & Internet@Schools but is not online there) focuses on school library media centers and the products available for that market. But it is worth reading by all information professionals since it presents a good overview of the topic and explains some of the pros and cons. The biggest advantage is the most obvious -- no need for the end user to hop from resource to resource in order to access all that an institution has available online. Some vendors' products will group results by source which, in essence, can show the user which resources are likely to be most useful for his/her particular information need. And the user only has to learn one search interface. But single-interface searching also has some downsides. Federated search technology is not quite "there" yet as far as relevance and de-duping are concerned. Also, the single interface may not permit the end user to take advantage of whatever sophisticated search features are offered by the individual resources. And this relatively new technology may prove challenging for librarians and IT people alike. If you don't have adequate in-house resources, hosting solutions may be available. - [39]SK Kurlantzick, Joshua. "[40]Dictatorship.com: The Web Won't Topple Tyranny" [41]The New Republic (25 March 2004) (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=oGG%2BvQEIjJRNjHGlOJiX4X%3D%3D). - As a tool to disseminate popular culture, the Internet has had spectacular success, even in "authoritarian nations" such as Laos, China, Singapore and Saudi Arabia. But, the author points out, its political impact has been negligible and, in some cases, "the Internet actually may be helping dictatorships remain in power." This in spite of the fact that pundits have been touting the political potential of the Net since it became more or less a mass medium in the mid-90s. Although "Internet usage has surged in many authoritarian nations," it has had little impact on "the political climate." Why? Because, the author says, it is not particularly useful "for expressing and organizing dissent," and -- technologically -- "it has proved surprisingly easy for authoritarian regimes to stifle, control, and co-opt." The author points out that the Internet is mainly used for individual rather than group activities. As one Laotian researcher quoted here observes, the Internet "is about people sitting in front of a terminal, barely interacting." Also, using the Net requires a relatively high level of literacy. The author provides examples of how different nations have attempted to control access to and content on the Internet, particularly China -- "Despite President Clinton's prediction, Beijing has proved that it can, in fact, nail Jell-O to the wall." And Western companies have proven only too eager "to sell the latest censorship technology" to any oppressive regime willing to ante up. Some dissidents claim the Internet actually facilitates monitoring of individuals by the government. Fascinating read; a don't-miss. - [42]SK Seebach, Peter. "[43]The Cranky User: Businesses Behaving Badly : Put Customers First Or Risk Losing Them" [44]developerWorks (4 March 2004) (http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-cranky38.html ). - The "Cranky User" is an occasional column on IBM's extremely helpful developerWorks site (the [45]Ease of Use section is wonderful). In this missive, the Cranky User complains about poor customer service. Poor customer service is a kind of action on the part of a company that produces a reaction in the customer, namely, a negative reaction. While I don't particularly agree with his example near the end of the column where he complains about contact email addresses being replaced by web forms, the notion that bad institutional practices have negative consequences is important to keep in mind. - [46]LRK Wells, Catherine A. "Location, Location, Location: The Importance of Placement of the Chat Request Button. " Reference & User Services Quarterly 43(2) (Winter 2003): 133-137. - Concerned that Chat Reference wasn't being used as much as expected, librarians at Case Western Reserve began experimenting with the size, shape, location and frequency of placement of the Chat Reference button on their site. They eventually found, perhaps to no one's surprise, that usage went up if the button appeared on the most heavily trafficked pages (home page, catalog page, database page). High on their wish list now is getting the button on vendor (i.e. subscription database) pages as well. - [47]LRK _________________________________________________________________ Current Cites - ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright (c) 2004 by the Regents of the University of California All rights reserved. Copying is permitted for noncommercial use by computerized bulletin board/conference systems, individual scholars, and libraries. Libraries are authorized to add the journal to their collections at no cost. This message must appear on copied material. All commercial use requires permission from the editor. All product names are trademarks or registered trade marks of their respective holders. Mention of a product in this publication does not necessarily imply endorsement of the product. To subscribe to the Current Cites distribution list, send the message "sub cites [your name]" to [48]listserv(a)library.berkeley.edu, replacing "[your name]" with your name. To unsubscribe, send the message "unsub cites" to the same address. References Visible links 1. LYNXIMGMAP:http://sunsite/CurrentCites/2004/cc04.15.3.html#head 2. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/ 3. http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm 4. http://iir.berkeley.edu/faculty/huwe/ 5. http://www.hooboy.com/ 6. http://leoklein.com/ 7. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/ 8. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/ 9. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/8.html 10. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/2.html 11. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/3.html 12. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/4.html 13. http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/7.html 14. http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm 15. http://www.infotoday.com/cil2004/presentations/ 16. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/ 17. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2004/sessions/ 18. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/ 19. http://conference.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/proceedings/ 20. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/ 21. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/od1_ppts.html 22. http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/ 23. http://escholarship.cdlib.org/rtennant/ 24. http://www.todaysengineer.org/feb04/backscatter.asp 25. http://www.todaysengineer.org/ 26. http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/spew4th.pl?ascribeid=20031030.103204&time=16% 2024%20PST&year=2003&public=1 27. http://www.hooboy.com/ 28. http://sunsite/CurrentCites/2004/cc04.15.3.html 29. http://leoklein.com/ 30. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_2/ebare/index.html 31. http://www.firstmonday.dk/ 32. http://iir.berkeley.edu/faculty/huwe/ 33. http://www.kmworld.com/publications/magazine/index.cfm?action=readarticle&Ar ticle_ID=1725&Publication_ID=108 34. http://www.kmworld.com/ 35. http://www.hooboy.com/ 36. http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/33160.html 37. http://www.technewsworld.com/ 38. http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/default.shtml 39. http://www.hooboy.com/ 40. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=oGG%2BvQEIjJRNjHGlOJiX4X%3D%3D 41. http://www.tnr.com/ 42. http://www.hooboy.com/ 43. http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-cranky38.html 44. http://www-136.ibm.com/developerworks/web/ 45. http://www-306.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/publish/558 46. http://leoklein.com/ 47. http://leoklein.com/ 48. mailto:listserv@library.berkeley.edu

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Google's Gmail arriving shortly
by Shyam Prasad pujar 01 Apr '04

01 Apr '04

Dear Members, Google is launching an e-mail service. Presently in beta testing, has the following features. Search, don't sort. Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received. Don't throw anything away. 1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message. Keep it all in context. Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation. No pop-up ads. No banners. You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest. For more information, please have a look at: http://gmail.google.com http://www.google.com/gmail/help/about.html Regards, S.M. Pujar ********************************************************************** Shamprasad M. Pujar Assistant Librarian Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research Gen. Vaidya Marg, Film City Road Goregaon (East) MUMBAI-400 065 India %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% * Phone: (022) 28400919-21 Extn: 514 * * Fax: (022) 28402752 * * E-mail: pujar(a)igidr.ac.in * * URL: http://www.igidr.ac.in * %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

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2005 IFLA/OCLC Fellows Program
by Mailing List Manager 01 Apr '04

01 Apr '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 12:57:08 +0100 (BST) From: "[iso-8859-1] Prof. N. Laxman Rao." <naglaxman(a)yahoo.com> 2005 IFLA/OCLC Fellows Program Deadline Approaching ATLA seeks theological librarians for a new fifth fellowship The deadline to apply for the 2005 IFLA/OCLC Early Career Development Fellowship Program is rapidly approaching. Complete applications, which include a cover sheet, a résumé, an essay of 1,000 words or less about the applicants professional plans and three letters of recommendation, must be submitted by Friday, April 23, 2004. Only complete applications will be considered. The Fellowship Program provides early career development and continuing education for library and information science professionals from countries with developing economies. OCLC and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions are happy to welcome a third sponsor for the 2005 program. This year, a fifth Fellow will be selected thanks to the generosity of the American Theological Library Association (ATLA). Established in 1946, ATLA is a professional association of more than 800 individual, institutional and affiliate members providing programs, products and services in support of theological and religious studies libraries and librarians. ATLAs ecumenical membership represents many religious traditions and denominations. Announcement http://www.ifla.org/V/press/pr110304.htm 2005 IFLA/OCLC Fellows Program Deadline Approaching Application information is available at: http://tinyurl.com/2oe55 or http://www.oclc.org/institute/resources/fellowships/ifla/default.htm More information at: http://www.ifla.org/III/grants/ecdf.htm

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DRTC COLLOQUIUM ON ICT FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
by Mailing List Manager 01 Apr '04

01 Apr '04

Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 08:07:41 -0800 (PST) From: rajesh mishra <rajesh_mishra61(a)yahoo.com> INDIAN STATISTICAL INSTITUTE DOCUMENTATION RESEARCH AND TRAINING CENTRE 8th Mile, Mysore Road, Banglore-560059 DRTC Colloquium on ICT FOR COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT ABSTRACT The difference of classes has brought about the phenomenon of Digital Divide. This phenomenon made information accessible only to a few communities. Information Communication Technology (ICT) is one approach to fill this divide. This colloquium is an attempt to look closely at use of ICT to fill Digital Divide and various social and economic challenges associated to it. SPEAKERS TOPICS 1. Rajesh Mishra Overview on ICT 2. Sarandha Singh Digital Divide 3. Ravinder ICT Policies and Development 4. Rashid Hussain ICT Education and Training 5. Amit Jha ICT Models and Tools Venue: DRTC Classroom Date: 2nd Apr. 2004 Time: 2.00 PM All are cordially invited Dr. Devika P. Madalli

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Open access - Comments on the posting of Arun, Chan and Barbara (fwd)
by Mailing List Manager 01 Apr '04

01 Apr '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 12:39:51 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> Friends: Here are some comments on one of our earlier postings. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] --------- Just some clarification on the posting of Subbiah Arunachalam, Leslie Chan, and Barbara Kirsop. Open Access to scientific documents as the solution for making articles visible to other users and thus maximizing their reading and citation (scientific impact) may involve various different forms of document space, effort-levels by the authors or their institutions, and degrees of success in achieving the aims of OA. 1. AUTHOR SELF-ARCHIVED, UNTAGGED PAPERS. The largest space of documents is raw, untagged preprints and scientific reports self-archived by their authors on their institution's webserver (e.g. on their research group's website). For Physics alone, we have already collected more than 500,000 such documents. These are harvestable with almost zero effort by our web crawlers. With Physnet <http://www.physnet.net> we have achieved already have almost complete coverage in some areas of Physics. (Clearly, however, the crawler of such websites can only be as good as the native language assistance offered to us: check a Finnish author!) Since the authors often provide their publication lists on their local websites, information on journal articles is also harvested. But because such authors have made no effort to tag their documents with metadata, retrieval is somewhat fuzzy -- yet almost complete for field-specific search engines such as PhysNet (started in 1995; but not so with google, scirus, etc.). 2. AUTHOR SELF-ARCHIVED, LIGHTLY TAGGED PAPERS. More functionality can be gained if the author adds some metadata, e.g., by using a web template such as <http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/services/mmm/> and adding that to his document source code or by using a shadow file that points to the document. (See <http://www.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/hydro/main_public.html> [year 2002 and earlier] In case an author finds this too tedious, we [the ISN] will do it for your lists!) At the moment, in physics the portion of the document space provided in this form is under 10%. Visibility is much increased, since most search engines understand these metadata, thus they rank them favourably. Costs are small. Let as call 1 and 2 "individual author self-archiving." 3. INSTITUTIONAL OAI-COMPLIANT SELF-ARCHIVING. A University, Research Institute, Department, or University Library may set up an OAI-compliant data provider. The local document space is small; visibility is excellent because of the systematically added metadata, the larger public visibility of the institution as such, and easy retrievability by OAI service providers. This is Distributed institutional self-archiving and it increasing exponentially currently: <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0043.gif> <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0036.png> <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0037.png> <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/self-archiving_files/Slide0023.gif> Costs may be larger (because library employees' salaries are involved). 4. CENTRAL OAI-COMPLIANT SELF-ARCHIVING. Authors send their documents to central archives, such as <http://www.arXiv.org> or the new European HAL <http://hal.ccsd.cnrs.fr> operated by the CCSD, supported by the French central research ageny CNRS, and under the auspices of the EPS with regard to physics. Costs depend on services (e.g., time stamp, permanent archiving, retrieval) and these are paid by the server's institution. Coverage is even smaller (ArXiv has some 269,439 documents to date) -- about 15% of physics journal publications at to date, but this may increase exponentially as more and more content authors convince others. 5. PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ARCHIVES. The costs depend on the services offered. The prices charged are known. ACP (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics) <http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/> has pretty much automatized the processing and covers its costs with $20 per page paid by the author, serving the journal open-access, with features such as several levels of refereeing, annotations, communications added by readers, etc. The Journals doing this form of archiving may be: (A) OPEN-ACCESS JOURNALS ('gold' journals in the Harnad and Romeo color-code), sometimes recovering costs by charging authors. Physics has 66 gold journals by now; see <http://de.physnet.net/PhysNet/journals.html> (B) TOLL-ACCESS JOURNALS ('green' journals in the Harnad and Romeo color-code), charging the reader but endorsing individual-article self-archiving by the author in one form or other (see the ROMEO list). <http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/Romeo%20Publisher%2 0Policies.htm> Now to close with some speculations about possible future scenarios for journal publishing: Since the refereeing normally takes place (and so it should) *after* the preprint is self-archived on the web in one of the above ways, refereeing can be much improved and diversified and can take its time (as it does with ACP <http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/acp/publication_process.html> ). Subscribing to a journal is thereby decoupled from gaining access to the information content of the raw document, and money is spent only on the refereeing and polishing, as well as the archiving of the document. Such a process of publicly self-archiving a document first and getting it refereed afterward would save money with which institutional libraries could subscribe to journals and would allow those publishers to flourish who add real value. The expert would gain the desired document directly from the author's website or elsewhere using search engines. Small departments in remote countries would be able to get the unrefereed information without having to pay, but they would miss the real added-value services. Eberhard R. Hilf, Dr. Prof.; CEO (Geschaeftsfuehrer) Institute for Science Networking Oldenburg GmbH an der Carl von Ossietzky Universitaet Ammerlaender Heerstr.121; D-26129 Oldenburg ISN-home: <http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/> homepage: <http://isn-oldenburg.de/~hilf> email : hilf(a)isn-oldenburg.de </ym/Compose?To=hilf(a)isn-oldenburg.de&YY=48797&order=down&sort=date&pos=0&vi ew=a&head=b> tel : +49-441-798-2884 fax : +49-441-798-5851

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Postponement of 4th ASSIST National Seminar
by Mailing List Manager 01 Apr '04

01 Apr '04

Date: 30 Mar 2004 13:29:55 -0000 From: Drbalabhim Shankarappa Biradar <bsbiradar53(a)rediffmail.com> Postponement of 4th ASSIST National Seminar As a part of Kuvempu Birth Centenary Celebration and the Decennial year Celebration of the Department of Library and Information Science, the Department and ASSIST was planned to organise two-day National Seminar on "Digital Resources and Services in Libraries" during 12th-13th April 2004. But the general election for Assembly and Parliament in Karnataka is Schedule to be held in two phases i.e. on 20th and 26th April 2004 and most of the Librarians and Library and Information Science teachers are drawn for election duty. Election Commission is holding training on 12th �13th April 2004 for the staff who are drawn for election duty and therefore, it has become inconvenient to most of the interested participants to participate in the seminar. In this context Organising Committee meeting was held on 28-03-2004 and unanimously decided to postpone the seminar to 30th April and 1st May 2004 in the interest of the participants. We request all the participants to note this change in date of the 4th ASSIST National Seminar and without fail kindly arrange to participate in the seminar rescheduled to be held on 30th April 2004 and 1st May 2004 instead of 12th-13th April 2004. For more information we request you to contact Dr.B.S.Biradar, Organising Secretary, 4th ASSIST National Seminar. Organising Secretary, 4th ASSIST National Seminar.

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J-STAGE
by Mailing List Manager 01 Apr '04

01 Apr '04

Date: 30 Mar 2004 08:07:31 -0000 From: Subbiah Gunasekaran <gunasekaran_subbiah(a)rediffmail.com> Dear Members: Please explore the website: http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/ It offers access to full text of many journals published in Japan. Thanks S. Gunasekaran CECRI Karaikudi

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GlobalSpec, a specialized online resource for engineering
by Mailing List Manager 30 Mar '04

30 Mar '04

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 10:25:35 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> March 29, 2004 - GlobalSpec, a specialized online resource for engineering, has launched a new interface, added more powerful search functionality, and has introduced a specialized search engine it is calling "The Engineering Web," which it says provides "engineering context and relevancy" and access to Hidden Web resources. The newly introduced engine searches more than 100,000 engineering and technical Web sites and provides searching of specialized content the company says is not available on any other search engine-application notes, patents, material properties, and standards. In announcing the enhancements, Jeffrey M. Killeen, GlobalSpec chairman and CEO said: "We have built the specialized search engine and content repository for engineers and technical buyers-everything of relevance, expertly classified and indexed in one place. In fact, we believe we have built the definitive search platform for the engineering community." John Schneiter, president and co-founder of GlobalSpec, said: "Extensive research of our online community, as well as our own engineering experiences, told us that engineers and technical professionals are frustrated with general search engines and having to wade through pages of irrelevant results. We have built what they asked us for-and what we frankly wished we had ourselves as practicing engineering professionals-The Engineering Search Engine." The company's proprietary SpecSearch allows users to search by specification more than 60 million parts in 1,000,000 product families from more than 10,000 supplier catalogs. GlobalSpec says it now has more than 1,000,000 registered users for SpecSearch (registration is free). Suppliers of the catalogs pay annual fees to GlobalSpec so that searchers can discover these products for free. New with this launch is the ability to compare products in suppliers' catalogs in tabular form and even compare specific parts across suppliers. SpecSearch is proprietary technology that has been developed by GlobalSpec over the last 8 years. Schneiter said that the company built its own extensive taxonomy as well, and continues to expand it organically as needed. The company also developed its own engine to search "The Engineering Web," though the results page looks and feels very similar to a results page at Google. However, a feature that offers suggestions to "Refine your Results" presents terms and topics that are generated on the fly from search results. As a feature of The Engineering Web engine, users have the option of searching specifically for information in companies' notes about their applications. An application note is a document that describes the use of a product, and may contain quite detailed information and drawings. It may list detailed design specifications, as well as data describing how the product functions in different situations and with different variables. GlobalSpec uses an automatic text classification system to identify candidate application notes from all of the sites identified for inclusion in The Engineering Web. To provide the other specialized content-patents, material properties, and standards-from the Hidden Web, GlobalSpec has partnered with other content companies. Abstracts of patents are available for free online and complete documents are available for purchase from its partner, MicroPatent. Patent information from the following sources are included: - USPTO (U.S. Patent & Trademark Office): Granted patents from 1982 - present; Applications from 2001 - present - EP (European Patent Office): 1982 - present - WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization): 1982 - present Access to standards is available through a partnership with IHS (Information Handling Services), which provides "the world's largest file" of active and historical standards, specifications, drawings, handbooks, and related technical documents. Users can search and see abstracts for free. Complete copies of technical standards are available for purchase, as hardcopy or as electronic downloads. IHS specializes in enterprise subscription sales, so this represents an additional distribution network for its products. Corporate customers of MicroPatent and IHS run the risk of their engineers paying piecemeal to obtain patents or standards via GlobalSpec that the company already has access to through enterprise subscriptions. GlobalSpec admitted this could be an issue, with companies paying twice for the same information when employees were unaware of available resources. But, thinking on the spot, Killeen said it was conceivable they could work with their partners to get the ISP addresses of customers and then send a notice if this was about to occur. GlobalSpec users can also search and get free abstracts of material property information for industrial materials, specifying attributes such as flexural modulus, flexural strength, hardness, density, deflection temperature, electrical resistivity, conductivity, heat capacity, etc. for any given material. The full text can be accessed for free by clicking a link over to the MatWeb site (http://www.matweb.com). MatWeb is a free searchable database designed by engineers. (The advanced features and tools on its site are available to those who register and to Premium users, who have full access for $49.95.). Killeen said GlobalSpec plans to add Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) to the site sometime in the second quarter of 2004. The company is also in active discussions with key engineering publishers to add full-text journal content. Many technical articles, tutorials, and white papers are now included in the section of the site called "Tools & Useful Links," which also offers research and reference links, calculators, and links to other engineering and technical sites. GlobalSpec, founded in 1996, is a privately-held company with about 130 employees based in Troy, New York (near Albany). While GlobalSpec's management feels that its search platform really has no competition, engineering professionals will continue to use other complementary resources as well. Engineering Village 2 provides comprehensive database searching and linking to full text, for example. Other sites, such as Engineering.com (which offers software, services, news, directories, etc.) will continue to fill a niche as well. Scirus, the science-only search engine includes engineering as a subject. But, given the accelerating rate of new user registrations on GlobalSpec, the growth in numbers of searchable parts, and the number of online visitors to the site, the company is obviously filling a need in the engineering community and has found a business model that is working.

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FW: Benefits of Open Access Archiving
by Mailing List Manager 30 Mar '04

30 Mar '04

Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2004 16:03:49 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> Friends: In response to messages to the Health Information Forum discussion list [ <mailto:hif-net@who.int> hif-net(a)who.int] on Open Access benefits, we would like to add the following comments: The two parallel Budapest Open Access Initiatives paths (Open Access Journals/Publishing and Open Access Archiving) both aim to achieve the same objective - the freeing of the research literature from access tolls - but use very different mechanisms to achieve it. Perhaps the two routes should be dissociated in our discussions, since discussing both routes under the common term 'open access' can create confusion. The messages from Ayo Onatola and others are focussing on Open Access journals, but we would like to draw attention again to the benefits of Open Access Archiving for developing countries. Open Access Archiving is the archiving of already published and refereed research papers in interoperable, minimal-cost institutional archives. The advantages of this are: [1] Nothing need change regarding the future of the publishers (because they will continue to publish as before and in parallel with the OA Archives - as already proven to be successful in physics through the 13-year old archive <http://arxive.org> <http://arxive.org> and the major physics journals. Over 60% of publishers have agreed to the institutional archiving of already published papers in OA Archives, including Elsevier and Nature Publishing); [2] Nothing need change for the authors (because they can continue to publish papers in their favourite journals). However, the impact of their work will be hugely increased if they also archive their full text publications in institutional archives using the free software that allows interoperable searching across all archives. Authors would be wise to publish in one of the majority of journals that agree to OA Archiving in order to benefit from this much increased international impact. OA-compliant archives are now also searchable through the Yahoo search engine. [3] The research output of the authors' institutes will be greatly enhanced through the establishment of institutional OA Archives, show-casing their academic publications. OA Archives are set up using free software and there are many support organisations offering help if needed. Note: there are three major workshops on setting up Open Access Archives being held this summer in Brazil, China and India. [4] If institutes are unable to set up their own institutional archives, authors may archive their *already published* research in any of the established archives (eg Cogprints, Bioline International etc). It does not matter at all where papers are archived, since the archives are all interoperable. However, establishing institutional archives has the advantage of additionally promoting the research output of the institutes. [5] As more and more archives are established, more and more of the world's research becomes internationally accessible for free. Harnad of Cogprints says 'Archive unto others as you would have them archive unto you'. For the developing country institutes, sharing their research with countries facing similar research priorities has clear benefits, and making their research 'visible' internationally will lead to many other advantages. In summary, archiving already published research in interoperable institutional archives greatly benefits global science at almost no cost. This could be done now, without changing established publishing practices. For developing country science and medical research this offers enormous opportunities. Maybe WHO should consider supporting the setting up of an OA Archive for medical research publications so that all developing countries can benefit from free access? Useful OA institutional archives links: Registry of institutional eprints: <http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php> <http://archives.eprints.org/eprints.php> Developing country bioscience archive: <http://bioline.utsc.utoronto.ca> <http://bioline.utsc.utoronto.ca> BOAI self(institutional)-archiving FAQ: <http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/> <http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/> Eprints software: <http://software.eprints.org/> <http://software.eprints.org/> Eprints Handbook for setting up institutional archives: <http://software.eprints.org/handbook/> <http://software.eprints.org/handbook/> Budapest Open Access Iniative <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml> <http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml> Subbiah Arunachalam, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation, India Leslie Chan, University of Toronto, Canada Barbara Kirsop, Electronic Publishing Trust for Development <http://www.epublishingtrust.org> <http://www.epublishingtrust.org>

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address info
by Mailing List Manager 29 Mar '04

29 Mar '04

Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 16:30:16 +0530 From: prafulla(a)nisc.co.in Dear All: I am searching for the contact info of National Center for Children's Literature located in New Delhi. I shall appreciate any help in this regard. Have a nice day! T.V. Prafulla Chandra Senior Editor National Center for Children's Literature, New Delhi --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NISC Export Services Pvt. Ltd. (an affiliate of NISC International, Inc. USA) S-1 Ballad Estates, St.Ann's School Road, Tarnaka, Hyderabad 500 017 Andhra Pradesh, India - Tel:+91 40 27001517 Tel/Fax:+91 40 27002538 WWW.NISC.COM A company in service to NISC worldwide. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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