University of Illinois DLib Test Suite Quarterly Report for July-September 2000

University of Illinois D-Lib Test Suite Quarterly Report for July-September 2000
Collection Growth

More than 3500 full-content journal articles were processed, indexed, and added to the testbed, including, for testing purposes, a small number of Elsevier and ACM issues.

We have also added two more volumes (11 and 13) of ASM International's Metals Handbook, adding approximately 2200 printed pages contained in 142 XML files. These were added to the testbed at the request of ASM specifically to facilitate review of these volumes by ASM's editors and authors in preparation for their next edition. ASM felt that our work had resulted in the best web viewable HTML version of their material they had ever seen.

Partners Workshop

The 6th Annual UIUC D-LIB Collaborating Partners Workshop was held on September 7-8 at the Grainger Engineering Library. It was well attended by representatives from the American Institute of Physics (AIP), American Physical Society (APS), ASM International, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE), Naval Research Laboratory, University of Chicago Press, Seagoat Consulting, Elsevier Science, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

We reported on the latest results of our research and development efforts, plus our ideas for other avenues of investigation. Everyone was very enthusiastic regarding our progress and the direction of our research. We also received invaluable feedback from our partners regarding directions they would like to see the research take.

ASCE SPIN Conversion

Utilizing the metadata we had created for the American Society of Civil Engineers' articles, and our expertise with XML transformations, we created Searchable Physics Information Notices (SPIN) metadata records for use with the American Institutes of Physics' Online Journal Publishing Service (OJPS). This will allow ASCE's articles to be hosted on AIP's OJPS.

D-LIB Cross-Repository Search Interface

Based on discussions at the previous D-Lib Test Suite Project participants meeting, we created a cross-repository search interface. This was accomplished by mapping various other D-LIB collections' metadata into Dublin Core, and then collecting the metadata into a common database. The search interface and descriptions of the metadata mappings can be found at http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/dlibmeta/searchform.asp. The cross-repository database currently contains 4,203,344 Dublin Core metadata records in various categories, describing 157,710 discrete objects, from five heterogeneous collections.

MathML

Initial work on Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) scripts that convert the American Physical Society's mathematical markup into standard, presentational MathML were completed. This work was very promising in that we believe that conversion from various SGML math markup schemas can now be accomplished with high accuracy. We plan to extend this work to the other publishers' material in our collection, and eventually make MathML our collection's standard for dealing with math markup.

Experiments were also begun into rendering the resulting MathML in various web browsers, using plugins, such as IBM's techexplorer, native browser support, as with Mozilla, or our own DHTML rendering in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Some of our rendering experiments can be seen at http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/~aps/tocs.asp?NG=1&pub=aps&jrnl=prl&voliss=74_1&test=tom or http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/mathmlstyle/samples.htm .

Presentations, Visitors, and Outside Researchers

We met with engineers from the NTT J-Stage project in Japan to discuss protocols for sharing citation metadata between our two projects, specifically so that forward and backward links could be made between the citations in our respective journal article collections.

Met with a visitor from the University of Maine who was interested implementing digital library projects at her home institution.

Presented an overview of our project, and digital libraries in general, to a UIUC Graduate School of Library and Information Science course, LIS 250, Emerging Technologies.

Held discussions with Eric Hellman, president of Openly Informatics, Inc., about scholarly linking technologies, and about incorporation of their LinkBaton product into our project.