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New Age Navigation: Innovative e-Journal Interfaces
by Gerry Mckiernan 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

_New Age Navigation: Innovative E-Journal Interfaces_ I am pleased to announce the formal publication of my latest Magnus Opus [:-) "New Age Navigation: Innovative Information Interfaces for Electronic Journals" _The Serials Librarian_ 45(2)(2003): 87-123 ABSTRACT. While it is typical for electronic journals to offer conventional search features similar to those provided by electronic databases, a select number of e-journals have also made available higher-level access options as well. In this article, we review several novel technologies and implementations that creatively exploit the inherent potential of the digital environment to further facilitate use of e-collections. We conclude with speculation on the functionalities of a next-generation e-journal interface that are likely to emerge in the near future. A offprint/preprint copy of the article is available at [ http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.pdf ] The article served as the basis of a presentation I gave at the _Internet Librarian 2003 Conference_ [ http://www.infotoday.com/il2003/] in Monterey, California in early November. [BTW: A *Most* Excellent Conference] [ http://www.infotoday.com/il2003/presentations/default.htm ] The conference version of my presentation is available at [http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAgeIL.ppt ] [*********1.6 MB FILE****************************] and the Director's Cut [:-) at [http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/NewAge.ppt ] **********[LARGE FILE 3.4 MB]****************** As Aways, I'd appreciate Any and All comments, queries, critiques, questions, or Cosmic Insights relating to the themes of Such Musings {:-) . Regards, /Gerry Gerry McKiernan New Age Librarian Iowa State University Ames AI 50011 gerrymck(a)iastate.edu As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know. Donald Rumsfeld -Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing [http://slate.msn.com/id/2081042/ ]

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FASTER, BETTER, CHEAPER: OPEN-SOURCE PRACTICES MAY HELP IMPROVE S OFTWARE ENGINEERING
by Mailing List Manager 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 14:02:38 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> National Science Foundation 4201 Wilson Blvd. Arlington, VA 22230 "Where discoveries begin" For Immediate Release December 3, 2003 NSF Media Contact: David Hart, 703-292-7737, <mailto:dhart@nsf.gov> dhart(a)nsf.gov FASTER, BETTER, CHEAPER: OPEN-SOURCE PRACTICES MAY HELP IMPROVE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ARLINGTON, Va.-Walt Scacchi of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues are conducting formal studies of the informal world of open-source software development, in which a distributed community of developers produces software source code that is freely available to share, study, modify and redistribute. They're finding that, in many ways, open-source development can be faster, better and cheaper than the "textbook" software engineering often used in corporate settings. In a series of reports posted online (see <http://www.isr.uci.edu> www.isr.uci.edu) Scacchi is documenting how open-source development breaks many of the software engineering rules formulated during 30 years of academic research. Far from finding that open-source development is just software engineering poorly done, Scacchi and colleagues show that it represents a new approach based on community building and other socio-technical mechanisms that might benefit traditional software engineering. "Free and open-source software development is faster, better and cheaper in building a community and at reinforcing and institutionalizing a culture for how to develop software," said Scacchi, a senior research scientist at UC Irvine's Institute for Software Research who has taught software engineering for two decades. "We're not ready to assert that open-source development is the be-all end-all for software engineering practice, but there's something going on in open-source development that is different from what we see in the textbooks." Scacchi and his colleagues are studying open-source projects to understand when the processes and practices work and when they don't. These findings may help businesses understand the implications of adopting open-source methods internally or investing in external open-source communities. The studies are supported by several Information Technology Research awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Three projects-one by Les Gasser at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Scacchi, one by Scacchi and John Noll of Santa Clara University and one led by UC Irvine's Richard Taylor-are applying the lessons learned from open-source practices to create new design, process-management and knowledge- management tools for large-scale, multi-organization development projects. "In many ways, open-source development projects are treasure troves of information for how large software systems get developed in the wild, if you will," Scacchi said. Open-source project databases, for example, record hundreds of thousands of bug reports. Gasser and Scacchi are mining those databases to try to understand how bug reporting relates to software quality or if it has other implications. "These are unprecedented data sets in software engineering research," he said. "We're thinking of these databases in a 'national treasure' sense. We're never going to get this from a corporate source." Not all open-source projects are alike, however. A small number of open-source projects have become well known, but the vast majority never get off the ground, according to Scacchi. He and his colleagues are trying to understand how successful projects, such as the Linux Kernel, grow from a few individuals to a community of a thousand developers. Similarly, they are trying to determine whether or not opensource software is appropriate for complex, fixed requirements projects of interest only to a limited community (for example, air defense radar software). It is unclear whether such systems can or will ever be developed in an open manner, or whether open-source approaches would falter, while traditional software engineering approaches would succeed. To explore the breadth of open-source activity, Scacchi and colleagues are looking at more than a hundred projects in several categories: network games, Internet and Web infrastructure, academic and scientific software and industry-sponsored activities. The network games include PlaneShift, Crystal Space, and game "mods" for Epic Games' Unreal or id Software's Quake game engines. Internet and Web infrastructure projects range from Linux Kernel, Apache and Mozilla to GNU Enterprise. In another project, Mark Ackerman at the University of Michigan and Scacchi are examining how scientists working in fields like X-ray astronomy and deep-space imaging are using opensource software to support basic scientific research. More recent efforts are examining industry-sponsored open-source projects including NetBeans from Sun Microsystems and Eclipse from IBM. "The software-intensive systems in today's world have become so complex that we need every available design tool at our disposal," said Suzanne Iacono, NSF program director. "Open source development has achieved some remarkable successes, and we need to learn from these successes as our systems become increasingly distributed, complex and heterogeneous. Traditional software engineering methods were originally developed for single- system design and development." The researchers have so far identified a number of ways in which open-source development surpasses traditional software engineering. In successful projects, open-source development is faster in the pace of evolution and the rate of software growth. Expertise also spreads faster through the community. The researchers also report that open-source development is better because of, among other features, its informality, which enables continuous system design and more agile development processes. And open-source is cheaper because the development tools are often open-source themselves and because other costs are often subsidized by corporate donations, volunteer efforts and "gifts" for the collective good. "Open-source is not a poor version of software engineering, but a private-collective approach to large-software systems," Scacchi said. "This is perhaps a new fertile ground between software engineering and the world of opensource and may be what the open- source community can contribute to new academic and commercial development efforts." ### NSF PR03-132 NSF Program Officer: Suzanne Iacono, 703-292-8930, <mailto:siacono@nsf.gov> siacono(a)nsf.gov Principal Investigator: Walt Scacchi, 949-824-4130, <mailto:wscacchi@ics.uci.edu> wscacchi(a)ics.uci.edu ISR Open-Source Software Development Research at UC Irvine: <http://www.isr.uci.edu/research-open-source.html> http://www.isr.uci.edu/research-open-source.html

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Sepcial Lecture
by DRTC General 04 Dec '03

04 Dec '03

INDIAN STATISTICAL INSTITUTE Documentation Research and Training Centre 8th Mile, Mysore Road, Bangalore 560059 CORDIALLY INVITES YOU TO THE Special Lecture on Term Frequency for Information Retrieval By Dr. Carolyn Watters Professor Faculty of Computer Science Dalhousie University, Canada B3H 1W5 On 5th December, 2003, 2.30 PM At DRTC Class Room Indian Statistical Institute Bangalore 560059 I.K RAVICHANDRA RAO Professor and Head, DRTC

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RE: [LIS-Forum] UGC-Net Question
by Mailing List Manager 03 Dec '03

03 Dec '03

Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 17:30:41 +0530 From: manish mankad <Manish.Mankad(a)unilever.com> For the q.1, I shall assume following dimensions as the standard one: 1 rack of 6 ft height, 2 ft depth and 3 ft width and is back to back. Each side will accomodate 6 shelves and thus both will have 12 shelves for storage. Each shelf will accomodate around 30 bks of average size and thus one rack can accomodate 360 books. With the same calculation, it will require 28 shelves to accomodate all the 10000 bk. Regards. -Manish Mankad Information Executive Hindustan Lever Research Centre, BD Sawant Marg Andheri (E), Mumbai, 400 099 INDIA ext. 208/330 (022) 28276 208 28276 330

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Forwarded mail....
by Mailing List Manager 03 Dec '03

03 Dec '03

Here is a press release on a meeting to be held in Geneva on 11 December 2003. "A growing number of scientists worldwide are actively promoting 'open access' to the scientific literature. This means toll-free online access to the full-texts of all refereed research articles. At present, except the fraction of articles for which a suitable open-access journal already exists today (<5%), research is only accessible if the researcher's institution can afford to pay for the toll-access journal in which it is published (>95%). As a result, most of the potential users of research -- and especially those in developing countries -- are unable to access most research. This represents a great loss to both research-providers and research-users, and hence to the progress and benefits of research itself. Fortunately, the Internet and Web technologies have at last opened up the possibility for those researchers whose institutions cannot afford the toll-access version of any article to use instead the open-access version, self-archived on the author's own institutional website. The provision of open access to their own refereed research output by researchers and their institutions needs systematic worldwide promotion. We are holding a three-hour meeting on open-access provision at Geneva as a side event at WSIS. Please publicise the meeting. More important, read and write about the substantial benefits of open access for the progress and benefits of science." (For some useful information: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ )

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Archives set up by funding agencies!
by Mailing List Manager 03 Dec '03

03 Dec '03

Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 17:58:44 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun(a)mssrf.res.in> Here is some model DST, DBT, UGC, CSIR, ICMR and other funding agencies can follow! I think this will be the best way for promoting open access in India. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] "Funding agencies should appreciate that they can host their own archives. Last month, for example, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched its own archive, Science Inventory, to hold EPA-funded data and research papers. Even if all these files could be archived in various institutional and disciplinary repositories outside the EPA, using its own archive lets EPA monitor compliance with its OA requirement, facilitate discovery and retrieval, assure long-term preservation, and of course guarantee the sufficiency of the infrastructure."

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Digital Libraries Program at IIM Kozhikode (January 19-21, 2004)
by Sree Kumar 02 Dec '03

02 Dec '03

Dear Colleagues: I am happy to inform you that IIM Kozhikode is organizing a three-day programme on <big>Digital Libraries</big> at IIM Kozhikode during January 19-21, 2004. The details of the programme is available at "http://www.iimk.ac.in/programs/diglib.htm". Programme brochures are available on request from the MDP office of IIMK. The programme will impart the latest trends in digital library technologies. Eminent faculty from the fields of information science and information technology are handling the sessions. Hands on labs will be conducted at IIMK. For any further information please feel free to contact me or our MDP Office (E-Mail : mdp(a)iimk.ac.in) With regards, M.G. Sreekumar Co-ordinator, MDP on Digital Libraries M G Sreekumar Librarian & Head, Center for Development of Digital Libraries (CDDL) Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode Kunnamangalam P.O Kozhikode, Kerala, India-673 571 ----------------------------------------- Phone : +91 495 2803001/2 Ext. 140 Fax : +91 495 2803010/11 Email : mgsree(a)iimk.ac.in Web : www.iimk.ac.in =========================================

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Need Information regarding RFID
by Mailing List Manager 02 Dec '03

02 Dec '03

Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 09:54:31 +0530 From: VYASAMOORTHY /IKP/HYD <Vyasamoorthy(a)icicikp.com> Dear Mr Babu Further to your enquiry there were some responses/answers. can you kindly send me those replies? I am unable to locate them in NCSI LIs-Forum archives. Another friend of mine is interested in the same topic. Is there anyone using RFID labels in India right now? Implemented? Thanks. Vyasamoorthy, P

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Special lecture at DRTC
by DRTC General 02 Dec '03

02 Dec '03

INDIAN STATISTICAL INSTITUTE Documentation Research and Training Centre 8th Mile, Mysore Road, Bangalore 560059 CORDIALLY INVITES YOU TO THE Special Lecture on Architecture for Dynamic Aggregation and Reuse of Learning Objects By Professor. Michael Shepherd Director of Health Informatics Faculty of Computer Science Dalhousie University, Canada B3H 1W5 On 3rd December, 2003, 2.30 PM At DRTC Class Room Indian Statistical Institute Bangalore 560059 I.K RAVICHANDRA RAO Professor and Head, DRTC

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UGC-Net Question
by Neetu Bharti 02 Dec '03

02 Dec '03

Dear Professionals We are unable to find out answers for these questions. If anyone of u know please help us. Thanks in advance Questions 1. If a new library wants to provide 10,000 books . How many double sided standard size racks are required? 2. If a library wants to provide 10,000 books , how many catalogue trays should it plan Regards Pandian.B

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