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Welcome to the 7th and last issue of Exploit Interactive Web magazine, as the saying goes - 'all good things must come to an end!' However there is no need to worry, the Exploit Interactive site will remain available for reference from UKOLN's server for at least another two years. A final report on Exploit Interactive will be written before the end of the year and linked to from this Web site.
Exploit Interactive has had a very successful year and a half run. During its duration 35 Telematics for Libraries projects have been covered, 110 articles have been included and there have been approximately 250,000 page views [1]. Exploit Interactive's coverage has included many vital and relevant topics areas ranging from technology based subjects such as "push" services, XHTML, accessibility tools, automated translation facilities, to library areas such as The Citizen's Gateways, eLib, digital Libraries, metadata and personalised libraries. Many writers have benefited from using Exploit Interactive as part of their project's Web-based dissemination strategy and a greater number of readers have benifited from sharing this knowledge. We hope that you have all enjoyed all Exploit Interactive has had to offer.
In this final issue we have a number of concluding reports from the Telematics for Libraries Community, notably the ELVIL, EQUINOX, ILSES, LIBECON 2000, TECUP and VERITY projects. From the broader community we are featuring articles on the FASTER project, and the preceding NESSTAR project, an initiative that provides flexible access to statistics, tables and electronic resources held at social science data archives and other data publishers. This type of information could be particularly pertinent to those putting in bids for the new IST 5th Framework programme. Karen Neale, formerly of the Library Information Technology Centre at South Bank University, looks at ways in which the European Library community can provide their own news services to their community using the NewsAgent project. Other contributions include commentary on the Tempe Meet document on scholarly publishing and an review of the Virtual Worlds 2000 conference held in Paris, France in July.
If you are interested in Telematics for Libraries and Digital Cultural Heritage issues and are going to miss your trimonthly installment of Exploit Interactive Web magazine then visit the new Cultivate Interactive Web magazine which hopes to carry on where Exploit Interactive leaves off. The next issue of Cultivate Interactive will be released on October 16th [2].
Marieke Napier, Exploit Interactive editor
Ingrid Cantwell and Magnus Enzell introduce the prototype for the ELVIL 2000 Project, an Academic Portal for European Law and Politics.
The European Legislative Virtual Library project (ELVIL) was conceived at the Stockholm University library back in 1995 [1]. The current library co-ordinator was teaching political science students the intricacies of using a telnet interface to access the Swedish Riksdag database and the thought arose that there had to be an easier way to access public information. Couldn't it all be done using the World Wide Web? A lot has happened since then but the basic ideas are still valid and the original problems are still pertinent: how can we increase the availability of public information by using the World Wide Web?
During the ELVIL project the team identified three variables of availability: access, education and communication. Access to public database had to be intuitive and user-centred. Users had to be educated about the content and role of public documentation. Since public documentation is often of a political nature there is also a need for forums to discuss the interpretation of it. The ELVIL-project was completed successfully in 1998 and was directly followed by the ELVIL 2000 project [2].
The general aim of the ELVIL 2000-project is to create and operate an Academic
Portal to European Law and Politics. Portal, because we combined
access to a number of different types of resources on the same platform. These
sources could be divided into three different categories but all intended to be
of a “slow nature” as opposed to “fast” information like
news. The sources include public documentation and official Web sites,
educational modules, discussion and work-platforms. Academic, because we
believed that academic standards and principles could greatly enhance the
quality of information and communication management on the Internet. The
principles of selection and validation could be useful for the Internet and
could also be used to a greater extent to ensure a higher degree of trust and
reliability on the Internet in general.
While focusing on virtues like speed, accessibility and rapid updates it is easy to forget that the Internet offers unique opportunities for the slower practices of accumulation and reflection on knowledge in a public sphere. ELVIL 2000 is aimed at building platforms that encouraged reflexivity, and the accumulation of “slow” knowledge. ELVIL 2000 has now finalised its second prototype (The “ELVIL-platform”) and will develop models and programs for use on the platform during the next six months.
The current ELVIL platform provides:
 Figure 1: European Union Encyclopaedia on the ELVIL prototype |
The current prototype is now available for viewing from the ELVIL site [3].
Ingrid Cantwell
Co-ordinator
Magnus Enzell
Project manager
For citation purposes:
Plamen Gradinarov, "ELVIL 2000", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/emerge/>
Monica Brinkley provides an update on the EQUINOX project following on from an earlier article in Exploit Interactive. Progress on the development of performance indicators for electronic library services is reported. These performance indicators aim to enhance and complement the ISO 11620 library performance indicators. Management information software has been developed and tested by the EQUINOX project. The EQUINOX software tool is designed to help library managers implement quality management and performance measurement principles.
The EQUINOX project is a research project funded under the EC fourth framework Telematics for Libraries programme [1]. The project, now in its final phase, aimes to advance the field of quality management and performance measurement in European libraries. This has been achieved firstly by developing a set of performance indicators for electronic library services, which will enhance and update existing standards for performance measurement in libraries. And secondly by the project team developing a software tool for library managers, which aids and facilitates the implementation of performance measurement and quality management.
The EQUINOX project is a two-year project, due to be completed in November 2000. The project comprises both library and technical partners from a range of European countries. Background information about EQUINOX and its history are available from the project Web site [2] and in an earlier article in Exploit Interactive [3] that introduced the project. The current article reports the results and findings of EQUINOX to date.
Performance indicators provide library managers with a standard and manageable method of measuring the library’s performance as well as allowing benchmarking and comparison between libraries. Electronic library services have been increasing in importance in terms of the percentage of the library budget being spent on them and in terms of the ease of access that they provide to users. However, to date no standard method has been available for evaluating how this important section of library services is performing and whether value for money is being achieved. The EQUINOX performance indicators for electronic library services provide the library manager with a methodology for gathering valuable information about the quality of service being offered.
An initial set of performance indicators (PIs) was developed by the project team during the first phase of the EQUINOX project and published through the EQUINOX Web site [2], relevant mailing lists, the professional literature and at EQUINOX workshops. Feedback was received from a wide range of professionals from Europe and around the world. At the same time, the library partners in the EQUINOX project team tested these performance indicators in real library situations in terms of ease of data collection, applicability to the current situation in the library, relevance to library management, and so on.
Both the feedback received and the testing of the PIs showed that while this initial set was very useful, further revision of the PI list was required. Some PIs were felt to be too demanding of staff time in relation to the value of the information gleaned. Others were felt to be somewhat confusing and difficult to calculate. In many cases, the data required simply wasn’t available from many of the electronic library services currently in use in libraries. Following deliberation and discussion between project partners and with external interested parties and experts in the field, a revised set of performance indicators was developed by the project team. A discussion of the deliberations leading to this revision is available on the project Web site [4].
The revised set of performance indicators, together with a definition of terms used is listed below. The full definition and collection methodology for each PI is available on the project Web site [5]. The final phase of the project will further refine these performance indicators to reflect feedback received; comments are therefore welcome even at this late stage of the project, directly to the author or through the project Web site.
It must be noted that these PIs are designed to enhance and complement rather than to replace the ISO 11620 Library Performance Indicators [6]. The ISO 11620 indicator ‘User Satisfaction’ in particular should be measured in conjunction with these PIs. For example, user satisfaction with each electronic library service and electronic library services generally would provide enhanced qualitative management information, in particular when considered in conjunction with PIs such as numbers 2 and 5 below. By considering pairs of PIs together in this way the manager can elicit even more valuable information. For example, the cost per session of a particular service considered in conjunction with the number of documents downloaded per session can give a better indication of value for money than has been available heretofore.
The term ‘library’ is used throughout but can be taken to refer to an information service irrespective of its title.
Standard definitions have been used where possible. Whether the definition is taken from an ISO document or has been defined by the EQUINOX project is indicated in bold after the definition.
Cost: Acquisition, subscription and license costs for electronic library services made available by the library. Network and hardware costs should not be included. EQUINOX
Document: Recorded information or material object which can be treated as a unit in a documentation process. ISO/FDIS 5127 [NOTE: Documents can differ in their physical form and characteristics.]
Downloading transaction: Any procedure that aims at reproducing electronic data onto a local storage medium or printing facility. ISO/DIS 2789
Electronic library resources: Every document in electronic form which needs special equipment to be used. Electronic resources include digital documents, electronic serials, databases, patents in electronic form and networked audiovisual documents. ISO/DIS 2789
Electronic library services: A service which is either supplied from local servers or accessible via networks. Electronic library services comprise the OPAC, the library Web site, electronic resources, electronic document delivery and internet access offered via the library. ISO/DIS 2789
Entry: Bits of information, especially from reference databases or directories e.g. records, abstracts etc. ISO 5127-1
Information request: User enquiry that involves the knowledge or use of, or recommendations, interpretation or instruction in the use of, one or more information sources (such as printed and non-printed materials, machine-readable databases, the library’s own and the institutions’ catalogues) by library staff. The request can be delivered personally or by means of telephone, regular mail, fax or electronic media. Do not include directional or administrative enquiries e.g. locating staff or facilities, opening times or handling of equipment. Do not include enquiries about locating items in stock that have already been identified bibliographically. ISO/DIS 2789
Library computer workstation: Public access networked and stand alone computers, provided by the library, though not necessarily in the library, offering access to electronic library services. EQUINOX
Session: An established connection to an electronic service, usually by a log-in. [NOTE: connecting to a Web site is regarded as a session if its referring link is external to the Web site. Sessions to a general entrance or gateway page should be excluded.] ISO/DIS 2789
Population to be served: Number of individuals for whom the library is set up to provide its services and materials. For public libraries this will normally be the population of the legal service area: for academic libraries this will normally be the total of academic and professional staff plus students. ISO 11620
Rejected session: Unsuccessful session to an electronic library service which is not available because of requests exceeding the simultaneous user limit. [Note: Rejection of wrong passwords is excluded.] ISO/DIS 2789
Target population: Groups of actual and potential users appropriate to an individual library as the object of a specific service or as the primary users of specific materials. The target population may be the population to be served. ISO 11620
In conjunction with the development of performance indicators for electronic library services, the EQUINOX project team have developed a software tool to aid the library manager to implement performance measurement and quality management practices in their library.
The EQUINOX system works on the basis of a quality framework, which is devised by each library to reflect their local situation. This framework consists of one or more missions, out of which arise aims. Objectives are defined relating to each of these aims, and the objectives are measured in terms of specific performance indicators (ISO 11620, EQUINOX, or locally defined indicators).
 Figure 1: Quality Framework in the EQUINOX System |
For example, Figure 1 above shows one of the library’s missions as being: ‘To support the teaching and learning activities of academic staff and students’. One of the aims arising from this mission is: ‘To equip members of the institution with the skills needed for the Information Society’. One of the specific objectives devolving from this aim is: ‘To maximise the use made of the electronic library’. The EQUINOX system can measure and record whether this objective is being met, through the performance indicators which have been defined as constituting this objective, namely: ‘Percentage of the population reached by electronic library services’ and ‘Number of sessions on each electronic library service per member of the target population’. Each of these is calculated from the datasets shown in Figure 1 and according to a predefined formula. Target values, minimum and maximum thresholds can also be defined by the library. The system compares the value of a PI or objective to these thresholds and an alerting facility will alert the relevant staff if a threshold has been exceeded.
This quality framework or hierarchy and its constituent entities can be stored, viewed and edited with ease through the EQUINOX software. Colour coding distinguishes clearly between different levels in the hierarchy. Entities can be viewed in their own right or as part of the hierarchical structure. Links to qualitative or related documentation can be provided from entities anywhere in the hierarchy and will be automatically launched using the appropriate software when selected. For example, links might be provided to service level agreements or to an analysis of a user survey.
The EQUINOX software consists of two modules: an administrative module and a review module. The administrative module is used to input the hierarchical structure and to set up the system according to the library’s needs. This module is also used to input actual data relating to library activities and performance, which is then used by the system to calculate performance indicators and objectives. The review module is aimed at library managers. This module allows the library’s quality framework to be viewed and printed. The performance of the library can be assessed by viewing or printing graphs depicting the values of a specific performance indicator or objective over time, as shown below. These can also be copied for inclusion in reports.
 Figure 2: Graph of PI: Percentage of the population reached by electronic library services |
 Figure 3: Graph of Objective: To maximise the use made of the electronic library |
The EQUINOX system has been tested by the partner libraries in live library environments. These tests resulted in minor changes to the system followed by a second (or beta) test phase. The beta testing resulted in further enhancements being made to the system. Overall the libraries found the system easy to use and extremely useful for managing quality and performance measurement data. Forty European libraries and two libraries in the US are currently testing the final version of the EQUINOX software. This large scale demonstration trial is due to be completed during September 2000, and feedback received from these trials will feed into plans for the future exploitation of the EQUINOX system.
Overall the EQUINOX project has been a very successful project. Two valuable additions to the area of performance measurement and quality management in libraries have resulted from this project. Performance indicators have been developed and tested for electronic library services to enhance and complement the existing standard indicators for traditional library services. These have been disseminated to and discussed with an international audience, ensuring their relevance to the profession and their position at the leading edge of developments in this field. A prototype software tool to aid the library manager attempting to implement quality principles in his or her library has been developed and tested and has proven to be not only possible but extremely useful.
The remaining phase of the EQUINOX project will include consideration of future exploitation of these two products of the project. The performance indicators have already been discussed with the relevant ISO Committee and may be considered for future revisions of ISO 11620. The project has identified a clear need and market for a software product such as EQUINOX and commercial exploitation of this product is being investigated.
Monica Brinkley
Research Officer
Dublin City University Library
Dublin City University
Collins Ave, Dublin 9
Ireland
Email: mbrinkley@esatclear.ie
URL: <http://equinox.dcu.ie/>
Monica Brinkley is the EQUINOX Research Officer for Dublin City University Library. She has previously been involved in the research project BIBDEL: Libraries without Walls, which investigated the delivery of library services to remote users. Monica has worked both as an academic librarian and a lecturer in Library and Information Studies.
For citation purposes:
Monica Brinkley, "Performance Measurement and Quality Management for the Hybrid Library: An update on the EQUINOX project", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/equinox/>
Libraries and survey data archives traditionally offer separate services through their respective catalogues and reference systems. Thus for people interested in social science information the way from articles and books to related survey data or vice versa used to be quite cumbersome. ILSES aims at a multi-level integration of both: bibliographic references for publications and meta-data for related data files, including direct access to the increasingly available body of electronic format or digitised documents. On the content side ILSES focuses on the emerging needs by comparative cross-national and cross-temporal social research for country specific and time series (meta-)data. The ILSES prototype was built on exemplary surveys from the European Commission's bi-annual Eurobarometer series and related publications.
The ILSES project [1] aims to develop a service
that enables end-users to retrieve and access publications,
documentary information and empirical data related to large-scale surveys
within an integrated system, allowing for vertical ("in depth")
search, either starting from publications or from survey data or from both
in combination, and offering subsequent horizontal expansion to related
data respectively publications. For content providers, libraries
and data archives, ILSES offers tools and procedures for the generation of
meta-data, conversion of existing formats, normalization, cataloguing and
networked common access to distributed holdings [2]
[3].
The focus on end-users and content providers is reflected in the modular construction of ILSES, with a central data base administrator (ADMIN-ILSES) as its technical heart containing the meta-data dictionary, with the library and data archive content provider tools for local meta-data import and administration (LIB-ILSES, DAT-ILSES), and with the end-user modules E-ILSES, a locally installed client interface, and NET-ILSES as an additional WWW interface with a subset of basic facilities.
 Figure 1: Structure of ILSES |
The arrows on the left and on the right represent the access to real survey data, electronic documents and publications; the 'communication' of end-users with the meta-data database (ADMIN-ILSES) is effected via E- or NET-ILSES.
The integration of bibliographic information and survey meta-data, in principle created separately in libraries and data archives usually neglecting the interrelated nature, is realised in ILSES through indexing from a common (domain specific) thesaurus ("soft links") and through direct intellectual cross-referencing ("hard links"), both down from the study (survey) level to the variable (individual survey question) level.
For the ILSES prototype it was decided to use the internet based HASSET thesaurus [4] which was developed by the UK data archive starting from the "UNESCO thesaurus for social sciences, education, communication, and culture". ILSES also allows for the application of multiple, subject specific thesauri. The about 10000 thesaurus keywords and their hierarchical relations are stored in ADMIN-ILSES and assigned to publications via LIB-ILSES and to survey questions via DAT-ILSES. The end-user can select and combine keywords from the thesaurus list to start a structured search without being familiar for example with the actual question wording or publication titles. Free-text search interfaces on all levels (publication or study abstract, author, title, variable labels or question text) complement the ILSES information retrieval facilities.
 Figure 2: E-ILSES screen illustrating integrated data and publication retrieval For an enlarged view click on the image |
Publication and variable hit lists with results from an integral thesaurus guided search for the keyword "democracy"; meta-data for a selected variable (variable name and label, study number and title, question and answer text, aggregate results etc.) are displayed; publications directly linked to the selected variable are listed separately; bibliographic information for a selected publication is displayed.
In general, ILSES provides a pre-coordinated collection building which is controlled with common indexing and consistent cross-referencing between related information. While other systems (e.g. NESSTAR [5]) concentrating on critical mass and accepting a lowest common denominator in contributing material, show decreasing rates of completeness the deeper the search level, ILSES in principle maintains quality and consistency in vertical and horizontal direction. The price to be paid is the required amount of intellectual input which is concluded to be worthwhile only for selected data collections with recognized major importance. Therefore ILSES is anticipated to be an appropriate complement to other tools such as NESSTAR, for accessing specialized, complex and mixed media social scientific information content that needs integration beforehand.
Once relevant topics (i.e. publications and survey data units) are identified, ILSES provides, beyond bibliographic information and data documentation, direct access to electronic documents and data ordering. Full text publications are made available through their respective internet addresses, original documents such as the national field questionnaires on dedicated ftp servers.
"Custom-made" data sets containing exactly the information needed in a particular research framework, can be directly ordered from participating data archives. Last but not least ILSES supports the integration (combination) of time series data from different surveys through controlled data manipulation and harmonisation. The necessary SPSS code is created in the background to be run at the data archive. These data matching procedures can be stored and modified or extended at any later stage.
 Figure 3: E-ILSES screen illustrating the matching of time series data For an enlarged view click on the image |
Variable hit list with results from a free text search for "satisfaction" in variable labels of pre-selected studies (surveys); several steps are shown of preparing a time series data extraction from different surveys (match variables) by software supported comparison of variable labels and values: (1) variables which do not match at all, (2) variables with minor differences in labels or values (necessary manipulation is supported by a recode interface), (3) variables with identical labels and values ready to be matched, (4) checking variables to be matched (former recode procedures are tracked)
ILSES provides meta-data import from standard formats of bibliographic information (UNIMARC carried by the 2709 format), from statistical standard software (SPSS) and imports standard codebooks (detailed survey data documentation). ILSES is considering the emerging social sciences Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard [6], written as a DTD in XML [7], both for meta-data import and export and for exchange with complementary systems (e.g. NESSTAR). The DDI-DTD element definitions have already incorporated most of the ILSES requirements for handling cross-national and longitudinal comparative data. DAT-ILSES goes beyond the present DDI-DTD in country specific elements at the study and variable level of description and in time series elements. LIB-ILSES still supersedes the DDI in cross-referencing between publications and data from survey questions. Forementioned elements, as well as addressing better inclusion of thesaurus indexing terms at all possible levels, can be expected for consideration in future DDI-DTD developments.
The ILSES project has been running within the European Commission's Telematics for Libraries programme from September 1996 to September 1999. The project has been carried out by a consortium of Dutch, German, French, and Irish institutes. In accordance with their respective expertise, iec ProGAMMA (Groningen) was responsible for software development and the overall project management, NIWI (Amsterdam) for the design of the library module and the bibliographic input, Zentralarchiv (Cologne) for the design of and meta-data loading by the data archive module, and University of Amsterdam's Department for Political Sciences contributed the end-user perspective, seconded by Trinity College (Dublin) and CIDSP (Grenoble) in the organisation of end-user and content provider user validation workshops.
ILSES has been developed as an open system using different software modules assembled around a central data base. Software and underlying data base work locally or centrally over the Internet (ftp and http protocol). The software is written in C++, the user-interfaces (screens) have been developed in Delphi. ILSES has been developed under Paradox but with it's client-server model any relational database capable of understanding SQL (e.g. Oracle) can be used and manipulated.
Complementing the traditional publication retrieval with own (re-)analysis of relevant survey data, sharpening the perspective on selected data through relevant publications, inspecting the translation of indicators in the original language field questionnaires in cross-national survey programs, controlled build-up of cumulative time series data sets, all these facilities make ILSES a unique service for comparative social research. Cross checking own findings, general quality control and avoidance of double work are only some of the relevant aspects for Social Science Research in general. With ILSES, the building of integrated research databases around important large scale data collections such as Eurobarometer [8] [9], International Social Survey Program (ISSP), World Values Surveys, or National Elections Studies can be managed intellectually and in terms of sharing the workload, in close collaboration between all parties involved: data collectors, researchers, authors and publishers. With LIB and DAT-ILSES each would have the networked tool for creating meta-data, thesaurus indexing and information linking. Because of the added value following from building integrated databases and because of giving end-users their own tools (E and Net-ILSES), the archive’s and library’s support burden per information or data request, can very well be expected to be considerably reduced as well.
The future of ILSES depends on both content and software development. The prototype contains meta-data for five Eurobarometer surveys (study description, SPSS variable and value definitions, question- and answer text, aggregate results by country etc. for over 3000 Variables) including thesaurus controlled indexing and cross-linkages to national field questionnaire pages. It also contains about a hundred indexed and cross-referenced, related publications (from among a larger pool of roughly 600 bibliographic references of associated literature). As a start the present five could be expanded to make more than 50 Eurobarometer surveys with all related information, available through ILSES. On the software side rapidly increasing user expectations would ask for on-line data browsing and simple pre-analysis facilities. For content providers, standard developments ask for direct access from ILSES to Z39.50 databases and for new modules to accommodate for example the DDI data documentation standard.
(including links to the project partners)
Meinhard Moschner
Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung (ZA)
University of Cologne, Germany
Tel: +49 (0)221 47694 21
Fax: +49 (0)221 47694 44
E-mail: moschner@za.uni-koeln.de
URL: <http://www.za.uni-koeln.de>
Meinhard Moschner is responsible at ZA for data preparation, data documentation, user advice and data service for the Eurobarometer survey series.
Repke E. de Vries
Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services (NIWI),
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 4628600
Fax: +31 20 6685079
E-mail: repke.de.vries@niwi.knaw.nl
URL: <http://www.niwi.knaw.nl/us/research/research.htm>
Repke de Vries is participating in the NIWI Research Programme "Exploring the future of Information and Communication in Research" and studies ICT related changes in work- and information environments for researchers.
For citation purposes:
Meinhard Moschner and Repke de Vries , "The ILSES Project: Integrated Library and Survey Data Extraction Service", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/ilses/>
David Fuegi, John Sumsion and Phillip Ramsdale describe the LIBECON2000 Project and summarise the project’s Millennium Report. Funded by DG13 under FP4, Libecon2000 is fully described on its own Web site [1] where statistics on the libraries of 29 European countries [2] are found, constituting an indispensable resource for policymakers and others with an interest in libraries at the European level. This has been achieved with the assistance of EBLIDA, IFLA, UNESCO and colleagues throughout Europe. During 2000, one more year of data will be added. The Millennium Report evaluates the main trends and lessons from the financial and statistical data collected over the last 10 years.
LIBECON2000 ensures that data is recent, formulated to a common standard, validated and grossed up in appropriate cases to produce valid trend lines. Financial data is standardised on the Euro to allow comparisons between countries and over time. The Web site provides quick and easy access to the data and to the sources. Besides providing a tool for research, monitoring, benchmarking and comparison, the project has impacted on the revision of ISO2789 [library statistics] and influenced a number of countries to adopt ISO2789 or to carry out surveys for the first time or in an improved format.
The Millennium Report and the Web site cover Central and Eastern Europe, the EFTA countries and the European Union and all library sectors - schools, higher [tertiary] education, national, public, special [broken down for the first time into sub-sectors] and other major non-specialised. For the sake of brevity, comment is here restricted mainly to the public library and tertiary education sectors. For details and for the full text, please visit the Web site.
Libraries are developing an ever increasing role in the supply of knowledge and it is estimated that in the main countries of Europe, total expenditure on libraries now amounts to 16 billions euros per year. As we enter the new millennium, rapid progress in methods of distributing knowledge by electronic means is being made and librarians are playing a key role in managing this information revolution. In this context, we have a concern to monitor the economic place which libraries occupy to better inform policy judgements and investment appraisals by international, national and local governments. A network of mainly professional contacts has been established in each country to co-ordinate the return of statistical information on a regular basis and these data, and useful source references, are maintained on the LIBECON 2000 Web site. Our aim is to create a virtual community of those who create and use library statistics of European countries. There are a number of advantages arising from this approach:
The European focus of the project arises from the policy aims of our funding body, the European Commission and the work could usefully be extended more widely if a way could be found to do so. For instance data collected in last year’s surveys have already been passed to UNESCO for incorporation in the United Nations Statistical Year Book, and if the LIBECON surveys were extended to other countries a precedent already exists to channel such data through to the main international agencies.
A major problem in assembling meaningful statistics is gaining access to information prepared to consistent definitions. UNESCO pioneered standardisation in this field and have been publishing library statistics of many countries for many years and formulated the six standard sectors [3] which they respectively survey on a three-year cycle. ISO, the worldwide federation of national standards bodies (ISO member bodies) undertakes the work of preparing International Standards through its technical committees. International organisations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO, also take part in the work of refining the definitions, and LIBECON2000 is seeking to inform the standards debate. Our ability to do this arises from the fact that we are one of the few to have attempted to collate and compare library statistics from many countries and thus have first-hand experience of the pitfalls.
What LIBECON2000 does is both more extensive and more limited than UNESCO. More limited in that we cover only 29 countries, whereas UNESCO aims to cover the whole world. We are more extensive in that we ask more questions and attach importance to financial data which are presented in standardised form [euros] and not in national currencies. We also have the resources to check more thoroughly with our sources and, unlike UNESCO, we gross-up to account for missing data and provide a bibliography, list of contacts and translations of major column headings in the original publications. Like UNESCO, LIBECON2000 surveys countries, not libraries. In other words, we do not undertake primary survey work. We go beyond UNESCO also in publishing a commentary on trends. Previous publications in the series include Library Economics in Europe [4] and Library Economics in Central and Eastern Europe [5].
i. Staff
We estimate that about 374,000 staff were employed in libraries, an increase of 3.7 % since 1991. This increase in staffing numbers is weighted towards the professional staff whose numbers increased by 4.9 % over the period. The increase in Trained staff occurs mostly in EU States.
The number of trained librarians in all sectors of libraries (206,000) is higher than previous estimates for the mid-1990’s (175,800 for 1991). However, the number of other support staff is substantially lower than previous estimates. Proportionately the returns for ‘Other Staff’ are appreciably lower in the CEE than in the EU.
Table 1 Staff FTE * (000s)
| Qualified | Other | Total | |
| 1991 | 196 | 165 | 361 |
| 1992 | 195 | 163 | 357 |
| 1993 | 191 | 164 | 355 |
| 1994 | 195 | 163 | 357 |
| 1995 | 199 | 162 | 361 |
| 1996 | 201 | 159 | 360 |
| 1997 | 206 | 160 | 367 |
| 1998 | 206 | 168 | 374 |
* Full Time Equivalent, i.e. part time staff count as fractions in proportion to hours worked
ii. Materials
The overall position and trends are summarised in this table:
Table 2 Trends in Materials Provision (millions)
| RESOURCES | 1991 | 1998 | % change |
| Book stock |
2,778 |
2,944 |
+ 6 |
| Audio Visual stock |
104 |
127 |
+ 22 |
| Periodical subscriptions |
19.5 |
21.3 |
+ 9 |
| Manuscripts |
29.5 |
32.0 |
+ 8 |
| Microforms |
316 |
313 |
- 1 |
| ANNUAL MOVEMENTS: | |||
| Book Additions |
171 |
171 |
= |
| A/V Additions |
9.7 |
12.1 |
+ 25 |
| Inter Library Loans (received) |
15.2 |
29.0 |
+ 91 |
The trends in annual additions to stock appear to vary between sectors. National libraries report a growth in their annual additions in books and audio-visual materials. Public libraries book acquisitions fell between 1991 - 1995 but have since stabilised, while their audio-visual materials have increased steadily. With a large increase in the population served by Tertiary Education, so have their book acquisitions grown hugely, but there has been a decline in audio visual additions.
iii. Use and users
The count of Registered Members increased in total from 126 million to 139 million - an increase of 10.5 per cent. As this count includes those who use several libraries the proportion it represents out of the total population (484 million) - 29 per cent - is disappointingly low. But the trend is moving upwards. Estimates for Loan Transactions at 3,543 million and Visits at 3,468 million are close and show only a small difference in trend: + 5.2 % against - 1.3 %. When taken together the ratio for Loan Transactions per Registered Member point to high intensity of use - moving from 26.8 to 25.5.
iv. Modernisation
Overall total estimates show the following: Workstations for users increased more than fourfold from 74,000 in 1991 to 310,000 in 1998. The stock of CD ROMs went up exponentially during the second half of the period, going from an estimated 456,000 in 1991 to 2,500,000 in 1998. The percentage of catalogue records automated is estimated to have gone up from 36 to 46 per cent.
v. Service points
Including all sectors, it is estimated that in 1998 there were 224,000 service points throughout the study area. There has been a considerable contraction since 1991, averaging 7.1 %, but this has taken place particularly in the Central & Eastern European countries (CEE) where the proportionate drop was 14 % and where the main closures took place in public libraries.
[6] There has been greatly increased activity in Tertiary Libraries and lack of growth - overall - in the Public Library sector, with modest growth in National Libraries. The obvious expectation from this is that levels of expenditure have increased more in the Tertiary sector than in others. Here we look at the situation overall.
Table 3 Main trends in financial results (All sectors of library)
| (e millions) EXPENDITURE | 1991 |
1998 |
% change |
| Staff | 5,007 | 6,697 | + 34 |
| Materials | 2,342 | 3,121 | + 33 |
| Electronic information | 317 | 528 | + 67 |
| Total revenue exp. | 10,347 | 13,965 | + 35 |
| INCOME ITEMS | |||
| Fees & Charges | 382 | 648 | + 70 |
| Other (i.e. special funds) | 432 | 1,034 | + 139 |
| CAPITAL PAYMENTS | 487 | 695 | + 43 |
Since staffing costs represent the largest part of the budget, expenditure on staff has increased at a rate reflected by the charge in total expenditure.
The total expenditure on conventional materials also shows an average increase, but this average conceals an estimated + 64 % for Special Libraries, + 40 % for Tertiary, + 27 % for National, + 33 % for Schools, and only + 1 % for Public Libraries.
The data show a dramatic (67 per cent) increase in expenditure on electronic materials. This is heavily concentrated in the Tertiary and Special Libraries sectors - and Special Libraries are more fully represented in these statistics than ever before.
It is significant, however, that the 1998 results show electronic information still at only 15 per cent of total materials expenditure - so confirming that conventional materials are still dominant.
Perhaps the most surprising revelation in this set of statistics lies in the specifically identified ‘Income Items’. The magnitude of the increase in Fees & Charges - 70 per cent - is impressive, and the pattern is virtually universal across all countries. This is a new trend.
i. The importance of the library sectors
One would expect, even over a lengthy period, to find little change in the relative size of the various library sectors. Estimates in previous surveys showed that, between 1981 and 1995 public libraries and higher education libraries increased their share of total spending on libraries - with the share of other sectors largely unchanged. In this survey we find a very different result - as illustrated in this table:
Table 4 Library sector shares
| SECTOR | by total expenditure | by total staff | ||
| PREVIOUS ESTIMATE | PRESENT ESTIMATE | |||
| 1981 * | 1995 § | 1998 | 1998 | |
| National | 6.0 % | 5.9 % | 5.4% | 4.1% |
| Higher Education | 15.3 % | 16.9 % | 19.9% | 16.5% |
| Public | 47.3 % | 49.5 % | 45.0% | 45.2% |
| Special | 8.6 % | 8.6 % | 21.3% | 16.7% |
| Other Major | 4.9 % | 4.5 % | 0.8% | 2.2% |
| School | 17.8 % | 14.7 % | 7.7% | 15.5% |
* EU States only § estimated in The Historic Database, Libecon2000 Project Deliverable D, 1998
The main reason for these changes is the stricter application of sectoral definitions and better returns for the Special Library sector in this later canvass. In view of this major change Table 4 above also includes a column to show how different the sector proportions appear when analysed by the numbers of staff employed rather than by expenditure.
ii Tertiary education sector
Between 1991 - 1998 staff plus Student totals in Tertiary education went from 1,534,000 to almost 2 million. Changes in expenditure are as shown in the following table 5.
Table 5 Tertiary libraries expenditure and income - all states
| Responses No. | % | EXPENDITURE | 1991 e millions | 1998 e millions | %ge change | 1991 % | 1998 % |
| 16 | 86 | Employees | 799 | 1,210 | + 51 | 44.7 | 43.5 |
| 22 | 93 | Materials | 559 | 780 | + 40 | 31.3 | 28.1 |
| 5 | 30 | Electronic materials | 17 | 81 | + 376 | 1.0 | 2.9 |
| 4 | 34 | Automation | 59 | 81 | + 37 | 3.3 | 2.9 |
| 6 | 36 | Premises | 170 | 277 | + 63 | 9.5 | 10.0 |
| 5 | 53 | New Building & Ref’t | 2 | 5 | ** | ** | 0.2 |
| 17 | 56 | Other expenses | 183 | 347 | + 90 | 10.2 | 12.5 |
| 17 | 62 | TOTAL EXP’RE | 1,788 | 2,780 | + 55 | 100 | 100 |
| INCOME | |||||||
| 13 | 53 | Institutional | 1,686 | 2,466 | + 46 | 94.0 | 88.7 |
| 12 | 51 | Fees & charges | 38 | 77 | + 103 | 2.2 | 2.8 |
| 12 | 51 | ‘Other income’ | 64 | 237 | + 270 | 3.8 | 8.5 |
| 7 | 32 | CAPITAL PAYMENTS | 83 | 78 | - 5 | 4.6 | 2.8 |
i. National Library Sector
Financial trends for national libraries are as shown in the following table.
Table 6 National libraries expenditure & income - all countries
| Responses No. | % | EXPENDITURE | 1991 e millions | 1998 e millions | %ge change | 1991 % | 1998 % |
| 19 | 68 | Employees | 272 | 373 | + 37 | 50.2 | 49.2 |
| 21 | 66 | Materials | 78 | 99 | + 27 | 14.3 | 13.1 |
| 10 | 8 | Electronic materials | 3 | 11 | + 267 | 0.5 | 1.4 |
| 13 | 79 | Automation | § 1 | 3 | ** | 0.1 | 0.4 |
| 11 | 39 | Premises | 41 | 51 | + 24 | 7.5 | 6.7 |
| 14 | 44 | New Building & Ref’t | 29 | 40 | + 38 | 5.3 | 5.3 |
| 19 | 77 | Other expenses | 120 | 181 | + 51 | 22.1 | 23.9 |
| 21 | 78 | TOTAL EXP’RE | 544 | 757 | + 39 | 100 | 100 |
| INCOME | |||||||
| 17 | 52 | Institutional | 434 | 608 | + 40 | 79.8 | 80.3 |
| 16 | 46 | Fees & charges | 73 | 103 | + 41 | 13.8 | 14.0 |
| 16 | 49 | ‘Other income’ | 35 | 44 | + 26 | 6.4 | 5.7 |
| 12 | 30 | CAPITAL PAYMENTS | 33 | 127 | + 285 | 6.1 | 16.8 |
§ ‘3’ in 1993
ii. Public libraries sector
Over the seven years, service points have decreased by 18 per cent. The scale of this decline is much influenced by the position in Poland (decrease from 10,300 to 3,565). But most countries show decreases between 8 and 15 per cent.
The following general conclusions emerge from the data:
Table 7 Public libraries expenditure and income - all countries
| Responses No. | % | EXPENDITURE | 1991 e millions | 1998 e millions | %ge change | 1991 % | 1998 % |
| 21 | 75 | Employees | 2,585 | 3,348 | + 30 | 50.2 | 53.3 |
| 22 | 77 | Materials | 758 | 762 | + 1 | 14.7 | 12.1 |
| 4 | 26 | Electronic materials | 0.8 | 4.6 | x 6 | 0 | 0.1 |
| 5 | 24 | Automation | 103 | 167 | + 62 | 2.0 | 2.3 |
| 7 | 30 | Premises | 726 | 808 | + 11 | 14.0 | 12.9 |
| 10 | 38 | New Building & Ref’t | 58 | 60 | + 3 | 1.1 | 0.9 |
| 21 | 63 | Other expenses | 914 | 1130 | + 24 | 17.8 | 18.0 |
| 20 | 59 | TOTAL EXP’RE | 5146 | 6279 | + 22 | 99.9 | 100 |
| INCOME | |||||||
| 15 | 37 | Institutional | 4870 | 5632 | + 16 | 94.6 | 89.7 |
| 13 | 44 | Fees & charges | 135 | 316 | + 134 | 2.6 | 5.0 |
| 13 | 32 | ‘Other income’ | 142 | 331 | + 133 | 2.8 | 5.3 |
| 12 | 51 | CAPITAL PAYMENTS | 353 | 448 | + 27 | 6.9 | 7.1 |
The report’s recommendations cover the need for further work and for improved statistical representation of information technology in libraries. More importantly, perhaps, they draw policy makers’ attention once again to issues such as the small average size of university libraries in some countries and of public library authorities in others. Disparities in provision are quite marked and stand out from the data. The report calls upon governments to use the information provided to benchmark aspects of their services with a view to improving to the standard of the best.
The future of LIBECON is surrounded by some uncertainties at the time of writing. UNESCO, which has pioneered the production of international library statistics since the 1970s is reducing the numbers of its statistical staff and it is not clear what the consequences of this might be for library and other cultural statistics. EUROSTAT, which collects statistics for the European Union, has recently been asked to compile cultural statistics at the EU level but has not included libraries in its programme. A considerable onus thus lies on LIBECON to first maintain the series of statistics and secondly develop their utility for policy makers. In this respect, we would like to extend our activities beyond Europe. Libraries and the world of information are changing rapidly as technologies change and governments emphasise the role of libraries in supporting education, social inclusion and economic growth as well as the more traditional cultural role. Our challenge is to develop the international framework for producing reliable statistical information to monitor the success or otherwise of libraries. We have made a start in Europe and hope to secure funding to continue the work.
The Libecon2000 Millennium Report and database are available on CDRom
at 60gbp including tax and postage.
It can be ordered on the Web site or
by post direct to:
J.Toop
IPF
NLA Tower
Addiscombe Road
Croydon CR0
0XT
United Kingdom
Fax +44 (0) 208 681 6741
IPF is wholly owned by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy. The company provides an extensive range of services to over 1,200 public services under five main activity streams. These are:
David Fuegi
Email: david@fuegi.demon.co.uk
David Fuegi is a Consultant with IPF. He is joint author of “Library Performance Indicators and Library Management Tools” [1995] and of “Study of Library Economics of Central and Eastern Europe” [1998] both published in Luxembourg by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. He is currently project manager for the LIBECON2000 project is joint author of the project’s Millennium Study. Other major current projects include business planning for the TACIS Russian State Library Project in Moscow and drafting public library standards for England for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. He manages the IPF metric and process benchmarking clubs in which over 100 UK library authorities participate. He is special adviser to the UK Committee on Public Library Statistics which he chaired for 15 years and is a member of the UK ISO [BSI] committee on library statistics and performance indicators [ISO 2789 etc]. Other European library projects in which he has worked include the Publica Project [DG13], ISTAR [DG5] and PLDP [DG16]. Formerly he was Library Advisor to UK government ministers responsible for Libraries and held senior positions in public libraries.
John Sumsion
John Sumsion took a first class degree in Modern History at Cambridge and then spent two years at (M.A. 1953) and Cornell studying and teaching Economics. After a long career in shoe manufacturing he was appointed in 1981 to set up the Public Lending Right operation and gained valuable knowledge of UK public libraries through operating and evaluating the PLR statistical sampling scheme. In his PLR work he developed new ways of analysing book loans and describing the Buying:Borrowing features of the book trade.
John then spent five years as Director of Library & Information Statistics Unit (LISU) at Loughborough University. He was an active member of the Library & Information Services Council (England) and his research covered public, academic and special libraries. On retiring from LISU in September 1996 he was appointed Senior Honorary Fellow in Loughborough's Department of Information Science - which is now his base for personal teaching, research and consultancy.
Phillip Ramsdale
Email: phillip.ramsdale@ipf.co.uk
Phillip Ramsdale is Executive Director of IPF. He headed each of the previous studies undertaken for DG XIII concerning the monitoring of library activities in Europe. He is a statistician who manages a portfolio of research contracts for a number of Government Departments in the United Kingdom and has considerable international research experience arising from work undertaken for DG V and DG X and UNESCO. He directs one of the most comprehensive public service databases maintained by any non-governmental organisation and has established a respected reputation for IPF in the statistical field.
For citation purposes:
David Fuegi, John Sumsion and Phillip Ramsdale, "LIBECON2000: The Millennium Report", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/libecon/>
Paul Greenwood and Martina Lange-Rein report on TECUP. This project is concerned with the role of libraries, authors, publishers, collecting societies and subscription agents in the digital environment. The central question addressed is, how access to digital material can be provided using the latest technology without infringing copyright and in cooperation with all players in the value chain.
TECUP [1] (Test-bed Implementation of the European Copyright framework) is funded by DG Information Society (formerly DG XIII) of the European Commission under the Telematics for Libraries Programme. It started at the end of 1998 and will run until the end of 2000. TECUP is a meta-project, which gathers information on, and studies, projects of different kinds concerning digital uses. The feasibility of practical mechanisms for rights acquisition for the distribution, archiving and use of electronic products from different types of content owners and involving different types of libraries is analysed.
One of the main aims of TECUP is to bring together representatives of all the major players in the value chain. The project partners represent libraries, authors, publishers and collecting societies from across Europe.
TECUP evolved from a meeting of representatives of the main players in 1996, during the ECUP project. At that meeting there was disagreement as to the copyright exceptions needed for libraries in the digital environment, but at the same time a consensus emerged that all the players needed to work together in developing business models for licencing in the digital future. Further meetings followed at which first the outline and then the details of a new project were agreed and proposals were submitted to DGXIII of the European Commission for EU funding.
Between 1996 and 1999 the whole digital environment changed dramatically both in terms of the evolution of technology and, perhaps more importantly, in the thinking of those involved. The concept and aims of TECUP also changed. Originally it was seen as a means of testing and analysing models for the distribution, archiving and use of electronic products. It evolved into a meta-project which would not carry out testing itself but would feed off and analyse the results and methodology of other projects, both national and international, covering the whole spectrum of digital uses, with a view to identifying best practices in the interests of all the players.
In the first phase of the project, information was gathered on a large number of projects. We adopted a broad criterion for the interpretation of the term ”project”, to include licencing services available world-wide. From an original list of 70 projects 46 were selected for further study, divided into three broad categories, retrodigitisation, born digital and self publishing. We decided to adopt an empirical approach. First we assembled publicly available information, making extensive use of the internet. Then we sent a questionnaire to each project. On the basis of information assembled in this way we established a short list of 25 projects for detailed analysis from a legal, strategic, and technical point of view, and advisory boards have been established to examine each aspect. Of course the same project may be of interest from two of these aspects, or even all three. The Legal Advisory Board and the Technical Advisory Board have already completed their work. The Strategy Advisory Board, including international and European organisations representing all players, started its work at the end of May 2000.
The conclusion of the Legal Advisory Board was that contractual solutions need to be found to copyright and other issues. In some cases the appropriate contractual partner for libraries will be a publisher, in others a Reproduction Rights Organisation (RRO such as VG Wort in Germany) representing large numbers of authors as well as publishers. The fact that digital rights may be with authors as well as publishers needs to be taken into account. While licences can and do take into account exceptions to the exclusive rights in legislation, libraries cannot rely on copyright exceptions alone in the digital environment.
The LAG further concluded that there are no major problems of principle with licences except regarding perpetual access and warranty clauses, concerning which TECUP will be making recommendations.
The project held a workshop in Frankfurt at the end of October 1999 at which both TECUP and eight key projects under study were presented and discussed.
The programme included the following presentations:
TECUP / Emanuella Giavarra
New Journal of Physics (NJP) / Peter Reineker
Author funded electronic publishing of original research articles in
physics [2]
Elektra / Inkeri Salonharju, Helsinki University Library
and Jukka Pekka Timonen, KOPIOSTO (the Finnish RRO)
Finnsh joint project involving libraries, publishers, learned societies
and copyright organisations for electronic publishing and network access
to publications [3]
National Electronic Site Licence Initiative (NESLI) / Fred
Friend
Widespread delivery and use of electronic journals in UK universities
through a national licence based upon fair prices and terms [4]
Decomate II / Hans Geleijnse
EU project involving publishers, academic libraries and subscription
agents in various EU member states to provide the end-user with access to
heterogeneous information resources distributed over different libraries
in Europe using a uniform interface leading to a working demonstrator of
the European Digital Library for economics [5]
Laurin / Ingrid Mauritzen
Pan-European project involving libraries, universities and collecting
societies in various countries aimed at working out the technical,
organisational and legal prerequisites to support newspaper clipping
archives in their transfer from an analogue to a digital mode of operation
[6]
EZUL, EJOUR / Hildegard Schäffler
German project dealing with the provision of e-journal articles on a
national scale [7]
Higher Education Resources ON-demand (HERON) / Carolyn
Rowlinson
UK electronic Libraries Programme project designed to improve electronic
delivery of course materials within Higher education Institutions and to
enable HELs to market their own learning resources [8]
LINK / Thomas Rakow
Information service developed by Springer Verlag, Germany, offering high
quality information online [9]
The workshop was the culmination of the process of information-gathering which had been going on since the start of the project at the beginning of 1999. More information about this special event is available online [10].
The process of evaluation (detailed analysis of the legal, technical and strategic aspects) began after the workshop and will continue until the end of the project in December 2000.
The Strategy Advisory Group (SAG) held its first meeting of three in May 2000. Authors, publishers, libraries, RROs and subscription agents were represented at the international level. The SAG will define the key issues concerning the role of libraries in the digital environment taking into account the concerns and point of view of each of the players and drawing on the comparative analysis of projects developed by TECUP. Thomas Dreier, Professor at the Institute of Jurisprudence at Karlsruhe University / Germany, will develop a report in consultation with the SAG. The hope and objective is that not withstanding the different interests of the main players a consensus will emerge about the best way forward in the interests of all concerned.
A concertation meeting, where all results of TECUP will be presented, is planned for the 1 of December 2000 [11].
Paul Greenwood
International Affairs
Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort, Munich
Martina Lange-Rein
Projectmanager of TECUP
Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1
D-37070 Goettingen
Tel: +49 - 551-39 3855
Fax: +49 - 551-39 2361
e-mail: tecup@mail.sub.uni-goettingen.de
For citation purposes:
Paul Greenwood and Martina Lange-Rein, "TECUP (Test-bed Implementation of the European Copyright Framework)", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/tecup/>
Alexandra Papazoglou gives a final report on Project Verity: Virtual and Electronic Resources for Information skills Training for Young people.
A user analysis conducted prior to the project confirmed what many librarians have already experienced. Young people need help from the library in the selection of appropriate resources selected on the basis of their quality and relevance. They need a better search platform in order to locate OPAC and Web resources than the one normally available through traditional tools. They also need better training in developing their information skills. On the basis of these findings Verity attempts to offer a solution to this problem by providing a new search service called 'Virtual Resource Finder'
The Verity project first produced an English prototype called “Virtual Resource Finder” that has two parts:
 Figure 1: The Resource Finder |
The resource finder guides the user through a series of options that assist him in locating the correct bibliographic information both in the OPAC and from a database of selected web resources. For the purposes of the prototype the Web resources were chosen from two large subject areas: environment and social issues.
The idea of the project was to try to offer on line the type of support the user normally receives when assisted by a librarian in the library environment. After consideration of various possibilities it was decided that the best way to accomplish this objective, given the budget and time constrains of the project, was through the use of a thesaurus. A thesaurus offers links and suggestions similar to the ones offered by a librarian when trying to assist a user. For the particular needs of Verity, the EUROVOC thesaurus was considered. The selection was based on the fact that it is available in the 4 out of the 5 languages (English, German, Greek, Portuguese) of the project and it covers the subject areas of the environment and the social issues. For the Finnish prototype the partner had to provide a translation of EUROVOC in the Finnish language.
When the user queries the resource finder through a keyword search, the submitted term gets linked to a list of relative terms provided by EUROVOC . The user can stop and think if the keyword he used was the appropriate one, or whether one of the options provided serve better his purpose. In Figure 2 one sees that there is a variety of terms related to the query “population” that represent different aspects of the submitted keyword.
 Figure 2: Related terms provided after the initial keyword search |
The user can either continue with his original term of choose one of the related terms,
The outcome of the search could be a result screen or a no result screen.
The result screen can provide library catalogue resources from both the OPAC of the library and selected Web resources from the special database built by the library, or it can present resources from either the OPAC or the Web resources database.
In the example provided in Figure 3 the user is presented with both library and Web resources that correspond to the query “population”.
 Figure 3: Virtual Resource Finder Results screen |
When the result screen does not provide satisfactory resources because of too many or too few resources, or because of content quality, the user can choose to continue his search. Also available are options for selecting an encyclopedia in order to get better acquainted with the research topic, a dictionary to check the spelling of the keyword used, the “ask a librarian” option to directly ask a librarian for help by means of e-mail communication. The user can also make an “advanced search”, which is really a Boolean search screen that provides the Boolean operators.
By selecting the “continue” button the user is transferred to another screen, again EUROVOC supported which can provide a specific related term, a broader or a narrow term. By choosing one of these terms the user can go on and find more and better resources (see Figure 4).
 Figure 4: Related, broader and narrow terms screen |
The encyclopedia, the dictionary, the advanced search and the “ask a librarian” options are also available to the user in a no result screen in order to assist him in the search process. Help screens are also provided throughout in order to offer additional help in this process.
To further assist the user with their search needs and also train them in the information seeking process a special section called “infoskills” has been developed by the Verity project.
Infoskills includes the following three sections:
The Learning material is a guide for information seeking and processing specially designed for school assignment and project work. It teaches the user how to work effectively with information. The topics it develops are
An example of a model paper is included in order to allow a young person to follow it when writing his own paper.
The self-evaluation questionnaire section presents ideas concerning the writing process and provides a forty five questions questionnaire users can take to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in searching and writing. An explanation of the scores helps the user understand his problem areas. Users can take the questionnaire again to see how practice has contributed in the improvement of his information and writing skills.
Finally the Teacher’s guide discusses the challenges of education of the future and required conceptual changes. It offers guidance in encouraging collaborative work, how to construct new knowledge and understanding the knowledge-seeking goal.
After the completion and verification of the first prototype in English [1], additional prototypes were also produced in Finnish [2], German [3], Greek [4] and Portuguese [5].
Guided and assisted by the Virtual Resource Finder the user gets the support that the current commercial library catalogue softwares cannot provide and the quality and directness that search engines cannot offer. The features and concept of both the resource finder and the infoskills of the Verity project can and should be exploited by commercial companies in order to provide better service to young users. The Virtual Resource Finder can become a very powerful tool that would add quality to the search strategy and offer an effective search mechanism not only limited to young users.
For more information on the Verity project see the international home page [6]. An introduction article to the Verity project was given in Exploit Interactive issue 2 [7].
Alexandra Papazoglou
Director
Athens College Library
Email: papaz@ns.haef.gr
Alexandra Papazoglou gained a MLS in Library and Information Science from Simmons College, Boston USA. She then worked at Widener Library, Harvard University between 1976 and 1982. Since 1987 she has been Director of Libraries, of the schools and programmes for the Hellenic American Educational Foundation. She is the local project manager for the CHILIAS and VERITY (Telematics for Libraries 1994-1998, European Union) projects. She is also a reviewer for the Telematics for Libraries (1993,1994,1995,1997) and the IST (1999) Programmes.
Alexandra is secretary of the Section for School Libraries and Resource Centers, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (1997-2001) and a member of the Co-ordinating Board of the Division Libraries Serving the General Public (1997-2001) for the same organisation. She has worked as an expert on library issues for the Greek Ministry of Education, the Greek National Documentation Centre and the Union Catalogue of the Greek Academic Libraries. She works as a consultant to public and academic libraries in Greece and is the author of many professional articles, an editor of conference proceedings and professional Newsletters (Greek Library Association 1991-1995 and IFLA, Section of School libraries 1997- ).
For citation purposes:
Alexandra Papazoglou, "Project Verity: Virtual and Electronic Resources for Information skills Training for Young people: a New Online Library Service for Young People", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/verity/>
Simon Musgrave introduces the FASTER project (and preceding NESSTAR project) that provides flexible access to statistics, tables and electronic resources held at social science data archives and other data publishers.
Data about society, whether economic or social, is collected by many government departments, research institutes and companies. Many of these data collections are available for re-use (secondary analysis). Within the academic sector social science data archives have been established in several European countries to provide researcher and students with ready access to these data [1]. Some of these archives have been in existence for 2-3 decades and house the largest collections of accessible computer-readable data in the social sciences in their respective countries. The primary goals of the archives have been to safeguard the data and make it as easily accessible as possible for teaching and research independent of whether the users are able to pay for the services or not.
The NESSTAR project (1998-2000) [2] aimed to increase the use of these data by developing a set of generic tools that make it easier to:
The social science data archives are rarely engaged in the collection of primary data, but serve as brokers between various data providers and the academic community. They not only preserve data for future use but also add their own value to the data:
The basic strategic goal of the FASTER project (2000-2001) [3] is to link the world of the data archives described above with the official statistics and develop advanced metadata models and systems that build on the leading developments in both. To over-simplify, it could be said that the archives and libraries have concentrated on metadata for resource discovery and data transfer, hence the concentration on study descriptions and codebooks. Conversely the statistical offices and other data generators have concentrated on metadata for questionnaires, process control and tabular outputs. By combining the work of these traditions, we hope to generate metadata models and systems that are consistent all the way from data conceptualisation and collection through to end use and interpretation. Much of the drive for the FASTER project comes for the innovative NESSTAR project [2]. An example for the on-line browsing is shown in the screen-shot below.
 Figure 1: Online Browsing |
In order to interact with this diagram, and find out more about the data or add another explanatory variable, such as gender, it is possible to click on the graph above, a NESSTAR bookmark. To run this it is necessary to have the NESSTAR client installed on you desktop [4].
In order to understand the needs of the next generation of data analyst ‘dream machine’ it is necessary to review existing metadata traditions and develop a wider understanding of the different types of metadata that could, or should, be considered part of the system.
The first part of the metadata, and in many ways the most traditional, is the catalogue. This is the part of the metadata that includes title, ownership, location, keywords and other attributes. The data library community has adopted the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) [5]. It includes fields for almost every conceivable aspect of data cataloguing and includes mapping to the Dublin Core.
It is to be hoped that the exciting developments in the digital library community in developing a range of digitally based services will include effective links to the virtual data services being developed in the NESSTAR/FASTER projects. This is the part of the metadata that is most usable by the widest community and it is recommended that services are developed which speak a range of protocols, including Z39.50, so that they can be accessed, or ‘harvested’, by a range of library portals and services.
When the DDI, as draft specification, was converted from SGML to XML this, almost inadvertently, opened the door to a range of new Web based services. This was because XML was designed as a key part of the new semantic driven Web, designed for machine to machine interoperability as well as human readability. The new specification of the codebook ( or data dictionary) in the DDI format, allow the data library and hence the data publishing software, to formalise the structure and descriptions of the data content.
The standardisation of this level of metadata has been one of the most exciting developments of the current standard. No longer does the user just have to rely on the skill of the cataloguers, but by use of appropriate search engines the user is able to search directly on the specific value labels embedded in the dictionary. This is especially useful for categorical variables, for example ethnicity, occupation, geographies, gender.
Reflecting back on the fact that the DDI was essentially designed as a storage and transfer format for the predominantly survey datasets in the existing libraries and archives, it is easy to see that this structure, rich and powerful as it is, is unable to address some of the wider issues, such as contextual metadata. On one level the potential for exciting multi-media is clear. Categorical variables, such as housing, occupation and geographies could easily be not just enlivened, but also clarified, by the appropriate use of pictures, video and maps. These objects could be embedded, but more appropriately linked, to many parts of the DDI metadata.
Simple textual metadata, such as user guides, interviewer questionnaires (or links to computer aided questionnaires systems) can and should be added. They provide detailed background information for the advanced researcher. However there is also a need for wider contextual information for the inexperienced user. This might include access to teaching and learning material, for example to understand the meaning of a quota sample or to be alerted to the issues of question routing or variable weighting.
The fourth level of metadata that is of growing concern is related to data quality. The growth of advanced Web systems that link to many datasets can leave the user, particularly the naïve user, with serious problems. It is difficult to know whether a dataset is of high data quality or of high usability quality from a simple list of hits. An experienced user may be able to assess data quality from a well-documented dataset, and the DDI does include fields for such items as response rates. However this is likely to be beyond the reach of the casual user. On the other hand a high quality dataset can be identified, but the user will want to know how accessible it is to his particular environment.
The solution to this dilemma could come in one of two ways. On the one hand it might be possible to establish some sort of quality stamp for data, even a grading. These types of proposals have not been met with universal accord due to the difficulty in agreeing them, let alone implementing them. A second, more ad hoc but practical, solution is the development of added value portals or collections. This is likely to be the domain of the higher quality data libraries who are able to gather a set of working links to a range of reliable and trusted data sources. They might be grouped around course or discipline requirements and may have notes added that are semi-confidential.
The concept of specialist recommendation leads to the next type of metadata, which is not really metadata at all in the traditional sense. This is the human knowledge that relates to a dataset. A large part of this is likely to be unstructured and held in the head of one or two experts or expert centres. Whilst the attempt to record any common points, for example in Frequently Asked Questions repositories, is important, a good metadata system should include links to people as well. These could be advanced help desk systems that integrate video with screen duplication, or simply telephone numbers of experts. The support can be of several types, ranging from statistical analysis through data management and data content through to basic IT skills.
The final type of metadata, and perhaps the most exciting, is the metadata generated by the user – the supplementary metadata. This could be comment on a dataset, tips, corrections and the like. However it can also be the very use of the dataset. The NESSTAR system allows the user to bookmark operations such as a search or a table or a graph. These bookmarks can be saved and added into electronic articles, especially Web based ones. So it is easy to envisage the scenario in which a researcher carries out an analysis on a particular dataset and create an on-line article. In this they publish their analysis, not just as graph or table, but also include a live link back to the environment in which that graph or table was created. See the NESSTAR example above for how this might work.
The discussion on metadata components is largely based around the types of data set, the survey, that is the bread and butter of the existing data services. However the FASTER project is broadening the discussion beyond these types of dataset and has engaged in detailed ‘brainstorming’ with the developers of other types of metadata systems. Major players in the production of aggregate tables are the national statistical offices. The FASTER project benefits from having participation form three statistical offices, those of the Netherlands, Ireland and Norway and close links with a fourth, the UK. These types of tabulation systems, whether interactive, such as Statline, or simply table publications, demand a cell based metadata system.
A major part of the discussion in the FASTER project has centred on the distinction between microdata and aggregate data. Statistics Netherlands has proposed a CRISTAL data model that handles both micro and aggregate data (or data cubes) in the same logical model. If both representations of data can be handled by the same model, then can the data cube, the multi-dimensional table, be called a dataset itself. Traditionally the Census aggregate statistics (the small area statistics) were considered as datasets, and so it is correct to consider every data table as a dataset in its own right. In some instance a table can be derived from the original microdata and so can be considered as a tabulation and even recorded in a bookmark as described earlier. However the table may be much more complex than this and has been derived from a multiplicity of sources, including a synthetic database as described below.
The major data collectors, in particular the National Statistical Institutes (NSIs), have very different approaches to data collection (see Bethlehem et al. 1999). Some, notably the Anglo-Saxon countries, are heavily biased towards surveys. Others, notably the Netherlands and Scandinavia, are biased towards registers. Given the high cost of surveys, and the imperative to cut costs, it is likely that the use of secondary data collection, via administrative data such as registers, will grow. In addition one survey is used for multiple logical data collections. In this way a synthetic database can be imputed from a mixture of register and survey data. As a result a published table may have no underlying dataset and the microdata with the table will focus mainly on explaining how it was derived, analogous to describing how a survey was collected.
These trends will result in more data being released as multi-dimensional tables and not as surveys and hence the traditional archive model of simply holding discrete surveys will begin to break down for many organisations. The current bias towards surveys is illustrated by the first version of the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), which is primarily focused on the description of discrete surveys.
The coming years will, we anticipate, lead to a much wider and more diverse range of data resources to serve both the research community and the wider and growing community of data users, whether sophisticated analysts or casual data browsers. The retrieval and replication of the resulting analysis is essential and one of the goals of the project is to investigate ways in which this might be possible.
Given the need to more extensive metadata and the changing nature of the data themselves, what sort of data client is necessary in the next generation of the ‘dream machine’. The FASTER project believes that the new client should have the following features:
All of the metadata above is important in making proper use of the data resources once they have been identified and located. However the initial identification and location of data remains a fundamental issue. Most of the existing systems rely on the user knowing which sites to search. The development of more advanced search engines, such as Google, Clever (in development at IBM) and ResearchIndex have the potential to make the data services more accessible. The techniques that these services use provide exemplars of the type of advanced search techniques that will be required to sift and sort the growing number of hits in the wider data web that is developing. For example it would be sensible to rank datasets in more intelligent ways, such as the number of publications based on the dataset weighted for the age of the dataset. Another ranking mechanism would be to use the quality measures discussed above.
In addition to the need to provide some more sophisticated ranking of a generic nature, it is also necessary to provide a way for users to either develop their own profile or choose one of a number of profiles. Developing a user profile depends on the ability of the user to store, retrieve and edit their own preferences for searching. Within NESSTAR this can be done by saving bookmark of search parameters. These can be saved and re-run by an active agent.
User profiles can be represented in XML and used intelligently to map onto the organisational profiles described later on. They can be stored locally, or on servers. They can be used to add extra functionality at the local organisational level, as well as the user level. The development of user profiles will be carried out using any existing developments in related spheres, for example within the electronic library world.
In addition to the changes in the client that are driven by the user, there are many changes that are driven by the type of data, or metadata. It is possible to conceive of systems that load up a client depending on the type of data being delivered across the web. This is, or course, similar to the well-established functionality of the mime type in which different data types are able to initialise different applications. Other types of data that are of specific interest include geographical data, for example linking demographic information to maps, and time series data. The FASTER system will include ways of ensuring that these types of data can be displayed intelligently, maybe via an alternative system altogether.
It is worth, at this juncture, pointing out that a major part of the NESSTAR development has been the creation of an XML based protocol for the communication between the client and server. This protocol is in the public domain and available to anyone who wants to create new clients and servers to interact with the overall NESSTAR service. As a result the project expects that some services for specific types of data will be linked into the overall NESSTAR network. Indeed this is one of the most exciting outworkings of the project – the ability of multiple data servers and clients to inter-operate at a variety of levels (e.g. resource discovery, data browsing, data delivery and local portals)
A further issue to be resolved at the client level is the development of an intelligent way of sifting and sorting the variety of data and related services. To use the analogy of the social science workbench, the user wants to have easy access to the right collection of raw materials (typically the data) and the right collection of tools (typically analysis applications). It does not help them to be cluttered up with a huge amount of irrelevant material. Rather the user wants to be able to sort relevant resources quickly and easily and then store the re-arranged environment so that it can be returned to quickly and easily.
The FASTER project is very ambitious, it is seeking to address many of the issues that have been thrown up by the success of the NESSTAR project. However it is seeking to solve these problems by focusing on the development of the data web, rather than one-off solutions. It is the fervent hope of the author that the infrastructure that is being developed by both the NESSTAR and FASTER project can be both participatory and ever expanding. In this way our, and the data using community, dreams can both grow and be realised [6] [7].
Simon Musgrave
Deputy Director of the Data Archive
NESSTAR and FASTER project leader
University of Essex
Colchester
CO4 3SQ
Tel: 44 (0)1206 872321
Fax: 44 (0)1206 872003
<http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/
>
<http://www.nesstar.org/>
Simon Musgrave is Deputy Director of the UK Data Archive, a national centre for the collection and dissemination of economic and social data. He is co-ordinator of the NESSTAR and FASTER projects.
For citation purposes:
Simon Musgrave, "Flexible Access to Statistics, Tables and Electronic Resources", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/data/>
Many commercial Web sites carry news feeds from third parties. Suppliers of news feeds often use email to deliver user-selected areas of news. Karen Neal looks at ways in which the European Library community can provide their own news services to their community. She describes the NewsAgent project, which provides an email and Web-based current awareness service, and reviews developments to standards for providing similar services.
As people are suffering from “information overload” in both their professional and personal lives, news services that aggregate and disseminate targeted or personalised updates have become a common tool. Typical services deliver updates to the users inbox or set cookies on the user’s computer so that their personal news categories take over the front page of the site. While many individuals organisations choose to disseminate their information in the form of an e-mail newsletter, larger entities are currently pulling information from key sources and disseminating to interested parties. Internet news such as Moreover.com and Individual.com currently pull in news feeds, articles from online journals and online newspapers and disseminate the information to users in specific news channels. Legal, medical and business information are all represented by some form of news and content updating service. Smaller, more specialised, information groups do not necessarily have the resources to organise and disseminate the information from their chosen resources. This can be attributed to the lack of sufficient technology to deal with the task of pulling information from disparate resources, the lack well formatted content for harvesting, and the lack of disparate resources (such as listservs and newsgroups) from having their most valuable content efficiently disseminated.
NewsAgent began in 1996 when funding was awarded for the design and implementation of a service that would sort and deliver key information resources to library and information professionals. The funding was given under the Electronic Journals strand of the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) to research and develop the concept of an open-standards-based, electronic, personalised, current awareness service.
Dublin Core metadata tags are recognised by the system as well as a NewsAgent specific tagging terms. In addition, specific keywords are also employed to map stored user subject profiles against new information resources. Software robots have been used to build an Oracle database where both user profiles and document attributes are stored.
Users can join the service using the project Web page [1] (see Figure 1). Once within the systems users may sign up to receive information updates by email as well as search for information resources currently within the database. Users can receive updates from predefined topics to which they subscribe as well as create their own personalised searches.
 Figure 1: NewsAgent Log In Screen |
Web sites are monitored by the harvester and will create records when changes occur. With a change, information is gathered from the HTML coding of the page and a new record is created. In addition, messages to listservs to which the system is subscribed also enter the system. The subject field of the messages are transformed into the title of the entry and the message is placed on a Web page that is accessible for 30 days. The NewsAgent administrator also has the ability to send news and information into the system via e-mail or by creating a new record within the administration client.
 Figure 2: Results of an Online Search on the topic of Censorship |
The new entries are automatically analyzed for their content by way of DC tags and title tags. An index is created nightly with the new information being matched up against the profile of the users. The updates are then sent out. The format of the update is up to the user who can choose between daily or weekly, long or short entries, and text or HTML. The longer entries contain the description information when it is available from harvesting or the first few lines of a message that has been received via email.
While there are numerous news-alerting services available online, the content is of a general nature coming from wire services. As the newsagent service pulls information from resources as uncontrolled as listservs and with automated tools in the case of Web pages there have been many issues which have arisen. A primary factor has been the lack of metadata, inadequacies of URLs for delineating collections of resources, inadequacies of HTTP modification dates for identifying changes to resources, as well as the inability of the harvester to be more finely tuned.
With the numerous listservs that NewsAgent is subscribed to, there had to be a method in place by which information could be efficiently disseminated to subscribers. To do this, all of the e-mail messages coming into the server were converted into HTML pages with the title of the e-mail becoming the title for the item’s record. Words in the title are then matched the set of keywords associated with specific searches. If a message contains any of these words, then they are sent out with the content for that news section. Users are also able to create customized searches that work along the same principle. Any new messages containing words they have entered into a search statement will be delivered within their next update. The administrator can review all of the messages that have been imported overnight prior to their dissemination. This will allow for multiple postings, solved inquiries, and non-topical exchanges to be deleted. This is a time consuming process and would be greatly improved if users of listservs put additional key terminology in their subject line. After all, many listserv archives are searchable online. Even with variable terminology, additional content information on the subject line will assist current users as well as potential technological changes to assist with congregating and disseminating such information.
The older harvesters, such as the one that NewsAgent is currently using, are not able to tell the difference between banner advertisements and changes to the Web pages. Minor changes such as these can result in the pages being harvested and not bringing any new information or value into a system. In the case of NewsAgent, every time a page is visited which has a revolving banner advertisement the page is harvested and a new record is created. This means that without human intervention those receiving updates will find that XYZ Press Releases will be listed very frequently, and the Web page will not have had any new press releases for several weeks. Also, if a person were to search for company XYZ from the NewsAgent web site they will view a large number of records for the company’s press release pages unless duplicates are manually deleted. Sites that bring this additional strain to the NewsAgent harvester are currently being monitored using Netmind’s free Mind-it service. As these pages change, the NewsAgent administrator reviews the “changed page” and decides whether any new content has been added and whether to add the information to the NewsAgent system.
Harvesters can be configured to block out certain parts of Web sites that have been deemed of little value for the target information. This can include pages for areas such as feedback listings, advertising rates and archival information. One primary method in which a harvester can block such information is by using the file extension. In doing this, it can be configured to ignore everything which includes “/1999/”or “/volume4/ ”in the URL. The ability to effectively sort the wheat from the chaff of a Web site can result in problems if the information within the Web site is not organized in such a way to efficiently harvest around specific sections. The publishers who have been contacted regarding the organization of their information have responded most favorably. However, as many of these individuals are working with a low budget, are understaffed or are the only ones responsible for the site, they do not have the resources necessary to move the files to a more suitable format.
The date of the information harvested can also be a source of problems. There is no way to add information to the system without it possibly being disseminated to the users. This means that an older article thought to have value by the administrator and added to the system, or an older item which is harvested, may well be listed on a users update of new resources in addition to being available to users who perform online searches. The item record contains the import date and does not allow users to surmise the date of the item’s creation or last update unless the title or subject line contains the relevant information.
The lack of efficient tagging has also been an issue for the NewAgent harvester. While information such as the page’s author is not generally necessary, having a title that accurately reflects the contents on the page is vital. The contents tags have also been found to be underused by many content producers. In a general sense, many pages only have titles reflective of their content and neglect to mention the name of the site. Consider a press release page. It is not uncommon for a company or organization to use the tile “Press Releases” in the tags for the page. Who’s Press Releases are being viewed? If that particular page is harvested only the information in the title tag will be used. If a user were harvesting information from the site, they would have to look at the URL to attempt to decipher the company’s name. If another user had book marked the page, they would have the same question regarding which company’s press releases they have without edited the entry or until they look at the URL. The subject of the web page appears to quite often be overlooked. Without any coded subject information, the NewsAgent system will simply copy the title into the subject area of the item's record.
Overall, the NewsAgent service is currently functioning in its role for professional information dissemination. However, the need for administration and monitoring is quite high. While some minor changes to the service have been made, additional developments will be needed to make the system more autonomous. New technology and future changes to the system may help to increase the systems capabilities while decreasing the administration costs.
There are currently several initiatives underway to assist in making the information now available on the Internet much more logical and easily integrated into dissemination initiatives. Integration of Rich Site Summary (RSS) [2] information within a system such as NewsAgent could be beneficial for the content producer, the information disseminator as well as the information recipient. While time and resources would be necessary up front from the harvesters as well as the content producers, the final result would be much more accurate and user friendly. Information regarding copyright, editor, dates of publication/update, and image information could sit alongside the title and descriptions of a site. Additionally, a content producer can let aggregators know which hours or days to avoid collecting from a site. This will dramatically reduce the number of times a page is collected in error or a site is accessed at inopportune times wasting time and resources. Of course some pages, such as those for press releases, will be updated at an irregular interval. In cases such as these, a harvester can simply be set to look for new content headlines available from the RSS files for such a site.
While integration of RSS will take time at the beginning, it will eventually save a great deal of time and frustration. Rather than attempt continual work around when confronting dissemination and harvesting, making the first step towards embracing additional technological capabilities should assist in continuing to keep libraries and information professionals at the forefront of the changes within information technology. Quite often with new technologies, groups and organizations wait before investing in a particular technology to see how many others are integrating the same technology. If the same measurements are used as the basis for technologies such as RSS, it will take a great deal of time before the “magic number” of users is reached and the technology is embraced by a majority. With the plethora of information and resources available, it would be within every organisation's best interests to examine how they can best integrate RSS information into their Web site. With many institutions stretching their resources and unable to consider the cost or time involved in changing their current practices, a quick look at how much has changed in just the past few years should encourage content producers to move towards RSS. Whether one consults with others who are currently involved in RSS or if one works in cooperation with other organizations, there are methods by which to move one’s technological capabilities forward with minimal impact on the bottom line.
Karen Neal
Researcher
LITC
South Bank University
Karen has now left LITC. Her new email address is
Email: ateah@hotmail.com
All enquiries regarding NewsAgent should be sent to:
Andrew Cox
LITC
South Bank University
103 Borough Road
London
SE1 0AA
Email: coxam@sbu.ac.uk
For citation purposes:
Karen Neal, "News Services for the Library Community", Exploit Interactive, issue 7, 2nd
October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/newsagent/>
After a meeting in Tempe, Arizona, on March 2-4, 2000, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) decided upon a common understanding for the principles underlying any future system for scholarly publishing. [1] These principles have been set down in the Tempe Meet document. [2] In reply, Plamen Gradinarov provides a running commentary on the nine principles expounded in the this document and outlines the prospects for the creation of a new scholarly communication model. He argues that all maintenance and publication costs for electronic journals can drastically be reduced - from 10 to 100 times - while dialectically preserving the value-adding features characteristic of the traditional models.
The aim of this case study is to bring additional evidence in support of the philosophical truism going back to Hegel and stating that a good theory is the best practice. Of course, I am far from suspecting the authors of the TM document in a priori constructivism, neither can I decide to what extent their principles have been derived from established and working models. For the most part, they possess the transcendental form of categorical imperatives, and when read by a scholarly publisher outside the jurisdiction of the illustrious signators, can easily be interpreted as unsolicited prescriptions.
Surprisingly, against all my initial drive to provide a critical feedback only, I am going to partially support these principles, because, though in a subliminal form, they express the core philosophy of the emerging system for scholarly e-publishing.
1."The cost to the academy of published research should be contained so that access to relevant research publications for faculty and students can be maintained and even expanded."
Any cost is a function of the expenditures. If the scholarly publishers keep clinging to the old standards, the result will be – and sadly, already is - an endless escalation of the subscription prices for scholarly journals. So, this first principle is a rather naïve re-formulation of the infantile desire to orally incorporate everything visible in the field of direct experience. It is the desire of the libraries to shelf-store all published material that should be contained and a new attitude adopted so that faculty, students, and research libraries could turn into a real subject of the scholarly publishing process.
The cost to the faculty, students, and any library around the world of our target research paper [3] is ZERO. No further reduction is possible, except for the case where authors would pay you to read their article. A system is being developed that will tackle this and similar problems.
2."Electronic capabilities should be used, among other things, to: provide wide access to scholarship, encourage interdisciplinary research, and enhance interoperability and searchability. Development of common standards will be particularly important in the electronic environment."
The access to this article is universal. Rich and poor academics can equally access its full text. For, in materia academica, there is no segregation, no discrimination, no nation-based restrictions and misbillings. All pay-for-view solutions are basically sophistic in the derogative sense of this Greek word, and highly immoral when compared to the $100 monthly salary of an East European academic.
The Divorce article is an embodied example of interdisciplinary research. That's why it has been SIMULTANEOUSLY published in FIVE electronic journals: (1) Economics, (2) Law, (3) Social Welfare and Justice, (4) Home Economics and Technology, and (5) Moral Philosophy, all with distinct ISSN. This is rather encouraging for authors with interdisciplinary bent.
Here we come to the interoperability and searchability
issues. The second requirement is implemented in a set of digital
science portals (DSP) to be activated in the Section column of the Journals. DSP
40.30.370 searches for all resources dealing with bargaining - found 34
items; DSP 40.40.370 searches for family law - 17 items; DSP 40.60.170
returns more than 100 items for family studies and domestic violence;
DSP 60.80.200 returned nothing, because the IA was instructed to search with a
rather complex set of criteria, so it took me 30 seconds to provide different
instructions - now it returns 41 relevant items for family economics;
DSP 20.70.340 has been instructed to search for justice and injustice
within the domain of ethics and moral philosophy - 12 items found; 40.60.001
looks for philosophy of welfare and justice and returned 25 resources;
the last DSP - 40.60.007 - returned 47 relevant publications for social
and economic justice. In sum, the Divorce article is cherishing a
searchable multidisciplinary context of 276+ diversely interconnected academic
resources.
Interoperability - this magic fund-raising word - implies integration of
off-site resources into a stipulated classification bed
and predefined set of metadata. But not only that. Interoperability means
integration of different type of resources under one standard
classification scheme. There are thousands of priceless individual homepages
providing access to books, articles, and papers not indexed elsewhere; there are
academic databases, bibliographies, and catalogs that should also have their
presentation page accessible via one single search query. Searching a
database of 5,000 records for a specialized archive, then going to it and
perusing the individual articles ad hoc, is a much better alternative than
learning to search for somewhat noumenal articles in 9 or 49.95 archives
from one proto-protoplace. [4]
Opening any of the journals in which the Divorce paper has been published and
going down to the contents of the particular issue, you will find a breakdown of
15 typologically organized online resources, from Articles, Books, and
Reviews, to Electronic Theses and Dissertations, to Reference Material,
Databases, etc., to Individual and Organization Homepages. This is the formal
standard.
The content standard, or the material truth,
as would say Kant, is represented in the Resource Distribution table. Here
you have 7 hierarchically built directories to which the article is
cross-referenced. This is yet another way to explore interdisciplinary the whole
range of interlinked resources, this time with the help of a rigorous
classification scheme and expert, human-performed distribution. No automatic
search engine will ever provide a substitute for the work of a subject
librarian.
The classification scheme, or the Science Classification Index, implemented here contains 8,000 directories associated with science descriptors and intelligent search queries. The classification scheme is open to content development - there is a special public form for suggesting new call numbers along with their science descriptors - to fill in gaps or to create balanced presentation of individual science and research disciplines.
The Classification Management System allows of: (1) adding new call numbers at
any appropriate place of the scheme; (2) editing all existing call numbers;
(3) deleting unused or malfunctioning call numbers; (4) moving one call number -
along with all resources referenced by it - from one science cluster
to another, say, from 00.00 Cognitive Sciences to 00.10 Information
Sciences, as, for instance, may soon happen to 00.00.339 - Metadata
standardization and conversion; or from one science domain, 00 -
Knowledge, to another domain, 06 - Technology. The system keeps track of
all changes and does automatically generate updates of the classification at the
moment the changes have been confirmed.
Because to err is human, this is the dreamed-of flexible standard.
Changes of standard cease to affect past events and resource allocation - all
past records and publications adapt automatically to the new standard.
3. "Scholarly publications must be archived in a secure manner so as to remain permanently available and, in the case of electronic works, a permanent identifier for citation and linking should be provided."
This is a minor problem depending mainly on the disk space and bandwidth a digital library possesses of. In the case with our article, the access to its full text is secured in a triple way. First, as a presentation page (InfoBox) with permanent URL, second, as a Resource Location identifier which points to some remote location managed by the author, and, third, as an archived file hosted by the library. The authors can make current updates to both the presentation page and self-hosted work, but can never change the library-hosted archived work (for comparison and historical/copyright purposes).
4. "The system of scholarly publication must continue to include processes for evaluating the quality of scholarly work and every publication should provide the reader with information about evaluation the work has undergone."
The system alluded under point (1) and yet to be implemented provides a self-sustainable solution for all value-adding procedures in the electronic publishing of scholarly journals. It will give all authors the chance to select from a wide range of value-adding options: single and double peer review, rejoinders, arbitration, scholarly dispute resolution, copyright tracking numbers, etc. The reader has immediate access to all steps - if and when taken - in the evaluation of a particular publication. Moreover, the reviewing process transcends the caste boundaries set up hitherto by the publisher, and becomes open to all. Anyone can post a critical review.
But, to become part of the PR pool and get access to the original value-adding database, the prospective peer-reviewer will present a number of verifiable and traceable academic credentials. All articles will be assigned a pending copyright tracking number until they get reviewed by accredited peer-reviewers. Good or bad, extolling or deteriorating as it might be, the peer review will never prevent an article from being published.
With electronic publishing expanding to ever-new areas, the PR institution has to be radically changed. As a publisher, I do not have any more concerns about this or that article being interesting enough to be sold, ergo, I don't need peer-reviewers to tell me what to publish.
Yet the peer-reviewers have to perform a new, even more important function. They should help readers and academic bodies make informed solutions (with an important addition: when the latter are not feeling at ease in their chosen domain of scientific expertise or are lacking access to substantial information). The publisher provides only the media and the conceptual setup in terms of internal structural organization, intuitive technology, and categorial architectonics.
The next five principles have little to do with fundamental matters; they address second-range and mutually agreed issues of copyright retention, provide negotiation tips for prospective faculty authors, call for substantial reduction of the time needed to process the submitted articles, and pose a most important – but in a rather different, philosophical context – question of the dialectical unity of quantity and quality. Point (6) is but principle (1) put in other words and from a slightly shifted perspective, while the concluding principle pertains to self-evident access security trivia. Even the first four principles can be reduced to one single volitive: “Keep up the great work and don’t worry about the costs: we will never ever pay you that much.” One comes to wonder how 36 university presidents and vice-presidents, provosts, deans, directors, and lab heads could have produced such an eclectic document. The only explanation is that it reflects the current North American practice of relying on unimaginable subsidies in developing new models for scholarly communication. When you have $4M to spend for developing a single digital library, you may easily miss the wood because of the trees.
The models I am going to discuss do not require millions to be implemented. They do not even require hundred times less. The only thing they require is international co-operation.
There are two models inherent in the self-publishing system developed at Academic Resources Channel:
1. The S3 Model implies Self-published, Self-archived, and Self-hosted research papers and monographs, including all diverse kinds of self-maintained academic resources.
Authors have to register their online work, providing a set of metadata: personal information, title, short description, expanded abstract with contents and occasional excerpts, up to 7 call numbers, and persistent URL. The information gets instantly published in select journals. In fact, this is a Universal Academic Review Service. Submissions are updated on a regular basis by the authors. All publications are open to review.
The basic worries here are about the quality control and the accessibility of remote resources. The practice of the last 12 months has shown that it is much easier to submit a bad paper to any traditional journal than to register a good one with Academic Resources Channel. The first obstacle any prospective author has to overcome is the electronic Cerberus that is the RealSci Classification System. If you are not able to find where your research paper belongs, your paper is not worth belonging there. The lack of systematic and intuitive thinking would prevent any candidate from being registered and eventually published. The Classification System is the major peer-reviewer clearly announcing to the world the difference between academic and non-academic. If I have lost my systematic and innovative thinking, I’d better publish in the good old journal I am part of the editorial board.
Second, in the most active day after the Journals have been launched in the end of July 2000, we had 50 successful submissions of research papers. It took me two days to review the submitted info, compare it to the core document, and assign additional call numbers (when necessary). The author, as a self-publishing subject and holder of the integral copyright, bears the sole responsibility for maintaining the paper’s URL persistent, or adequate. But this is not that important: the temporal or efficient non-accessibility or non-availability of the original paper, book, or bibliography does not affect in any way the academic and scholarly character of the electronic journal. I’ve never heard of somebody so fool that to ask the editors of Mind to provide access or make available all those books that have been reviewed on the pages of the journal.
Yes, there will be URL fluctuations for individually submitted resources. But, on a large scale, we are talking about papers hosted by academic libraries and registered from one single place, by specially appointed technical editors. Then all fluctuations will be minimized. We are talking about local archives that can be created by any librarian possessing the simple knowledge of “save this file as…” No need of metadata unification, no special programming skills, no searchable local databases depending on compatible networked software, no divergent categorization tools. Then part of the so envisaged network could be not some 50 privileged archives, but any archive, in any library, at any department, in any country of the world. And all of them will be enjoying the same electronic environment.
Will they lose their individuality?
Not at all. Suppose, you maintain a small departmental archive storing papers on kinship and social organizations. You can register all of them using as call number 40.06.305 and/or any other number across the classification index. Thus, every paper will be published in the Journal of Anthropology and/or any other journal, depending on the call numbers selected. But, you can also reserve the selfsame call number and ask us to convert it into the quarterly Journal of Kinship and Social Organization, provided you take the charge of the journal, apply for ISSN, and become its Editor. Then all papers you host in your archive and register with this call number will be displayed chronologically as separate issues of the new journal. The other submissions using the same call number will not be displayed in your journal, but, along with all your submissions, will be featured in the metajournal, i.e., the Journal of Anthropology. There are 8,000 call numbers with empty ISSN fields ready to be converted into individual journals. And there are thousands of other not yet activated call numbers left for your imagination.
How much does the S3 Model cost?
It is an accepted practice, when estimating the cost for a paper published in electronic journals, to leave aside all expenditures covering editorial work as it is done by enthusiasts or by parties interested in reducing the cost of the journal. With 132 journals and estimated 10,000 submissions, the cost for submission is $0.90 to keep the system working for the next two years.
The S4U Model is an enhanced replication of S3 and implies self-published and self-archived papers hosted only by Academic Resources Channel. Another substantial feature of the S4U Model is the integrated e-commerce solution.
Of course, this should be a flexible system, taking account of all individual motivation to get published. It will "Sell 4 You" the paper(s) you have self-published, providing expert and express document delivery service to academic comunities everywhere... There are still thousands of small departmental archives that will be glad to use this service and the instant electronic payments that go with it instead of the "Draft a Check to the Regents" never to be accepted invitation. Because to send your $8 check from an England-based bank, I should pay additional 10 pounds to issue the check.
It is quite natural to take on the road of e-commerce when there is no way to solve all those highly complicated inter-library, inter-university, interacademic, in short, interoperability issues. The university and academic divergences are so deeply rooted in the national psychology and material conditions of life that they will never be eradicated by adopting a common ecumenical policy towards scholarly publishing. The only true ecumenical approach in these matters is the economic one. The introduction of commercial mechanisms will stimulate individual scholars and organizations to better comprehend their own interests in the battle with the rising Leviathan of transnational content & knowledgebase providers. The model will cost as much as it deserves. In every particular case, the production cost for paper will be determined on the basis of strict fixed rules and easy to implement technological solutions. But one is for sure: it will never reach the black-hole rate of $3,000 per article, [5] as it is now with many respectable, yet old-fashioned and exposed to solipsism academic journals.
Plamen Gradinarov
Lyulin 331 A
Sofia 1336
Bulgaria
Academic Resources Channel
Email: editor@realsci.com
URL: <http://www.realsci.com/index.cfm>
A former Professor at the Academy of Social Sciences and Management, Sofia, Plamen Gradinarov is the founder of the first private academic publishing house in Bulgaria. With 15 authored books, including English translations of, and comparative studies on, original Sanskrit logical and metaphysical works, he holds a Ph.D. degree from Moscow State University (1982) and a D.Sc. degree from the Russian Academy of Sciences (1990). In 1999, Dr. Gradinarov has started the Academic Resources Channel project. Fifteen months later, at the end of July 2000, the first set of 132 electronic meta-journals was launched as an alternative to the soaring subscription prices for scholarly journals. Dr. Gradinarov's CV is published in the 16th edition of Who's Who in the World.
For citation purposes:
Plamen Gradinarov, "An Emerging System for Scholarly E-Publishing - How to Make the Cake without Breaking the E-Community Eggs", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/emerge/>
Jean-François Vincent talks about a truly respectable but rarely useful kind of do-it-yourself activity for a growing number of libraries, documentation centers and research institutes, in offering pages of links on their Internet site.
Link pages come in all shapes and sizes, short and long, good and bad, general and specialised, and with very different aims [1]. These include giving basic help to the local user (especially in libraries with public access to the Internet), or to specialised institutions by pointing out the resources that have direct connections with their activities. These pages of links often contain rare and exciting destinations but in most cases they are seen as an obligatory feature of an Internet site, as if a site without its links section would not be significant enough.
If Internet were not in its infancy the repetitive character of these pages would be irritating. Here we have hundreds (?) of institutions, many of which have practised co-operation for many years, notably through collective cataloguing, who waste time and money repeating the same process as everyone else. The situation reminds me of stamp collecting when it was practised in schoolyards when I was a boy; everyone wanted to have as fine a collection as his neighbour, and would peek at his neighbour's album and try to have at least the same stamps as he had. In the end, the school’s collective effort had produced a big collection of similar small collections, none of which were worth very much on the philatelic market! So it is today with pages of links, we peek at our neighbour's pages and complete our album of sites with new ones we find there.
This two-for-a-penny copying business produces almost the opposite result of what the pages’ authors intended (and they are usually aware of this): the collections obtained when not extremely specialised are desperately incomplete, because nobody can cover all the ground. So users do not waste time with them and quickly resort to the big commercial search tools. Just ask library readers - or even librarians - which search tools they use apart from Yahoo!, Altavista and other such monsters.... What then is the use of pages of links, if these big tools can answer users' needs? But academic or technical needs are not so easily satisfied. And, hidden within the forest of useless selections, small and scattered original collections are hidden from the view of the average user, who only comes across them, in the best of cases, after wasting much time, and then only by chance.
But enough irony. We are all still learning and most of these efforts, as they stand, will in all likelihood disappear. Nevertheless they will have allowed us to gain useful experience of the Internet. It was a necessary step.
Isn't it time though to stop tinkering with 'do-it-yourself' processes so that institutions who want to best serve their public can give themselves an effective means to do so? To really be of use, their selection has to grow to a critical mass that very few institutional subject gateways have attained [2]. The only way to attain this critical mass is through co-operation. Some institutions have already started this, notably in Great Britain. The aim of the Resource Discovery Network [3], launched in January 1999, is to connect quality gateways (and other Internet resources), which are themselves the result of collective projects. A number of European countries are attempting to do the same through the Renardus Project [4]. In the United States several interesting projects have already been set up, these include Infomine [5] and the Online Computer Library Centere (OCLC) has launched the Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) Project [6], the IMesh group [7], [8], wants to favour international co-operation, still in its infancy. There are other ongoing initiatives which cannot all be listed here.
But if it is necessary to create a widely distributed co-operative network so that the said institutions may play a real role in discovering the resources of the Internet, it remains for the partners to start working together. Co-operation involves an energetic impulse, long discussions, and hard-won agreements. It requires years of efforts to produce really convincing results. It also requires shared knowledges.
A pioneer in Europe, the European Commission funded DESIRE programme [9] has been designing tools to aid in the cooperative creation of catalogues of Internet resources for academic and research communities. And it has recently offered us a really efficient one.
This tool is called The DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook. Written in clear and simple English by the designers of gateways which are already well-known or which deserve to be, it seeks "to support libraries and other organisations interested in setting up large-scale information gateways [10] on the Internet", by reporting what has been tried so far, by giving up-to-date, well-structured information and by presenting case studies. The different aspects involved in setting up a gateway are reviewed and coherently presented, with information on planning, staff and skills requirements, management, selection policy, metadata, subject indexing and classification, and technical issues. Updated versions are announced, and one has already appeared.
You may object that initially I was talking about pages of links while DESIRE deals with large-scale gateways. Does the library of the University of ******* really have to throw away its twenty-page list, and build a large scale gateway, in spite of its staff problems, and this year's budget cuts? Of course not. What I am suggesting is that this library and ten others, working in the same academic field, or for the same public, could agree to set up a common database, to which each partner would contribute according to its capabilities; that if this were done with common sense and pragmatism, it would not cost too much; and that, at the very least, the result would be of great advantage to the user. I am also suggesting that their parent organisations should quickly decide on a co-operation strategy so that these databases may function effectively (in terms of policy, cataloguing and technical requirements) with those set up in related fields. This would mean an end to the waste of time, money and energy that the duplication of similar pages of links represents. It would, of course, cost something. You can not set up a database without at least a server and a system administrator [11]. You can't co-operate unless you spend some time talking either, but at least, the job would get done.
There are numerous ways to set up a co-operation, the details of this can be quite complex so we will not go into them here.
My first aim is to encourage those who could be interested by this subject to read the DESIRE handbook carefully, in it the different cooperative models are clearly described. I consider it to be the best introductory guide to the issues raised by the cataloguing of Internet resources. The guide contains approximately 150 pages, was written by 13 authors aided by 11 contributors from 5 institutions and 3 countries, and contains 235 further online references and numerous printed ones. It is not just another publication on the subject, but THE source you must have read before beginning to catalog Internet sites with a non-profit objective, or to improve the service once you have begun.
It demonstrates that enough expertise is now at hand for serious work to be done. Furthermore, it gives librarians an easily accessible base of common knowledge, and this would greatly facilitate discussions and allow us to avoid the usual errors of beginners and the long-term consequences of bad starts.
If one agrees that libraries are the best candidates for cataloguing some Internet resources – and this is my opinion, but one could discuss the question at great length -, then one also has to admit that the only way to do it properly is through co-operation. My second aim (as you must have guessed by now) is to relay here the invitation made throughout the handbook, let's co-operate. Let's stop working all by ourselves. Methods exist and are only waiting for us to put them to use. Tools are available and needs are not lacking. So let us incite our institutions, our parent organisations and ourselves into action. It is now possible to give up the 'do-it-yourself' process, and provide our users with the services they have a right to expect.
This article was written on Dec. 9th, 1999, and was published in the Lettre du bibliothécaire québécois n· 20, October-December 1999 [12]. It was slightly revised on May 27th, 2000. Thank to Marianne Peereboom (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague), who suggested that I publish it in English, Juliette Jestaz who agreed to translate it, and Jean-François Barbe, editor of the Lettre du bibliothécaire québécois, who gave copyright permission.
I must first specify that the opinions expressed are strictly personal.
Jean-François Vincent
Librarian
Bibliothèque nationale de France
Département de recherche bibliographique
Jean-François Vincent is the coordinator of Les Signets de la
Bibliothèque nationale de France
directory.
URL: <http://www.bnf.fr/web-bnf/liens/>
For citation purposes:
Jean-François Vincent, "Towards The End Of 'Do-It-Yourself' Gateways? The DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook ", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/desire/>
As the EU's Telematics For Libraries programme comes to an end Brian Kelly reviews the Web sites provided by funded projects.
Approximately 100 projects and actions were funded under the EU Telematics for Libraries Programme [1]. Many of the projects will have produced Web sites which provide the services the projects were funded to deliver or reports on their activities. What approaches did the projects take in providing their Web sites? What lessons can be learnt for Fifth Framework projects? In this survey of the technical aspects of the Web site, we try to answer these questions.
A small number of Web-based services were used to provide reports on a number of aspects of the Telematics for Libraries project Web sites. The results of the surveys (which took place on 20-21 September 2000) are published in Appendix 1. This appendix also provides links to the services themselves, so that readers can check the results at the time of reading.
The following surveys were carried out:
The aims of this small survey are to:
Details of availability of a Web site for the projects is given below.
| Available | | Web Site Never Provided | | Domain Not Available | | Web Page Not Available |
| 65 | 16 | 11 | 12 |
Details of server type is given below.
| Server Type | | Details | | Comments |
| Apache | 41 | Three projects run Apache on an MS Windows platform |
| Microsoft IIS | 10 | |
| NCSA | 3 | |
| Netscape | 3 | |
| Other | 6 | Not known (3); WN (1); HyperWave (1); FirstClass/5.5, Mac (1) |
This small survey has attempted to provide a picture of usage of Web sites by Telematics For Libraries project Web sites.
There are several caveats which should be noted. For example many of the broken links on the project home pages are likely to be to the Telematics For Libraries Web site, which changed URLs recently (from <http://www2.echo.lu/libraries/en/libraries.html>). Projects which have finished will be unlikely to update such links.
However the survey has helped to identify some examples of good practice and some problem areas, including:
The area of most concern, however, is probably the number of project Web sites which are no longer available (about 20%).
The methodology for monitoring and evaluating remote Web sites using Web tools will be developed. It is intended to carry out a more rigorous survey of projects funding by the Fifth Framework DIGICULT programme [7] and to publish the findings in the Cultivate Interactive Web magazine [8].
A summary of the findings is given in the following table.
| Project | Server | NetMechanic Analysis | Accessibility | 404 Page | robots.txt | Comments | ||
| 1 | AIDA | Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 9 errors Load time = 4.15 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 3.61 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 2 | ARCA | Web page no longer available | ||||||
| 3 | BALTICSEAWEB | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 5 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 1 errors Load time = 1.69 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 17.02 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 4 | BAMBI | Web page no longer available | ||||||
| 5 | BIBDEL | Apache/1.3.6 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 1 problems HTML check - 4 errors Load time = 6.02 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 6.52 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 6 | BIBLINK | Apache/1.2b8 Check |
Link check - 2 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 12 errors Load time = 4.21 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 3.65 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 7 | BIBLIOTECA | Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 5.87 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 4.79 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 8 | BORGES | Web site no longer available | ||||||
| 9 | CAMILE | Apache/1.3.6 Check |
Link check - 2 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 9.11 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 12.11 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
No Try it |
||
| 10 | CANAL/LS | Apache/1.3.6 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 2.0 secs Try it |
Not checked Check |
Default Try it |
No (redirect) Try it |
||
| 11 | CANDLE | Apache/1.3.12 Check |
Link check - 2 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 3 errors Load time = 19.13 secs Try it |
2 P1 errors 13.74 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 12 | CANTATE | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 4.44 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 4.94 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 13 | CASA | Apache/1.3b3 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 72 errors Load time = 3.04 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 2.01 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 14 | CASELIBRARY | Apache/1.3.12 Check |
Link check - 2 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 5 errors Load time = 8.46 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 8.96 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 15 | CDBIB | Web page no longer available | ||||||
| 16 | CECUP | Apache/1.2.5 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 8.66 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 8.38 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 17 | CHILIAS | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 3 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 14.05 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 17.23 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 18 | CoBRA | No Web site | ||||||
| 19 | CoBRA+ | Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP1 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 9.63 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 7.63 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 20 | COPINET | Apache/1.1.1 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 6 problems HTML check - 23 errors Load time = 4.61 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 6.11 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 21 | DALI | Web site no longer available | ||||||
| 22 | DEBORA | Apache/1.3.12 ApacheJServ/1.1 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 3.80 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 2.80 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 23 | DECIDE | Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 Check |
Link check - 4 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 4 errors Load time = 2.71 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 1.57 secs download time Check |
x Try it |
x Try it |
||
| 24 | DECIMAL | Web page no longer available | ||||||
| 25 | DECOMATE | Web site no longer available | ||||||
| 26 | DECOMATE II | Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 Check |
Link check - x bad links Browser compatibility - x problems HTML check - x errors Load time = x secs Try it |
Bobby could not connect Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 27 | DEDICATE | Apache/1.3.12 (Win32) Check |
Robots excluded | 1 P1 errors 13.38 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 28 | DELICAT | Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 Check |
Link check - 3 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 5.29 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 5.29 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 29 | DERAL | Apache/1.3.0 Check |
Link check - 7 bad links Browser compatibility - 4 problems HTML check - 34 errors Load time = 12.01 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 16.01 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 30 | DIEPER | Apache/1.3.4 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 3 errors Load time = 15.70 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 0.66 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 31 | ECUP+ | Apache/1.2.5 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 1 problems HTML check - 1 errors Load time = 10.26 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 9.99 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 32 | EDIL | Web page no longer available | ||||||
| 33 | EDILIBE I | No Web site | ||||||
| 34 | EDILIBE II same as EXCEL |
Apache/1.1.0 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 8.68 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 9.87 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 35 | EDUCATE | Apache/1.3.12 (Win32) Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 9 errors Load time = 6.19 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 8.69 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 36 | EFILA+ | Web site no longer available | ||||||
| 37 | EFILA97 | No Web site | ||||||
| 38 | ELISE | Not known Check |
Link check - 3 bad links Browser compatibility - 1 problems HTML check - 3 errors Load time = 39.96 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 39.96 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 39 | ELISE II | Not known Check |
Link check - 3 bad links Browser compatibility - 1 problems HTML check - 3 errors Load time = 39.96 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 6.12 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 40 | ELITE | No Web site | ||||||
| 41 | ELSA | No Web site | ||||||
| 42 | ELVIL | Apache/1.3.4 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 7.12 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 6.12 secs download time Check |
x Try it |
x Try it |
||
| 43 | ELVIL 2000 Same as ELVIL |
Apache/1.3.4 (Unix) Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 7.12 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 6.12 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 44 | EQLIPSE | Apache/1.3.12 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 3.84 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 2.79 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 45 | EQUINOX | Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) Check |
Link check - 2 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 3.20 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 1.70 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 46 | EULER | Apache/1.3.6 Check |
Link check - 3 bad links Browser compatibility - 3 problems HTML check - 18 errors Load time = 12.75 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 13.25 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 47 | EURILIA | Apache/1.3.11 Check |
Link check - 2 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 10 errors Load time = 3.46 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 2.96 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 48 | EUROPAGATE | Apache/1.3.9 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 3.42 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 4.68 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 49 | EXCEL same as EDILIBE II |
Apache/1.1.0 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 8.68 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 9.87 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 50 | EXLIB | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 4.06 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 4.56 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 51 | EXPLOIT | Apache/1.3.4 Check |
Robots not allowed Try it |
[Framed site] 1 P1 errors 0.70 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 52 | FACIT | Web page no longer available | ||||||
| 53 | FASTDOC | No Web site | ||||||
| 54 | Harmonica | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 2 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 3 errors Load time = 4.91 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 5.41 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 55 | HELEN | Apache/1.3.12 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 2.52 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 1.52 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 56 | HERCULE | FirstClass/5.5 (Mac) Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 18.62 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 20.09 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 57 | HISTORIA | Web page not available | ||||||
| 58 | HYPERLIB | Apache/1.3.6 Check |
Link check - 5 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 5 errors Load time = 6.44 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 6.44 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 59 | IFLA-EU | No Web site | ||||||
| 60 | ILIERS | Web site not available | ||||||
| 61 | ILSES | Apache/1.3.3 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 1 problems HTML check - 1 errors Load time = 20.78 secs Try it |
2 P1 errors 2.55 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 62 | IMPRESS | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 12.57 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 12.07 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
No Try it |
||
| 63 | INCIPIT | No Web site | ||||||
| 64 | ION | No Web site | ||||||
| 65 | JUKEBOX | Unknown Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 4 errors Load time = 2.28 secs Try it |
2 P1 errors 1.28 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 66 | LAURIN | WN/2.2.9 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 34 errors Load time = 6.53 secs Try it |
2 P1 errors 6.86 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 67 | LIBECON2000 | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 4 errors Load time = 5.70 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 5.20 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 68 | LIBERATION | Hyperwave-Information-Server/4.1 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 1 problem HTML check - 17 errors Load time = 2.73 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 1.23 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 69 | LIBERATOR | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 2 bad links Browser compatibility - 1 problems HTML check - 3 errors Load time = 8.13 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 9.13 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 70 | LISTED | NCSA/1.4.2 Check |
Link check - 2 bad links Browser compatibility - 3 problems HTML check - 14 errors Load time = 27.24 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 29.64 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 71 | LIRN | NCSA/1.4.2 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 3.36 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 2.86 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 72 | MALVINE | Apache/1.3.6 Check |
Link check - 26 bad links
NOTE Incorrect information provided by Netmechanic, which does not
understand the <BASE> element Browser compatibility - 5 problems HTML check - 6 errors Load time = 16.11 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 9.23 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 73 | MASTER | No Web site. | ||||||
| 74 | MECANO | Apache/1.3.3 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 15.78 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 15.78 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 75 | MINSTREL | Apache/1.3.11 Check |
Robots not allowed | 0 P1 errors 0.59 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 76 | MIRACLE | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 5 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 3 errors Load time = 6.06 secs Try it |
x P1 errors x secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 77 | MOBILE | Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2411 Check |
Web page no longer available | |||||
| 78 | MORE | No Web site. | ||||||
| 79 | MUMLIB | Apache/1.3.6 Check |
Link check - 6 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 0 errors Load time = 5.06 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 5.56 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 80 | MURIEL | Web page no longer available | ||||||
| 81 | NEDLIB | Apache/1.3.12 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 3 problems HTML check - 7 errors Load time = 3.25 secs Try it |
[Framed site] 1 P1 errors 1.51 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 82 | OLUIT | No Web site. | ||||||
| 83 | ONE | No Web site. | ||||||
| 84 | ONE II | No Web site. | ||||||
| 85 | PLAIN | No Web site. | ||||||
| 86 | PRIDE | NCSA/1.4.2 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 15 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 5.10 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 3.87 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 87 | PUBLICA | Web page no longer available | ||||||
| 88 | REACTIVE TELECOM | Web site no longer available | ||||||
| 89 | RIDDLE | Apache/1.3.3 Check |
Link check - 0 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 3 errors Load time = 3.15 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 2.15 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 90 | SELF | Web site no longer available. | ||||||
| 91 | SESAM | Web site no longer available. | ||||||
| 92 | SOCKER | Web site no longer available | ||||||
| 93 | SPRINTEL | Web site no longer available | ||||||
| 94 | SR TARGET / PARAGON | Web site no longer available | ||||||
| 95 | TECUP | Apache/1.3.4 Check |
Link check - 3 bad links Browser compatibility - 3 problems HTML check - 5 errors Load time = 9.65 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 9.15 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 96 | TESTLAB | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 2 errors Load time = 4.35 secs Try it |
0 P1 errors 4.85 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 97 | TOLIMAC | Apache/1.3.3 Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 2 problems HTML check - 8 errors Load time = 4.33 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 3.06 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
None Try it |
||
| 98 | TRANSLIB | Web page no longer available | ||||||
| 99 | UNIVERSE | Netscape-Enterprise/2.0a Check |
Link check - 1 bad links Browser compatibility - 0 problems HTML check - 17 errors Load time = 7.19 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 6.30 secs download time Check |
Default Try it |
Yes Try it |
||
| 100 | USEMARCON | No Web site. | ||||||
| 101 | VAN EYCK | Web site no longer available | ||||||
| 102 | VERITY | Not known Check |
Not known Try it |
Not known Check |
Not known Try it |
Not known Try it |
||
| 103 | VILIB | Microsoft-IIS/4.0 Check |
Link check - 3 bad links Browser compatibility - 1 problems HTML check - 3 errors Load time = 20.70 secs Try it |
1 P1 errors 24.65 secs download time Check |
Tailored Try it |
None Try it |
The information in the table was collected on 21 September 2000.
The following projects appear never to have had a Web site:
The following project domains are no longer available:
The URL of the project's Web page is no longer available, although the domain is still available:
It should be noted that there may be limitations in the services used to carry out this survey. For example, it has been noticed that the Netmechanic link-checking service does not understand the HTML element <BASE> which can provide a alternative directory for relative URLs. This was the case for the MALVINE home page, which contains no broken links and not 26 as reported by Netmechanic.
This paragraph was added on 18 October 2000.
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
England
BA2 7AY
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
For citation purposes:
Brian Kelly, "WebWatching Telematics For Libraries Project Web Sites",
Exploit Interactive, issue 7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/webwatch/>
Fabio Crestani reports on the Third European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR'2000) held in Varenna, Italy, by Lake Como, on 11-15 September 2000. The event was jointly organised by Maristella Agosti of the University of Padova (Italy), Gabriella Pasi of ITIM-CNR (Italy), and the author of this report who is working at the University of Strathclyde (Scotland).
Here is a story that Fabio Crestani has been telling since his return to Scotland after co-organising ESSIR'2000:
"Coffee or tea?", the young female waitress from the catering service asked me. "Coffee, please", I said, as any real Italian would, even after a few years spent in a tea-drinking country. She served me a good coffee and a good smile. I smiled back politely and that, I think, broke the ice. She had been providing catering services to Villa Monastero, a conference centre partially owned by the Italian National Research Council (CNR), for some time, but something in her look told me that this event was different. As I was one of the organisers of the event, I decided to enquire about this, fearing that something could be wrong. "Nothing wrong at all", she told me, "Just, we are not used to have so many young people attending, here", she added. She explained me that most of the events (conference, workshops, summer schools, and so on) organised at Villa Monastero were attended by somewhat "older" people. The average age of participants to this event was considerable lower than that of other events organised there, she intended. "What topic is it, that you are teaching, that attract such a young crowd?", she asked me. "Information Retrieval", I said puzzled.
For those of you that are not familiar with this topic, like the young waitress, Information retrieval (IR) is the science and technology concerned with the effective and efficient retrieval of information by its semantic content [1]. The central problem in IR is the quest to find the set of relevant documents, amongst a large collection, containing the information sought, thereby satisfying an user's information need usually expressed by a natural language query. Documents may be objects or items in any medium, text, image, audio, or, indeed a mixture of all three.
IR is certainly not a young topic, having been studied for long time by librarians and computer scientists for over 50 years. However, IR is has had a surge of interest in recent times because of the World Wide Web. Finding information on the Web or in one of the increasingly available digital libraries has been compared to "finding a needle in a haystack" [2] and new technologies and tools need to be designed and developed to make all this information available and really useful to users worldwide.
Access to information has gone through a slow but steady process to adapt to the growth of availability of electronically stored information. When libraries were small, access to a piece of information could be achieved by asking the librarian, a "wise sage" who was supposed to have read every book in the library. The librarian could tell you which book contained the information you needed and where the book was located. When the number of books began to exceed the limits of human memory, categorisation became necessary and library classification systems such as the Dewey or the Library of Congress' were developed. Each book was assigned a set of subject headings that identified the topics treated in the book and a location in the library. Only by knowing the appropriate set of subject headings that identified the searched information one could find the location of the book in the library. With computers and the availability of electronic text comes the possibility of searching through the entire text of documents (book, articles, etc.) to find words and phrases that identify a document as containing the information sought. This free text searching ability meant that the searcher did not have to rely on someone else looking for documents for him or assigning documents to particular categories. Nevertheless, if on one hand this puts the searcher in control of the search, on the other hand the searcher now has to know which word to use to express his information need when looking for documents, and every so often he has to know how to use the tool that performs such search.
With the increasing availability of electronic text and with the searcher becoming the user of an information accessing system, it became necessary to develop systems that were both easy to use and effective. The birth of the World Wide Web has magnified enormously this problem, as everybody knows.
So, in over 50 years researchers in IR have developed and evaluated a bewildering array of techniques for indexing and retrieving information. These techniques have slowly matured and improved through refinement, rather than there having been one or a small number of really significant break throughs.
The purpose of the Third European Summer School in Information (ESSIR'2000), held in Varenna (Italy) at Villa Monastero in September 2000, was to pass on to younger generations of researchers the expertise and knowledge acquired by some of the best European experts in IR and related areas. There is a widely perceived need of new developments in IR and, like in many other fields of research, significant breakthroughs are more likely to come from younger minds than from experienced researchers. Indeed, there was a very young level of participation at ESSIR'2000. As organisers, we have very happy of this. We hope that more advances and, perhaps, some breakthrough, will come to IR from this young international crowd that for a week attended the school and strolled along the shores of Lake Como. Here is a short report of that event.
The Third European Summer School in Information (ESSIR'2000) was held at Villa Monastero in Varenna (Italy) in September 2000 [3]. It is part of a series of ESSIRs that began in 1990, the first one was organised by the University of Padova (by Maristella Agosti) and was held in Bressanone, Italy in 1990. The second ESSIR was organised by the University of Glasgow (by Keith van Rijsbergen) and held in Glasgow in 1995, in the context of the IR Festival which consisted of ESSIR '95 [5], a IRIDES workshop [6], and the final MIRO workshop [7]. ESSIR'2000 was jointly organised by:
The administrative support was provided by Milano Ricerche, a consortium of industries, research institutions (CNR among them) and the University of Milano, whose purpose is to provide administrative and technical support to research and development activities of its members.
The scope of ESSIR'2000 was to give to its participants a grounding in the core subjects of IR, which included methods and techniques for designing and developing IR systems, Web search engines, and tools for information storing and querying in Digital Libraries. To reach this scope, the program of the ESSIR 2000 was been organised over the following lectures: an introduction to IR, fundamental IR models, evaluation in IR, multi-lingual information access, multimedia IR (audio image, and video), digital libraries, IR and users, uncertainty and logic in IR, modelling vagueness in IR, IR on the Web, and IR and structured documents.
The lecturers of the school were leading European researchers (with only one extra-European exception). Their course subjects strongly reflected the research work for which they are all well known.
ESSIR'2000 was intended for researchers starting out in IR, for industrialists who wish to know more about this increasingly important topic and for people working on topics related to management of information on the Internet. The proceedings, (that were distributed at the school in draft and that will be available in final form shortly [4]) contains 12 chapters written by the school's lecturers detailing the state of the art in IR and related areas. They contain experience distilled from many years of work.
The programme of the school was very dense, comprising of 11 lectures, divided in basic (6 lectures) and advanced (5 lectures). Here is briey what was taught and who did it. More information can be found on teh Web site [3], [4].
Keith van Rijsbergen (University of Glasgow) gave the opening lecture by introducing some underlying concepts and ideas essential for understanding IR research and techniques. He also highlighted some related hot areas of research, emphasising the role of IR in each.
Norbert Fuhr (University of Dortmund) lectured on main mathematical models of IR. His lecture gave the theoretical basis for representing the informative content of documents and for estimating the relevance of a document to a query.
Paraic Sheridan (TextWise) and Carol Peters (IEI-CNR) presented, in a nicely concerted way, the issues and proposed solutions to multi-lingual information access in digital archives.
Stephen Robertson (Microsoft) addressed the topic of evaluation.
Alan Smeaton (Dublin City University) and John Eakins (University of Northumbria) addressed issues and techniques related to indexing, browsing and searching multimedia information (audio, image, or digital video).
The lecture by Ingeborg Solvberg (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) covered the basics and the challenges of digital libraries.
The lecture by Peter Ingwersen (Danish Royal School of Library and Information Science), the First on advanced topics, concentrated on users issues and usability of interactive IR.
Fabio Crestani (University of Strathclyde) and Mounia Lalmas (University of London) addressed the use of logic and uncertainty theories in IR.
Gabriella Pasi and Gloria Bordogna (both from ITIM-CNR) presented the area of research in that aims at modelling the vagueness and imprecision involved in the IR process.
Maristella Agosti and Massimo Melucci (both at the University of Padova) addressed the use of IR techniques on the Web.
Finally, Yves Chiaramella (University of Grenoble) addressed the issues related to indexing and retrieval of structured documents.
The school was a success. Not just in the words of the organisers (whom you would expect to claim so!), but and most importantly by the judgement of the participants. ESSIR'2000 was a success not just for the quality of the quality of the lectures, the authority of the the lecturers, and the beautiful surroundings, it was a success because it was informal and interactive. For the best part of a week more that 60 participants and 12 lecturers exchanged ideas and inspirations on where IR is at and where it should go to. Many (not only the school participants, but some of the lecturers too) went home with renewed encouragements and motivations.
Not everything ran smoothly (as Murphy's law teaches us). There were tense moments when Fuhr's demos did not start and when in the middle of Robertson's lecture the electricity went off. There was also terror in the eyes of the participants when, after the official dinner on the other side of Lake Como (in Belaggio), the boat chartered to take everybody back to Varenna did not show up on time. The thought of a long cold swim after such a wonderfully filling meal put the life of the organisers in serious danger. We are sure other faults can be found in the organisation of the event. Nevertheless, the vast majority of participants went home very happy with their experience. That is not only the impression that we gathered but it is also the feedback that we received and are still receiving.
Finally, from the point of view of the organisers, it was very hard work. It took months to organise the event and although it is now over, we are still working for it. Nevertheless it was a useful and enjoyable experience from which we have learned a lot.
So far, ESSIRs have been held at a five-year interval. We hope this interval will be considerably reduced in the future. The large participation of young researchers to ESSIR'2000 shows that there is a very active interest in the field and one that is likely to grow even more in the future. We are ready to pass the torch to the next organisers, to whom we will be happy provide our experience in the organisation of such an event.
Indeed, there was a very young participation at the Third European Summer School in Information (ESSIR'2000), that was held in Varenna (Italy) by the Lake Como, in September 2000. Probably a much younger participation than other events held there. As organisers, we are very happy about this. We hope that more advances and, perhaps, some breakthroughs, will come to IR from this young international crowd that for a week, thoughtfully but joyfully, strolled along the shores of Lake Como.
The main financial support for ESSIR'2000 was provide by the registration fees and by the the Special Interest Network on Information Retrieval of the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS-IR). In particular, CEPIS-IR made available a number of grants for young students and researchers to attend the school.
Other financial support was provide by the following sponsors: Microsoft Italia, Mondadori, Oracle, Sharp Laboratories of Europe, and 3-D Informatica.
Finally, the following institutions provided general support: the Gruppo Specialistico Tecnologie e Applicazioni Informatiche (AEI) and the Convention of National Societies of Electrical Engineers of Europe (EUREL).
Maristella Agosti
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informatica
Universita' di Padova
Padova, Italy
URL: <http://www.dei.unipd.it/>
Email: agosti@dei.unipd.it
Fabio Crestani
Department of Computer Science
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, G1 1XH, Scotland
URL: <http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/>
Email: fabioc@cs.strath.ac.uk
Gabriella Pasi
Istituto Technologie Informatiche Multimediali
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Milano, Italy
URL: <http://www.itim.mi.cnr.it/>
Email: gabriella.pasi@itim.mi.cnr.it
For citation purposes:
Maristella Agosti, Fabio Crestani and Gabriella Pasi, "ESSIR'2000: Information Retrieval by the Lake", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/essir/>
The Virtual Worlds 2000 conference was hosted by the International Institute of Multimedia (Pôle Universitaire Léonard de Vinci) in Paris, France between 5 - 7 July. Its focus was virtual worlds with a component of Artificial Life. Joseph Nechvatal reports. This article originally appeared on Rhizome.org [1].
Something exciting happens when one looks at various subjects not for closed conceptual systems, but to find an ever-opening conceptual edge. This conceptual edge is more and more important today after we have learned that modernist reductionist assumptions are not easily changed by mere postmodern negations. For example, postmodernists typically reject scientific reductionism, but often assume a kind of fractionated cultural reductionism. Thus people stay trapped in the scientistic objectivist model because it is largely the only working one out there. What seems to be needed are self-mutating conceptual models to think differently with; self-re-organizing conceptual models that are never just the completed or inverted objectivity of the usual conceptions.
Hence, details concerning a plethora of new conceptual and
procedural models shown and discussed at the Virtual Worlds 2000
Conference [2] - which was held for three
days in July at Ple Universitaire Lonard de Vinci in Paris -
might give us some sense of the many promising conceptual points
found there - even though the private discussions I had with
participants were often even more abstract and complex and not
fixed to the topic I am reporting on here. But we all seemed to
agree that we no longer needed a further contextual completion
before we can reject any reduction of human processes to the
completed/objectified kind, even while we still respect science
and its logic as a recognizably special tool within a new
art/science matrix.
Prof. Jean-Claude Heudin, director of the International Institute of Multimedia Lab and chairman of Virtual Worlds 2000, aimed to avoid any fall-back by starting off and catalyzing the conference with a succinct but stimulating talk on the conferences goals, which, like the first Virtual Worlds conference in 1998, were to develop a discourse around the merging of Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Life (A-Life) - the study of synthetic systems that exhibit behaviors characteristic of natural living systems.
Unlike the first conference in 1998, this one was better organized as a single thread and even though there were three key-note speakers (Bruce Damer, Ken Perlin, and Claude Lattaud) they did not dominate the discourse. As a result there was very good rapport at the conference between the diverse international participants and a general feeling that virtually nothing is impossible with co-operational imagination. Cyborg imagery in pop culture, I suppose, has fruitfully fertilized this optimistic ontological feeling by imaginatively inviting people to experience their ontology through losing track of their bodies and becoming (what seems to be) pure consciousness - even though people all over the world have now grasped the fact that even dis-embodied self-conceptual models bring old conceptions of the sexual body with it because as the self becomes progressively more detachable from the location of the body, it becomes increasingly constituted through and in communication processes. The postmodern critique of the sexual/racial body and the problems it poses are now widely understood too, but many are bored by the constant stoppage, as every conceptual model of the body can be made to seem a fall-back into an older politics or metaphysics - and hence a backhanded re-affirmation of them. Thus the benefits of studying ontological complexity via apparently autonomous computational self-modeling systems.
This rhizomatic discourse embraces such diverse fields as advanced computer graphics for virtual worlds, evolutionary computational systems, simulation of ecological systems, simulation of physical environments, multi-agent on-line communities, evolutionary applications for cyber-art, and a host of philosophical traditions. Indeed, except for an overall idea of a coming immersive evolution, there was great diversity at this extremely informative gathering; a gathering of such intellectual breadth that one often felt like a mosquito in a nudist camp, buzzing from one promising approach to another, vampiricaly loading up on them all. But I found this diverse, interdisciplinary approach warranted, for with Virtual Worlds 2000s emphasis on merging Virtual Reality with Artificial Life we come to a fundamental human exploration concerning the spatialization of consciousness relating to the recognition of life (a working definition of life is quite important to establishing whether an artificial system exhibits life or not but such a definition is still under debate with some biologists insisting that life can only be found in certain hydro-carbon chains while Schrdinger and Von Neumann early on speculated that life is best characterized as islands of negative entropy, a.k.a. information). That doesnt sound too high-minded, does it? because the applications are rather banal; ranging from apparently intelligent computer game avatar simulations to system-bot on-line education and business uses. Well, even so, the high-mindedness is justified in that in Virtual Worlds 2000 a new kind of apparent art/scientific animism was being devised; a buzzing animism that incorporates the recognition of life in artistic, computer scientific, virtual worlds. Hence, Virtual Worlds 2000 continues the opening of a new discourse after postmodernism. Whereas Virtual Reality has largely concerned itself with the design of 3D immersive spaces, and Artificial Life with the simulation of living organisms, Virtual Worlds is concerned with the synthesis of digital living wholes (systemic synthetic worlds). Thus it continues to move us past the time when it was revolutionary to undermine the idea of apparent logical unities.
This synthetic/emergent approach has opened possibilities that were missed by both foundational models and by their postmodernist negation. VR/A-life studies then systematically escape postmodernisms either/or; we are neither just logical nor arbitrary. Hence, VR/A-life studies gets us past the postmodern alternatives as it systematically exceeds formulation and yet it is far from arbitrary. This approach can re-establish apparent empirical findings within a more critical omnijective context, rather than the strict postmodern disbelief in empiricism. And this is as it should be, for VR is not strictly a virtual enterprise. It is a fuzzy virtual-actual (viractual) one thus a radicalization of classic Cartesian dualism - as with VR the electronic apparatus supplements both the bodys limitations and its classic imaginary spaces and mental possibilities as the equipment systematically supplements the mind/bodys powers of perception.
Moreover, as we are learning through the Human Genome Project, like everything, life itself has been succumbing to digital dematerialization. But with VR/A-life inspired life, life is even better characterized as a viractual process, rather than the digital substrate in which that process is embedded. This seems right to me, as our life has an apparent order that is more intricate than a single conceptual system. VR/A-life is clearly not static or fixed. It is dynamic.
Without dynamic viractuality, digital ontology encounters a major quandary as life re-mutates into binary modulation, re-structuring human reality again into a new breed of dualing Cartesianalities. But with the dynamic viractual socioepistemic ontology offered in the study of VR/A-life which comes about through the particular viractual conjunctions of body and digital technology we are enabled to construct new forms of intersubjective ontology and apparent ways to embody those ontologies to slip into them, take them on, and live them out immersively to their outer edges.
While we might have once assumed spatial separation between the body and digital technology, the viractuality found in VR/A-life effects a recuperation of spatial absence through temporal presence. This viractual notion places us at once at the most general and limiting condition of our existence. Our bodily existence, or embodiment, is from this standpoint understood to have a viractual range of potential experiential modalities in relation to features of cultural and historical context.
As the interpenetrating of bodies with digital technologies continues unabated, becoming more and more seamless and pervasive, new domains of art experience and being-in-the-world become colonized by this ontological demand. Sure, VR/A-life research is currently devoted to synthesizing new and more seamlessly aesthetic ways to interface embodied ontology with disembodied computer intelligence. However, the majority of people today clearly do not show any special interest in Artificial Life or/and Virtual Reality as art they perceive them exactly in the same way as they perceive the creation of any other specialized conceptual esoterica. Equally, people dont comprehend their own ontological internal processes because how we define the extended viractual space of our life is always more than cognitive like good art is. Therefore, the quintessential VR/A-life concept of emergent complexity via immersive genetic algorithms is a valuable conceptual model for art today in that much of its emergent computational work is organized in a "bottom up" fashion; focusing on local rather than global behaviors, while centering its ontology around poly-sexual cellular automata, neural networks, enzyme catalysts, nanotechnology, RNA strands, and immersive computer models of ecological systems.
But it is not just art. As Prof. Heudin indicated, VR/A-life is a major new ontological medium based on the collaboration of science, technology and art. With VR/A-life yielding up some useful insights into procedure, we might self-study our own organisms apparent behaviors and environmental interactions by studying our life as it might be. This is clearly not a counter-revolution against postmodernism but an emergent surpassing of it. Instead of mere postmodern pluralism we might create for ourselves an apparent complex unified ontology made up of emergent multiple-selves by involving a sophisticated steering of artistic applications into a fully ontological immersive context. Such an interplay between evolutionary self-representational dis-embodiment and emergent being-in-the-world embodiment is precisely the viractual issue found in all post-biotechnological applications of the computer, as demonstrated at the conference by both Jeffrey Ventrellas and Tina LaPortas work.
By being taken up into an emergent viractual environment, the complexity of ontological life consciousness is re-represented in VR/A-life and, I would suggest, altered as the computer VR/A-life manipulator encounters emergent representations of her own bodies processes. Thus the VR/A-life inquiry will continue to unfold under its own weight from the point of view of the extended reproducing body, with the next set of emergent ontological questions necessarily having to do with how VR/A-life worlds (for they are always multiple) are constituted, what it means to have them, how they feel, and precisely how we may inhabit them aesthetically.
Dr. Joseph Nechvatal
jnech@hotmail.com
<http://www.intelligentagent.com/satyricon.html>
<http://www.dom.de/groebel/jnech/>
<http://www.dom.de/groebel/jnech/ideals.htm>
<http://www.cybertheque.fr/galerie/jnech>
For citation purposes:
Dr. Joseph Nechvatal s , "The Virtual Worlds 2000 Conference : an Island of Negative Entropy", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/worlds/>
Rob Davies announces the likely funding of PULMAN, a successor support measure to PubliCA, the Concerted Action for Public Libraries which ended last year.
Those who followed the story of PubliCA, the Concerted Action for Public Libraries [1] which ended in late 1999, will be interested to know that a proposal for a successor support measure - PULMAN - has been submitted to the EC. PULMAN plans to build on the earlier work by establishing a Europe-wide Thematic Network. The greatly expanded consortium, led by Antwerp public library, has heard informally that the proposal was positively evaluated and - subject to the Commission’s final decision-making procedures - is likely to be funded.
PULMAN will focus initially on the development of a series of Digital Guidelines Manuals to promote best practice in the delivery of innovative public library services. The Guidelines will cover ‘social’ aspects of services in key areas such as support for: education and lifelong learning; digital literacy; social inclusion; business and the economy; citizen participation in new forms of civic governance; access to cultural content; access and services for people with physical disabilities; access to music and non-print material; management practices and models for co-operation and partnership; funding and financing opportunities; copyright, licensing initiatives and rights transactions.
The Digital Guidelines Manuals will also cover key technical issues for public libraries such as: resource description; discovery and retrieval; digitisation; multimedia digital service delivery; applications of newly developing technologies; developments in integrated library systems; performance measures and evaluative tools; tailoring of services for citizen interaction and participation; privacy, data protection, IPR; and multi-lingual issues. An ongoing public library Technology Watch will be established.
PULMAN will also support and develop the dialogue between practitioners and policy makers at local, national, regional and European levels, in order to stimulate consideration and appropriate adoption of the Guidelines and their incorporation into strategic thinking and planning. An important goal will be to develop interaction and scenarios for co-operation between public libraries, museums and archives and other cultural institutions, through a programme of events, training workshops and advocacy, culminating in a European Policy Conference.
The 18 partners in PULMAN include a number of Europe’s leading municipal public library services, including some of the PubliCA participants, EBLIDA, representatives of earlier Concerted Actions such as HARMONICA, ECUP, CAMILE and LIBECON2000 and a number of specialised research bodies. 26 European countries will be represented by a partner or a national co-ordinator. It is hoped that work will be able to start early in 2001 with a planned duration, under EU funding, of 24 months.
Rob Davies
MDR Partners.
Email: rob@robdavies.plus.com
For citation purposes:
Robert Davies , "PULMAN: A Europe-wide Thematic Network", Exploit Interactive, issue
7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/pulman/>
In this final issue we will be comparing the two types of statistics software that have been used during the production of Exploit Interactive.
Benjamin Disraeli once contended that "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Of course this is not always the case, some statistics can even prove to be useful! However, whether we like them or not statistics are often a required part of EC Web sites and are usually necessary to justify spending to Project funders. Web site statistics can illustrate that your site is increasing in popularity or show that further dissemination is needed. They can also confirm who your users are and where they come from; which in turn helps you to bring in more users. Some statistical analysis programmes can even help resolve problem areas such as broken links. For more on providing regular performance indicators for your funding body see Brian Kelly's article in Ariadne Issue 23 [1].
Nevertheless, Disraeli's reservation should be taken as a word of warning. Statistics can be misleading and should always be viewed as objectively as possible. There are quite often influencing factors that can cause unexpected results. One way of getting clearer figures is by using more than one statistical analysis system. This article will firstly have a look at some statistics from the time of Exploit Interactive Web magazine's launch to now (7th August). For this we will primarily use the WebTrends software because the other software programmes only began building up statistics in January 2000, a few added features of SiteMeter will also be considered. Secondly, the two types of software used to create these statistics will be compared and a list of relevant positive and negative factors drawn up.
The two pieces of externally-hosted statistical software used on Exploit Interactive are SiteMeter [2] and NedStat [3]. Both were reviewed in the Software in Use column in issue 5 [4]. SiteMeter gives general site statistics and has been running on the Exploit Interactive server since 4th January 2000. NedStat is used to provide statistics for individual pages. The benefits in using externally-hosted statistical software were discussed in Ariadne issue 23 [5].
The WebTrends [6] Professional Suite was installed for access on a server in may 2000. It lays claim to a complete Web site management Suite that includes Web Site Traffic Analysis, Link Analysis, Content Management and Visualization, Alerting Monitoring and Recovery, Proxy Server Traffic Analysis and Reporting. We have yet to find out how most of these work!
The WebTrends software analyses logfiles. A report was created for the entire site for the date range 23rd April 1999 14:46:15 to 7th August 2000 16:32:38, the time Exploit Interactive has been running. This report had a number of filters switched on so that page hits from the main authoring PC and from Harvester, a Web crawler, would be ignored.
 Figure 1: WebTrends Summary |
WebTrends found that the total number of hits from the launch till 7th August to be 733,476. This may seem like a huge number but to WebTrends the total number of hits is a count of all the successful hits including HTML pages, pictures, forms, scripts and files downloaded. It is probably more useful to consider the total number of page views received which was 230,768, this evens out to average 488 a day. With page views only the hits to documents and forms are counted. The total number of visitor sessions, hits to the site by a single visitor within a timeframe, came to 48,802, an average of 103 per day.
WebTrends allows you to view a whole host of statistic types in a number of different ways. The full report is divided up into General Statistics, Resources Accessed, Visitors & Demographics, Activity Statistics, Technical Statistics, Referrers & Keywords and Browsers & Platforms.
Some of the more interesting information includes the most requested page, unsurprisingly the Exploit Interactive Home Page followed by the issue home pages.
The most accessed article was Exploit Interactive Issue 1 News Article: Are You Linking to a Porn Site? This page probably proved to be the most popular due to having 'porn' in its title so we should really discount it. The second most accessed article was Exploit Interactive Issue 4: Building Europe's Largest Library. The top 5 articles are listed above, obviously articles in earlier issues will have had more time to get hits.
Other interesting data includes the most active city, which is London closely followed by Bath; both are in the UK. The top geographic regions are Western Europe with 32.9% followed by North America with 30.2% and then region unspecified with 22.9%.
The top referrer, after 'no referrer' with 26,923 hits, was found to be Altavista.com. The referrer is the domain name that the user visited your site from. This makes Altavista the top search engine, succeeded by Google, Yahoo and Excite.
 Figure 2: WebTrends Top Search Engines |
The top 10 keywords used on search engines were found to be exploit, porn, Web, interactive, library, information, e-commerce, aggressor, server and libraries. The top browser used was Netscape, which was used by 37.58% of readers, next was Internet Explorer (IE), which was used by 35.01% of readers. These results are quite surprising; IE was used on more visitor sessions though.
One of the added features of SiteMeter is the ability to track the site by time zone. The Universal Time Coordinated [UTC] is given against a percent of users. For Exploit Interactive the highest percent, at 47%, is in Western Europe. The second highest group of users is East America and Africa with 15% and then Eastern Europe with 11%. These percentages do seem to vary throughout the day depending on which area of the world is 'awake'.
 Figure 3: SiteMeter Site by Time Zone. |
The two types of statistics services used have been compared on a number of key areas.
| Externally-Hosted Web Statistics Services | Purchased Web Statistics Services | |
| Cost | Free to use, no maintenance costs. | UKOLN paid £500 for one server licence. |
| Installation Effort | None, though the icon will need to be added to each page. | There is an effort in installing the software. Once installed it is fairly simple to run a report, though to get to grips with the full funtionality of the software you may need to spend sometime reading the manual. |
| Access to information | By default everyone has access to your statistics. If you are working on a dissemination project then this may be acceptable or even requisite. However you may not want users to be able to see your statistics. Public access to information can be suppressed from the manager page. Once logged in it is possible to make your site's statistics password protected and even remove your site from any public site lists. | Access to statistical reports is initially limited to those with access to the report. If wanted HTML pages can be put on the Web. |
| Stability of Service | If the external site or the network needed to access it go down them the statistics are not available. This may also effect the recording of statistics. | The statistics software is hosted on your own server so is always available unless your own network is down. |
| Format of Reports | The reports appear in HTML format accessible from your Web site. The format of the pages cannot be changed. If you wish to create a paper copy of the statistics you have to print each page individually, though it is possible to create CSV files. You can also get email statistics of your site but these are not as comprehensive. | The reports produced are highly customisable. They can be modified in style and customised to use certain terminology. Reports can be produced in HTML for Web use, MS Word for printed copies and MS Excel for statistical analysis. |
| Information Recorded | The information is captured through the downloading of the image icon. This means that information from 'text only' browsers or browsers with their images switched off is lost. Hits are also not recorded for users who flick from page to page without giving the icon time to load up. This is only a relatively small percent of users but will affect your statistics. To record all the hits you must remember to add the icon to every page you would like counted. This has not been done on Exploit Interactive. | The server log files are used to create the statistics. However not all the data available is captured due to caching. Users who have viewed a page before maybe looking at a Web page that is held on their local drive and therefore their intention to view a page is not recorded. Before a report is run you can chose to filter out certain pieces of ambiguous data (see filtering). |
| Availability | Up to date statistics are available virtually instantaneously. However sometimes data is only available for a limited amount of time. | A report must be run to retrieve the statistics. The time this takes will depend on the length of time you need the data for and the popularity of a Web site. |
| Filtering | Limited filtering capabilities to support data mining. | Filtering is possible. Areas that are particularly useful are removing Web crawlers such as Harvest and Robots. You can also remove internal users. |
| Other | Having an extra icon on your page may effect the time it takes for a page to download. Site Meter uses dedicated servers that are directly connected to the US Internet backbone so the time delay should be minimal. | WebTrends provides information on more areas. It is possible to obtain lists of broken links; there are externally hosted services that can do this too such as Link Alarm [12]. |
In his article on using externally-hosted statistical software Brian Kelly concluded that "Web statistics services such as Nedstat and SiteMeter appear to be very useful. They provide a cheap alternative to purchased statistics services and work very effectively with few serious drawbacks". He also pointed out that they do however have limitations in how much information is retrieved and what information is available for viewing. Their main disadvantages are their inability to record hits from 'text only' browsers and their restrictions on what data you can see.
Purchased statistics services such as WebTrends offer more data and more manipulation of statistics into reports, though they have their own disadvantages due to caching. They are probably more useful to Web authors with a number of sites to manage and a need for highly comprehensive reports.
A combination of the two statistical services has allowed Exploit Interactive to have access to a full range of data. Information such as top referrers and search engine used has been very useful for dissemination targeting for Exploit Interactive and the new pan-European Web magazine, Cultivate Interactive [13]. The SiteMeter and NedStat services have meant that authors can see how well their articles are being received and how well the magazine as a whole is doing. Although statistics are not always perfect when used in a comparative way they can give a good idea of the success of your site. With such information aboard you, as a Web author or Web site manager, can revise your site to make it even more successful.
Marieke Napier
Information Officer
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
England
BA2 7AY
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Email: m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk
Marieke is editor of Exploit Interactive and Cultivate Interactive Web magazines.
For citation purposes:
Marieke Napier, "Software in use: Comparing Externally-Hosted Web Statistics and Purchased Statistics Services",
Exploit Interactive, issue 7, 2nd October 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue7/statistics/>
Welcome to Exploit Interactive's Jobs Section. If your organisation has position openings for Telematics Projects, Networking, or Library related work, details (as shown below) will now need to be sent to cultivate-editor@ukoln.ac.uk
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is building a Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER); a national managed information environment for further and higher education. The DNER is a co-ordinated and comprehensive collection of high quality digital resources for use in learning, teaching and research. The RDN is one important service component of the DNER, and the postholder will be required to work closely with both RDN and DNER staff to realise the overall objectives of the DNER. The Information Officer will support the implementation and ongoing development of an ambitious programme of PR and communication activity for both the DNER and the RDN, and assist in creating widespread awareness across the education, public, heritage and commercial sectors using a variety of print and electronic media. The successful applicant will be creative and dynamic and able to employ their previous experience, excellent communication, IT and research skills to:
The post is available for two years. Secondment arrangements will be considered. Salary, will be within the ALC1/2 scale: £18,909 - £27,347 per annum, inclusive of London Allowance.
For further details and an application form, please send a large
self-addressed envelope to:
Emma Hammond
Personnel Department
King's
College London
James Clerk Maxwell Building
57 Waterloo Road
London SE1
8WA
Phone: 0151-794-2696
Fax: 0151-794-2681
Email: emma.hammond@kcl.ac.uk
quoting reference E2/QJ/148/00.
Closing date: Tuesday 10th October 2000.
There is a vacancy for one full-time Graduate Library Assistant in the Special Collections and Archives Division of the University Library.
The Library Assistant is required to assist a team of librarians and archivists in the day to day running of the Special Collections and Archives Reading Room in the Sydney Jones Library. Library experience is not essential but there is a need to work accurately in a well-organised manner and to assist researchers in a friendly and efficient way. General enquiry, clerical, and preservation work is also part of the job. Duties will include work with the Innopac computerised library system and other online access tools. Full training will be given.
The post is specifically intended to provide pre-course experience to graduates wishing to progress to a course in Library and Information Science or Archives Administration. The post is tenable for one year.
Further particulars and application form may be obtained from:
Maureen Watry
Phone: 0151-794-2696
Fax: 0151-794-2681
Email: mwatry@liverpool.ac.uk
To apply please send a CV and covering letter to:
Maureen Watry
Head of Special Collections and Archives
Sydney Jones Library
University of Liverpool
PO Box 123
Liverpool
L69 3DA
Closing date: Friday 6th October 2000.
An experimental web-based art on self and identity with religional and philosophical concept and empirical experience. It explores the possibility of presenting the subject with visual and audio elements. Furthermore, it aims to provide a space for subject discussion and experience sharing.
For further information and the exhibition see the
<http://meditation-space.tripod.com
>
or contact
Alison Tang
The exhibition runs from September 1st to November 30th 2000.
The UNESCO Archives Portal has just been launched and gives access to websites of archival institutions around the world. It is also a gateway to resources related to records and archives management and to international co-operation in this area.
With the Archives Portal, UNESCO provides a single interactive access point to information for archivists and users of archives worldwide.
Visitors to the UNESCO Archives Portal can browse through pre-established categories or search for specific words. They can add a new link or modify an already existing link. An electronic Newsletter will provide information on new entries. The "In Focus" section presents websites of archives which are particularly interesting. Visitors can also rank websites of archives and related institutions through an on-line rating system.
At the date of its launch, the UNESCO Archives Portal gives access to a first set of several hundred websites. UNESCO encourages all visitors to add links in order to increase rapidly their number.
For further information please contact
Axel Plathe
UNESCO
Information Society Division
1, rue Miollis
75015 Paris
France
Phone: 33 1 45 684467
Fax: 33 1 45 685583
a.plathe@unesco.org
<http://www.unesco.org/webworld/>
Location: Berlin
Date: 1 December 2000
Source: Email from Teresa Hackett
A final concertation meeting for the EU TECUP project will take place in Berlin on Friday 1st December 2000 from 9.30-12.30. This meeting has been organised as a pre-conference to the European Conference of ICOLC.
The purpose of the concertation meeting is to present the TECUP project results, including a draft Memorandum of Understanding between key players in the information chain e.g. publishers, libraries, RROs, subscription agents, etc. in accordance with the aim of building a consensus amongst the parties involved. The findings of the technical and legal advisory groups will also be presented.
For further information see the
TECUP Web site
Online registration is available from 15th August 2000.
Location:Gustav-Stresseman Institut, Bonn, Germany
Date: 23 - 24th November 2000
Source: Email from Manjula Patel
Implementation projects generally find that no one metadata standard will completely meet their descriptive needs. General standards such as Dublin Core must often be used alongside domain- or sector-specific standards such as MPEG-7 for multimedia and IEEE/LOM for educational resources; and new elements may be needed for local needs not covered by any of the existing standards. Recent practice distinguishes between the definition of semantics in "namespaces" (i.e. official standards) and the reuse and interpretation of those semantics in "application profiles". Application profiles are schemas that combine elements from multiple standards, perhaps with application-specific constraints.
This workshop will present the state of the art in constructing and publishing an application profile. It will look at how a profile may be declared in XML or RDF, especially in light of new metadata harvesters that support the indexing and browsing of standards and application profiles located on multiple Web servers.
Participants in the workshop will gain an understanding of the conceptual issues involved in ongoing debates about application profiles and come away with concrete guidelines for creating and publishing profiles for their own projects. The workshop will present the SCHEMAS Project registry which enables implementers to share information about their schema.
The workshop will conclude with a look at how schema harvesters may be used to harmonize metadata usage within a particular field or within a cluster of projects. Harmonisation of metadata usage is an essential foundation for the construction of federated digital libraries and portals.
Apart from the specific issues addressed in the workshop, this event is an opportunity for metadata schema developers from a wide range of domains to meet and discuss common problems and interoperable solutions.
SCHEMAS is an accompanying measure under the European Commission's IST programme, aiming to guide and educate metadata schema implementers about the status and proper use of new and emerging metadata standards, and to promote good-practice guidelines for adapting multiple standards or metadata modules for local use in customised schemas.
For further information and booking form see
<http://www.schemas-forum.org/>
Deadline for applications: 1st November 2000
The contact for this workshop is Joy Fraser
Location:Berlin State Library, Germany
Date: 4th - 5th December 2000
Source: Email from Hans-Jörg Lieder
This event will be a platform to present and discuss the results of the EU-funded project MALVINE and the intentions of the planned EU project LEAF (Linking and Exploring Authority Files).
Participation in this event is free of charge.
For further information see
<http://www.sbb.spk-berlin.de/malvine/>
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