Scholarly Publishing : Version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. Charles W. Bailey, Jr. writes "Version 50 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over1,950 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sourcesthat are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishingefforts on the Internet.           HTML: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html           Acrobat: http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.pdf [LISNews.com]  4:33:24 PM   [Feedback ]  

Metadata : XML/XSLT-Mediated File Format Migration as a Digital Preservation Strategy. This month's RLG DigiNews has an excellent overview of how XML and XSLT can be used as an approach to digital preservation.

The FAQ question makes a good point about the future of software, and how we plan to preserve electronic objects, irrespective of their formats. Tools such as OpenOffice and the new Microsoft Office 2003 are based entirely on XML. If you unzip the document, presentation, or spreadsheet with which you're working, you'll discover a nifty XML file that contains the entire contents of your work. The benefit of this is that digital preservationists can convert this XML to any long-term storage format they need, such as TIFF, JPEG2000, or any text-based file. Coupled with the metadata and XML work that catalogers are already pursuing, we could maintain accessiblity to a whole range of objects that, until now, required excessive amounts of abstracting, indexing, and summarization to utilize.

Archivists in particular should pay attention to these tools. If archivists were to work with potential donors (e.g., faculty and university administrators), to create their work in these XML-compliant tools, then the entire contents of the documents could be made accessible for searching. Natural language processing tools could do the summarization work for us, similar to what the HELIOS project did at Carnegie Mellon. This could mean less (or no) work for preparing finding aids or cumbersome EAD files. [inSilico - A Princeton University Library metadata and digital library blog]  12:53:50 PM   [Feedback ]  

Federated Searching : Whither those myriad library search boxes federated searching. Simultaneous searching of multiple collections and resources through a single interface (sometimes called "federated searching" or "one search" solutions) would represent the biggest improvement in library usability since the switch from card catalogs and printed indexes to online catalogs and databases. Below is a short introduction to federated searching and where its going. [LISNews.com]  7:55:24 AM   [Feedback ]  

Library of Congress : Library of Congress Is Bursting at Seams. Associated Press says The space problem began years ago and has only worsened as the library accumulated million items with more coming in every working dayMost of the books are in the Madison Building which is among Washingtons biggest but cant come close to meeting the needs of the worlds largest library collection To handle some of the millions of items the library is building warehouses at Fort Meade Md miles from Capitol Hill The first of what could be as many as buildings is finished and already almost halffull About volumes have been trucked from Washington a dayAbout twice as far in the opposite direction storage is being developed at Culpeper Va for the librarys audiovisual material such as recordings of Elvis Presley and Theodore Roosevelt and movies of Thomas Edison and Ronald ReaganFacts Figures on Library of Congress [LISNews.com]  7:52:51 AM   [Feedback ]  

Search Engines : Google Adds Supplemental Search. About Web Search Sep 5 2003 2:50AM ET [Moreover - Online search engines news]  7:52:17 AM   [Feedback ]