This study explored what technological protection measures (TPM) publishers/vendors of licensed scholarly resources employ by assessing the use restrictions experienced in a sample of resources from history/art history, engineering and health sciences. The analysis develops a framework of use restrictions that distinguishes between soft TPM - which discourage use - and hard TPM - which strictly limit or forbid uses. Within soft TPM, the framework identifies six use discouraging TPM: extent of use, obfuscation, omission, amalgamation, frustration and threat. The study concludes that these soft TPM are common in licensed scholarly resources. Further, while hard TPM are less common, they are not unknown.

A 6 month Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded project on a terminology registry scoping study led by UKOLN in collaboration with Glamorgan and OCLC is just starting. This study aims to analyse issues related to potential delivery of a Terminology Registry as a shared infrastructure service within the JISC Information Environment. It will consider how a Registry might support development of terminology and other services within the context of a services oriented environment. The study is briefly outlined along with some previous work in this presentation. The author welcomes input and suggestions.

With the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and online information services, more and more information is available and accessible online. Automatic summarization is an indispensable solution to reduce the information overload problem. Multi-document summarization is useful to provide an overview of a topic and allow users to zoom in for more details on aspects of interest. This paper reports three types of multi-document summaries generated for a set of research abstracts, using different summarization approaches: a sentence-based summary generated by a MEAD summarization system that extracts important sentences using various features, another sentence-based summary generated by extracting research objective sentences, and a variable-based summary focusing on research concepts and relationships. A user evaluation was carried out to compare the three types of summaries. The evaluation results indicated that the majority of users (70%) preferred the variable-based summary, while 55% of the users preferred the research objective summary, and only 25% preferred the MEAD summary.

The presentation was part of The 6th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop at the 11th ECDL Conference, Budapest, Hungary September 21st 2007 http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/research/hypermedia/nkos/nkos2007/progr amme.html / In 2004, the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded a major terminology mapping initiative at the GESIS Social Science Information Centre in Bonn (GESIS-IZ), which will find its conclusion this year. The task of this terminology mapping initiative was to organize, create and manage â crossconcordancesâ between major controlled vocabularies (thesauri, classification systems, subject heading lists) centred around the social sciences but quickly extending to other subject areas. This project is the largest terminology mapping effort in Germany. The number and variety of controlled vocabularies targeted provide an optimal basis for insights and further research opportunities. To our knowledge, terminology mapping efforts have rarely been evaluated with stringent qualitative and quantitative measures. This research should contribute in this area. For the NKOS workshop, we plan to present an overview of the project and participating vocabularies, an introduction to the heterogeneity service and its application as well as some of the results and findings of the evaluation, which will be concluded in August.

For some years now, Indian Universities and Colleges have been deprived of access to journals and other professional literature. About two decades ago, University libraries were able to subscribe to a decent number of journals in various subjects. The subscriptions have steadily eroded since funds available to universities have not been able to cover the rising cost of the literature, and today access to journals is all but impossible, except from a handful of major university libraries. It is clear that this trend cannot be reversed in the conventional fashion by providing increased funding. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has recently undertaken a major new initiative called the UGC-INFONET, which seeks to provide high speed internet connections, electronic access to professional literature, and the development of multimedia content to supplement conventional learning and teaching. In the present paper we describe the part of this project which deals with the provision of electronic access to journals and other literature for the University sector. Major organizations like the CSIR, DAE, AICTE etc have set up consortia involving institutes under the aegis of the respective department to have electronic access. The arrangement here involves incremental payments to be made to publishers to supplement an already large print subscription base. This arrangement is not possible for the Universities, since the present subscription base is very poor, and therefore arrangements which involve electronic subscriptions only are being made with publishers. In our paper we will discuss details about the initiative, the novel aspects of the programme, the great benefits that it will bring to the University sector, its present and future relationship with other consortia, and the role of INFLIBNET in the planning and long term implementation of the scheme.

This Microsoft Powerpoint presentation (of 20 slides) was presented at the Learning Resources Association of the California Community Colleges (LRACCC) North-South Meetings on February 15 at San Francisco City College and on March 11 at Coastline Community College. Cheryl Stewart is Virtual Librarian, Cosatline Community College and she discusses how distance learning is changing library services in the community colleges. A distinction is made between virtual, digital, and electronic librarians and library services in these modes. References are embedded and urls to useful electronic resources and tools are included.

This article first introduces the needs for a true interoperability environment that allows information and its context can be transfer across domains and applications. Then it describes an approach to build a RDF-based digital library system at the University of Arizona Libraries. The system architecture consists of a storage layer, a metadata management and semantic layer, a common service layer and an application layer. The system is an artifact of the RDF model and also uses an RDF database to facilitate internal management of information resources. The article presents background for a journal delivery project and reports the implementation of the journal application using Java Servlet technology. Issues about metadata management such as various metadata formats for specific communities, and MARC to DC mapping are discussed.

This 105-page report is deposited with permission of the Digital Library Federation which retains copyright. It is freely available in html and pdf formats at the DLF Web site or may be purchased in softcover edition for $20 from DLF. / This report, commissioned by DLF, provides an overview of a diverse set of more than thirty digital library aggregation services, organizes them into functional clusters, and then evaluates them more fully from the perspective of an informed user. Most of the services under review rely wholly or partially on the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI-PMH). Each service is annotated with its organizational affiliation, subject coverage, function, audience, status, and size. Critical issues surrounding each of these elements are presented in order to provide the reader with an appreciation of the nuances inherent in seemingly straightforward factual information, such as "audience" or "size." Each service is then grouped into one of five functional clusters: open access e-print archives and servers; cross-archive search services and aggregators; from digital collections to digital library environments; from peer-reviewed "referratories" to portal services; specialized search engines. This publication was deposited with permission of the publisher (Digital Library Federation Council on Library and Information Resources Washington, DC.).

This is a presentation at the ASIS&T 2005 Annual Meeting session on Progress in the Design and Evaluation of Digital Libraries: Implications for Research and Education (moderator: Kyung-Sun Kim). The presentation discusses the creation, design, and management of dLIST, an open access archive for the Information Sciences, and the affiliated DL-Harvest, an open access aggregator and federated search engine. As an Eprints-based open access archive, dLIST is a digital repository but it is a cross-institutional and interdisciplinary repository built on the concept of "sustainable information behaviors." Elements such as openness, transparency, information quality and interoperability are critical components along with a focus on connected communities of practice. Sustainable information behaviors can take us beyond the information-seeking-in-context agenda and enable a transformation of scholarly and research commmunity information sharing and communication that is more in tune with the values of a digitally flat (connected) world. Editor's Note: Some of the screenshots of the dlist web pages in the slides appear to have degenerated.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / In this era of the Internet and distributed multimedia computing, new and emerging classes of information systems applications have swept into the lives of office workers and everyday people. New applications ranging from digital libraries, multimedia systems, geographic information systems, collaborative computing to electronic commerce, virtual reality, and electronic video arts and games have created tremendous opportunities for information and computer science researchers and practitioners. As the applications become more overwhelming, pressing, and diverse, several well-known information retrieval (IR) problems have become even more urgent in this â networkcentricâ information age. Information overload, a result of the ease of information creation and rendering via the Internet and the World Wide Web, has become more evident in peopleâ s lives. Significant variations of database formats and structures, the richness of information media, and an abundance of multilingual information content also have created severe information interoperability problems-structural interoperability, media interoperability, and multilingual interoperability. The conventional approaches to addressing information overload and information interoperability problems are manual in nature, requiring human experts as information intermediaries to create knowledge structures and/or ontologies. As information content and collections become even larger and more dynamic, we believe a system-aided bottom-up artificial intelligence (AI) approach is needed. By applying scalable techniques developed in various AI subareas such as image segmentation and indexing, voice recognition, natural language processing, neural networks, machine learning, clustering and categorization, and intelligent agents, we can provide an alternative system-aided approach to addressing both information overload and information interoperability.