University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Digital Libraries Initiative
Comments to: External Relations Coordinator, Tom Habing
10/15/96
This quarterly report briefly gives the status of our Testbed (searchable digital collection), our Technology (longer-term research), and Evaluation (sociology user studies). For self-contained descriptions see the 6 month report 2Q95.
TESTBED
There continue to be two primary foci. The first is based in the Grainger Engineering Library and focuses on the collection itself: processing, indexing, searching, and displaying. The second is based in the NCSA Software Development Group and focuses on Web infrastructure which can be used to support search. The Grainger effort is building the digital library and testing sample usage (scale of documents), while the NCSA effort is building the foundations of the large user population (scale of users). The sample usage is about to begin initial testing in the Grainger Library, while the initial Web version is planned for next summer.
We have also begun sharing information with the Stanford DLI project as part of the DLI Interoperability Experiment, which was the recipient of a DLI supplemental grant. The Stanford DLI personnel have visited us and we have formulated a plan for sharing information about our search engine and interface techniques. This will allow Stanford personnel to write an object wrapper and protocol translation software for the two projects. We also expect to utilize the Stanford proxy server within our interface software to provide access to the remote information resources available through the Stanford server. In addition, we have been exchanging information with the Michigan DLI on SGML processing and on search interfaces.
Testbed Development
The Grainger testbed efforts are managed by Bill Mischo, director of the Grainger, with Tim Cole as the technical lead. Recruiting and hiring has finally built this team up to full strength -- there is now a fulltime programmer handling the processing of SGML from the publishers (Robert Ferrer) and a fulltime programmer (Maria Pflaum) has just been hired to interface to the search engine (front end rather than back end). These new hires are needed as we are just entering the initial production phases of the testbed and need reliable fulltime staff. Susan Harum continues to be the liaison to the publisher partners.
The Grainger Library continues to focus on generating an SGML testbed for the digital library collection. Work continues on the current demonstration system, expected to begin limited availability in January. This demonstration system is based on a Microsoft Windows Visual Basic interface built on a hybrid OpenText full-text search engine combined with Microsoft SQL database for maximum retrieval performance. It is clear that the OpenText database engine will provide us scalability and extensibility.
The OpenText database software is running on a Hewlett-Packard J200 server secured for the DLI project as part of a $1 million grant from Hewlett-Packard. The full text documents are retrieved in an HTTP environment from Windows NT HTTP servers using SoftQuad Panorama's CCI (Common Client Interface) links to the NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Web browsers.
The brief status is that parts of the collection are now being updated on a production basis -- in particular there is a pipeline from the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the American Society of Civil Engineers. Our relations with major publishers in engineering and science remain very strong -- our partners see us as their research arm for the future of much of their business. A detailed report on the publisher status is contained in the appendix. Most of these partners have signed our research agreement committing themselves throughout the period of the DLI grant.
The DLI Project has become a member of the Electronic Book Technologies (EBT) University Grant program. We have been in discussion with EBT's technical staff in regards to rendering of mathematics and development of their SGML viewer. We will be receiving the full EBT software suite and will be evaluating its effectiveness for retrieval and display of heterogeneous SGML documents .
Testbed personnel have also written a information retrieval system for the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) which provides indexing, retrieval, and display of some 7,000 bit-mapped images (and accompanying textual descriptions) from Fowler Museum at UCLA, George Eastman House, Harvard University art museums, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, and the National Museum of American Art.
Publisher Issues
In the past two months, members of the UIUC Digital Libraries Initiative's testbed team have had hands-on meetings with some of our most active Partners regarding processing concerns. A meeting on August 24 included representatives of IEEE Computer Society, and a meeting September 13-14 included representatives from the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, Beacon Graphics, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Naval Research Laboratory (the latter 3 organizations are involved with the APS on related publishing and publication archive projects). Below is a summary of the most important issues discussed at these meetings, and where things stand in regard to these issues. We will be holding a hands-on workshop for processing SGML for all our partners (at their expense!) on November 16-17.
1. SGML RENDERING: Problems with rendering SGML continue to be a major concern. The development of an SGML viewer capable of properly rendering all of the materials included in our testbed is lagging behind. IEEE CS, APS, and AIP have all expressed concerns about the problems Panorama has rendering their SGML. This is the major current bottleneck in effective processing of SGML for scientific literature.
Response from SoftQuad and Synex regarding the problems we've been having with Panorama (e.g., fraction bar lengths, positioning of overbars, vertical kerning of superscripts and subscripts, etc.) has been slow. In part, this appears to be due to a relatively low priority assigned by SoftQuad and Synex to the concerns we've raised (as compared to such projects as adding to Panorama support for character sets of other languages, etc.). Informally we've heard from the folks at SoftQuad, that while they see the UIUC DLI activity as important, they don't perceive UIUC as their primary potential customer here -- rather they see the publishers as their future customers and they've not heard much directly from them up to this point.
We will continue to bring our rendering concerns to their attention, and we have been promised further progress on this front soon. In the meantime we have encouraged DLI publisher partners to contact SoftQuad directly if they think that Panorama might indeed be of potential interest to they and their users assuming the specific rendering issues were addressed. Several of them have already written strong letters stating that quality display of equations is critical to their business.
We are also hopeful that alternatives to Panorama will be available for evaluation shortly. We have a promise from EBT of a new 'raw' SGML rendering software package any day now. We have done our best to make sure they were aware of the requirements of the SGML we're seeing from our partners.
2 EMBEDDED WMF/TeX: As another work around for the raw SGML rendering problems mentioned above, some publishers have indicated a strong interest in providing complex mathematics, etc. embedded in their SGML in some other format (such as TeX or Windows Meta Files). We have been investigating this approach, and do have software that will read TeX embedded in SGML and replace it with links to GIF files. While this approach does seem to have some potential, it can lead to a unwieldy number of GIF links in the final SGML -- especially if TeX is used for all math, even simple math that can be rendered properly by SGML rendering systems. We'll continue to look further at this option, but at present are not optimistic that it will prove a generally viable and good approach to dealing with SGML rendering difficulties.
3. SEARCH ENGINES: We now have in place our OpenText SGML search system and are using it to index the SGML in the testbed. To date indications are that it will prove a good, 'production' quality system for our project. There remain, however, some index and search approaches not supported well by OpenText that we need to investigate. For the time being at least we will continue development on an SQL-based SGML index/search engine in-house to meet these requirements.
4. PC GRAPHIC VIEWERS: We've had some difficulties viewing certain formats of graphics files provided by DLI publisher partners. These files can be read in certain, expensive commercial systems, but not in common PC freeware/shareware viewers. We're looking at 2 options to resolve these issues. The most promising is the development in-house of a general purpose PC viewer for TIFF, JPEG, GIF, and BMP format graphic files that's more tolerant of format variations (particularly in TIFF files). We hope to make this viewer available free to DLI participants. The other option under investigation is software to bulk convert files to formats that can be read by currently available freeware or shareware viewers.
5. DISTRIBUTED DELIVERY SERVERS:
Several publishers have expressed interest in putting their material up on their own servers and we would like to explore this in the near-future (early - mid 1996). For now we will to continue to request that materials be sent to us. Hopefully we be able to experiment with distributed repositories one year from now. By then, the Web interface will be working (see below).
Infrastructure Development
The Grainger team is assembling the testbed as described above, based primarily on using existing components with some applications software as glue and user interface. They are currently using existing software for search and display (e.g. OpenText and Panorama), which works with the Web. In addition, the SGML documents themselves are stored in a Web (HTTP) server and fetched by the Web browser (Mosaic) as invoked by the SGML viewer via a CCI link.
The DLI project has been working closely with the NCSA Software Development Group (SDG) with many of its members as active participants and partially funding the new major efforts to bring Search to the Web, by developing repository software packages. Since the browsers on the client side (pioneered by NCSA Mosaic) are now a significant commercial market, the SDG efforts are focusing on repositories on the server side. In particular, the next generation of HTTPD servers will incorporate many of the features of object repositories.
SDG underwent a major re-organization in this quarter to focus its efforts on these new trends (away from browsing, towards search and collaboration). Joseph Hardin, Director of SDG, continues to manage the DLI-related efforts. However, the Server Group has greatly expanded in scope and personnel. Its manager, Beth Frank, has become the technical lead for the repository efforts in general and the DLI infrastructure in particular. Dan LaLiberte is the conceptual architect. Jason Ng, the programmer on the stateful gateway work, is now in this group, as are others implementing the HTTPD next generation servers..
The plan is for future versions of the NCSA Web servers to gradually incorporate all of the functions needed for complete distributed search repositories. The server packages will be modular, with a number of functions supported -- standard plug-ins will be provided with the generic package but applications developers can substitute their own specialized software as needed.
The 2.0 server will be released initially in December and concentrates primarily on the deposit process into a repository. It thus will support security, metadata checking, and link maintenance. Multiple protocols for retrieval will begin to be supported so that the package is no longer only a HTTPD server. In particular, there will be support for fetching multiple files in a single get (e.g. through the keep open command). This is of critical importance to the DLI performance since fetching a single SGML document requires fetching multiple files (including the SGML, the DTD, the figures, the links, etc.) and each fetch currently requires a separate network session consuming network latency time.
Subsequent versions will support sessions, i.e. saving the state of the requests to the server so that they can be re-executed. This will incorporate much of the work being now separately done on the stateful gateway for searches in the DLI testbed. The gateway (and possibly the server at a later state) will also support distributed repositories so that we can run the experiments with the actual publishers maintaining their own documents across the Web. As discussed above, discussions are already in place with a number of publishers to be early adopters of this technology (especially APS, IEEE Computer Society, and AAS).
The Web interface to the DLI testbed will be a portable generic implementation of the multiple view interface described under Technology below. In contrast to the experimental interface described above, which is primarily intended to test the database structure, this interface is intended to be used by our large group of users across the University of Illinois and eventually the Big Ten CIC Universities. It will thus be implemented in Java by Eric Johnson and incorporate much of our technology research. Johnson is the applications programmer based in the Grainger Library as the interface between the NCSA team and the Grainger team for new infrastructure for the testbed; he reports directly to PI Schatz.
TECHNOLOGY
The Technology Research focuses on developing fundamental new technology for digital libraries, which can be incorporated when ready into the testbed. There are substantial efforts in Library Science, Information Science, Computer Science, and Information Systems.
Library Science
Our research centers around incorporating traditional A& I (Abstract & Indexing) services within the context of a complete digital library system. The work is supervised by coPI Pauline Cochrane and developed by programmer Eric Johnson. Previous work had obtained the INSPEC thesaurus from IEE, which contains a subject hierarchy covering our core areas of electrical engineering, computer science, and physics, and built an interactive viewer for this thesaurus.
A multiple view interface has now been built which combines the subject thesaurus with the co-occurrence lists for the same corpus (see below). A paper on this interface was submitted to the ACM Digital Library conference this quarter. This interface enables the user to use multiple views into the digital collection and to transparently drag-and-drop terms between the views. Current views include: INSPEC thesaurus, INSPEC co- occurrence, full-text search, and keyword-in-context. Each view has its own utility: a subject thesaurus, for example, facilitates precision since a human-generated hierarchy of the major concepts can be browsed. Conversely, a co-occurrence list facilitates recall since a machine-generated graph of the contextual frequency of terms can be browsed (many more terms but giving those that occur together in context of documents rather than those that are broader or narrower in meaning).
The intention is that a user will first use views that select general topics (e.g. subject thesaurus) then those that select specific terms (e.g. co-occurrence list) then perform an actual text search of the SGML documents. This sophistication of interface is known to closely reflect typical search needs of online retrieval systems. A prototype has been implemented in Visual Basic. Now that dynamic execution environments are available, e.g. Sun Microsystem's Java, such interfaces can be implemented in Web browsers.
Information Science
Our work centers around implementing fully automatic techniques for term suggestion of large collections, based upon co-occurrence lists. In the context of digital libraries, these lists are called concept spaces. This work is supervised by coPI Hsinchun Chen of the University of Arizona in collaboration with PI Bruce Schatz and carried out by Chen's students supported by the DLI. Previous work generated a concept space from the past 3 years of abstracts from the INSPEC sections in electrical engineering and in computer science.
This quarter this work continued by generating a concept space for the remainder of our current collection by using the INSPEC sections on physics. This concept space was again generated from about 400K abstracts on the SGI Power Challenge at NCSA (using Chen's peer- reviewed national user account). Other concept spaces have been generated, e.g. in computer science from the CSTR collection at Cornell. We now have a concept space generated from roughly 1 million abstracts in our core areas of engineering and science. This represents the first realistic- size collection available to a digital library with indexing at a deeper semantic level than full-text search.
We have also planned a larger experiment to test vocabulary switching and user modeling. This experiment will generate concept spaces using 3 million abstracts covering areas across all of engineering from Compendex (Engineering Index). The concept spaces will be partitioned at the class code level (e.g. at bridges rather than at civil engineering), creating some 1000 spaces which are roughly the equivalent of specialized community repositories. A user will then be able to choose the areas they are knowledgeable about and the areas they wish to search, then perform interactive term suggestion across the subjects. This uniquely large experiment is only possible due to the granting of special time on the new NCSA Convex Exemplar during its testing period. This may be the first crack in practical deep semantics for information retrieval.
Computer Science
Our work centers around practical implementations of operating system components for supporting objects across the Net. There are two foci here: one with coPI Roy Campbell and students in the Computer Science Department and one with coPI Charlie Catlett and programmers at NCSA. These both involve major external collaborations.
The computer science research continues the work with CNRI on improving the handles system, which is intended for the addressing problem for objects in the Web. Student Varna Puvvada spent the summer working at CNRI on this. There is also complementary work on URN resolution in the repository group at NCSA SDG.
The NCSA practical systems work finished a design of a network object store, concentrating on the security portions. A paper on this design was submitted to the ACM Digital Library conference this quarter. The design contains extensive support for terms and conditions, which are necessary to support practical digital libraries with real publishers. The lead on this project was John Garrett from CNRI, a former executive from the Copyright Clearance Center. The project itself is a joint collaboration between CNRI (beyond the handles work), Cornell (the former CSTR Dienst people especially Carl Lagoze), and Illinois. Our Illinois people at NCSA include Bob McGrath and Nancy Yeager (partially funded by our separate digital library grant in the NASA CAN program).
Information Systems
Our work here centers around constructing an applications environment for information analysis, as a demonstration of what information technology will be possible in the 21st century. This work is supervised by PI Bruce Schatz, with the technical leads being Kevin Powell (for architecture, supported by the Illinois DLI grant) and Charles Herring (for implementation, supported by the Illinois CAN grant). The Interspace prototype integrates all of the work in the Illinois DLI project, particularly the Technology Research, into a single system providing 'deeper semantics'.
The design for the complete environment has been completed and in the past quarter we have begun the implementation of the initial prototype. Our implementation assumes that objects are already supported in the Net -- object infrastructure is simulated by using Smalltalk with ObjectStore and ILU as the base infrastructure for storing and invoking objects. Through collaborations with the computer science efforts discussed above under Computer Science and the interoperability experiment with the Stanford DLI, the groundwork necessary to bring objects into the Net is being stimulated.
The core portions of the implementation instead focus on applications environment middleware to support semantic retrieval and indexes. We are embedding the concept space framework directly into the kernel of the Interspace prototype, so that every collection of objects will have generated an associated concept space for term suggestion. When the large-scale experiment in community repositories using Compendex described above under Information Science is finished, the Interspace prototype will become a substantial testbed for demonstrating vocabulary switching across multiple subject domains, as a first step towards infrastructure support for cross- correlation between objects..
EVALUATION
Faculty and students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Sociology, and Economics are continuing with their research on digital library development and use. This effort is managed overall by coPI Ann Bishop with coPI Leigh Star supervising the more theoretical sociology work. This quarter, they completed two empirical investigations: observations of how current online systems at Grainger Library are used; and a study of the design process for digital libraries, based on our DLI project. The Social Science Team also spent considerable effort in integrating the findings of their work to date and making these findings public. A third major effort this quarter was development of the Allerton Institute on 'How We Do User-Centered Design and Evaluation for Digital Libraries: A Methodological Forum,' an international meeting designed to promote interdisciplinary advances in the conduct of user- centered digital library research. The team continued its preparations for studying use of the DLI testbed, including planning for economics trials and serving as a consultant to the American Institute of Physics in the preparation of its survey of subscribers to its Applied Physics Letters Online. A capsule description of each of these activities is provided below.
Grainger observations
A small number of people were observed as they used existing online library systems in the Grainger Library, such as Mosaic, the online library catalog, various abstracting and indexing services, and IEEE's fulltext journal service (bitmaps) on CD-ROM. A total of 18 different system interactions were observed and a coding scheme was developed to record and summarize data related to search strategies, problems encountered, etc. The study was undertaken in consultation with the DLI testbed team, who noted that findings would be useful in helping them understand the capabilities, needs, preferences, and expectations of those people who would soon be trying out our DLI testbed initial prototype. This understanding would, in turn, help to inform basic DLI design decisions. The coding scheme provides the social science team with an initial framework that can be applied to the analysis of data from other study activities as well, and which will evolve in an iterative fashion throughout the course of the project. A report on the Grainger system observations was prepared and presented to the DLI testbed team.
Integration of findings to date
To date, the Social Science Team has conducted the following data collection activities related to digital information system use: (1) interviews about the use of information infrastructure with faculty members in several engineering disciplines; (2) focus group interviews about journal use and digital libraries with engineering faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students; (3) observations and interviews related to information system use with high school students; (4) observations of general activities in the Reference area of the Grainger Library; (5) observations of system use at the Grainger Library. During this quarter, we employed a grounded theory approach to begin integrating and analyzing data from these different activities. A report of key issues and findings was prepared and presented to the DLI testbed team. In addition, this review of findings was instrumental in the preparation of several other papers about the DLI user research efforts of the Social Science Team that were presented to national audiences.
Study of the DL design process
Interviews with a range of DLI team members were undertaken in a sociological study of the digital library design process. The study contributes to theoretical understanding of how large-scale R& D projects in information systems are organized and carried out. The critical assessment of roles and views of various actors is important for analyzing the often unexplored assumptions and implications of digital library design.
Planning for economics trials
Plans for developing an economic model of journal pricing on the Internet continued this quarter. The concept of product differentiation (i.e., offering different online journal services, such as subscription to a single journal vs. the ability to access equations or other individual components of journal articles) was added to plans to test fluctuations in demand based on price differentials. Discussions continued with our publisher partners and with our collaborators from the CMU DLI project (the NetBill project who will be providing the charging mechanism infrastructure) for planning a major experiment.
Consultation with the American Institute of Physics
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) is one of our most active DLI publishing partners. The Social Science Team collaborated with the AIP by reviewing and suggesting revisions to the draft of the survey they will administer to subscribers of Applied Physics Letters Online, an online journal service offered by AIP and OCLC. It is hoped that this collaboration will be mutually beneficial, resulting in improved survey results for the AIP which can, further, supply useful input to the DLI testbed team. We hope this type of collaboration will continue; it may provide an effective means of leveraging the resources of the Social Science Team as well as a model for cross-institutional user research to support digital library development and evaluation.
Allerton Institute
The Social Science Team worked intensively this quarter to produce the Allerton Institute on user-centered design and analysis of digital libraries. The Institute was sponsored by NSF and the U of I's Graduate School of Library and Information Science and was guided by a steering committee whose members represent DLI affiliates as well as other experts in the field. Approximately sixty researchers from the disciplines of Library and Information Science, Computer Science, Sociology, and Psychology gathered on October 29-31 for an intense exchange on conceptual and methodological issues related to studying the use of digital libraries. Institute sessions focused on the study of electronic information seeking and use, co-design of digital libraries, investigating work practices and institutional change, migrating foundational methodological approaches to the electronic environment, and understanding a large and heterogeneous user population. The Institute, with international representation, serves the DLI by advancing the state-of-the-art in digital library user research, focusing attention on the importance of user-centered research, offering an opportunity for graduate student participation, and bringing DLI user research teams in contact with researchers from other digital library projects. Discussion documents and other material from the Institute will be made available on the World Wide Web shortly. The consensus at the meeting was that there was a central core of knowledge on this topic, that a subfield was emerging, and that further meetings would be enthusiastically pursued. Thus the Institute was a great success in stimulating the user studies of digital libraries.
Publications
Bishop, A.P., Star, S.L., Neumann, L., Ignacio, E., Sandusky, R.J., & Schatz, B. (1995, in press). Building a university digital library: Understanding implications for academic institutions and their constituencies. In Higher Education and the NII: From vision to reality. Proceedings of the Monterey Conference, Sept. 26-29, 1995. Washington, DC: Coalition for Networked Information.
Bishop, A.P. (1995, in press). This little user went to market, this little user stayed home: What users, potential users, and nonusers can tell us. In Challenging Marketplace Solutions to Problems in the Economics of Information: Proceedings. Washington, DC: Association for Research Libraries.
Bishop, A.P. (1995, October). Working towards an understanding of digital library use: A report on the user research efforts of the NSF/ARPA/NASA DLI projects. D-LIB Magazine, 1(3). URL: http://www.dlib.org
Bishop, A.P. (1995). User research and the NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library Initiative (DLI) projects. Working Paper. URL:http://anshar.grainger.uiuc.edu/dlisoc/home_page.html/us- er_research_wg
Bowker, G. and S.L. Star, "Customized Software for Community Support versus Large Scale Infrastructure," Editors: G. M. Olson, J. B. Smith, and T. W. Malone, in Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology, 1995, in press.
Chen, H. and Schatz, B.R. "A Path to Concept-based Information Access: From National Collaboratories to Digital Libraries," Editors: G. M. Olson, J. B. Smith, and T. W. Malone, in Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology, 1995, in press.
Chen, H., Schatz, B.R. & Lin, C. "Concept Classification and Search on Internet Using Machine Learning and Parallel Computing Techniques", World Wide Web 4 Conference, Boston, December 11-13, 1995.
H. Chen, B. Schatz, T. Ng, J. Martinez, A. Kirchhoff, C. Lin (1995) A Parallel Computing Approach to Creating Engineering Concept Spaces for Semantic Retrieval: The Illinois Digital Library Initiative Project, submitted to IEEE Trans Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Special Issue on Digital Libraries: Representation and Retrieval, 15pp.
C. Lagoze, R, Grath, N. Yeager, E. Overly, A Design for Inter-operable Secure Object Stores (ISOS), submitted to ACM Int Conf on Digital Libraries, 1995.
Johnson, E. "Extending an Interactive Thesaurus by Dragging." Siglink Newsletter, Volume 4, Number 2, Pages 16-17, September 1995.
Neumann, L.J., Ignacio, E.N., & Sandusky, R.J. (1995, October). Preliminary report on DLI Social Science Team data collection activities, 1994-1995. Working Paper. URL:http://anshar.grainger.uiuc.edu/dlisoc/home_page.html/
Schatz, B., B. Mischo, T. Cole, J. Hardin, L. Jackson, A. Bishop, L. Star,
P. Cochrane, and H. Chen,"Digital Library Infrastructure for a University Engineering Community: Towards Search in the Net via Structure and Semantics," submitted to IEEE Computer, Special Issue on "Building Large-scale Digital Libraries," 1995.
Schatz, B., Johnson, E., Cochrane, P. and Chen, H. "Interactive Term Suggestion for Users of Digital Libraries: Using Subject Thesauri and Co- occurrence Lists for Information Retrieval," submitted to ACM Int Conf on Digital Library Conference, 1995.
Star, S.L. and Bowker, G. "Work and Infrastructure." Communications of the ACM, Vol. 38, No. 8 (August, 1995).
Editing Work and Related Grant Activities
Chen, H and B. Schatz,. Guest editors, IEEE Computer May 1996 special issue on "Building Large-scale Digital Libraries".
Chen, H. Principal investigator (PI), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), "Information Analysis and Knowledge Discovery for Digital Libraries," High-performance Computing Resources Grants (Peer Review Board), on SGI Power Challenge Array (48 R8000 processors, 3000 SUs), October 1995-September 1996 (IRI950001N).
Cultures of Computing (Sociological Review Monograph). Susan L. Star, Editor. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995.
"The Politics of Formal Representations: Wizards, Gurus and Organizational Complexity," in Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and Politics in Science and Technology. Susan Leigh Star, Editor. Albany: SUNY Press, 1995.
Star, S.L. Action editor for special issue on "Time in Asynchronous Group Communication," Editors Joseph McGrath and Holly Arrow, Computer- Supported Cooperative Work: An International Journal, forthcoming January 1996.
Public Presentations
Bishop, A.P. "This little user went to market, this little user stayed home: What users, potential users, and nonusers can tell us." Invited speaker in a panel on Economic Considerations for Digital Libraries at: Challenging Marketplace Solutions to Problems in the Economics of Information, Sept. 19, 1995, Washington, DC. Conference sponsored by: Council on Library Resources, Association of Research Libraries, Coalition for Networked Information, and other organizations.
Bishop, A.P. "Building a university digital library: Understanding implications for academic institutions and their constituencies". Invited speaker for: Higher Education and the NII: From vision to reality, Sept. 27, 1995, Monterey, CA. Conference sponsored by: Coalition for Networked Information, American Library Association, Educom, IEEE/USA, and other organizations.
Bishop, A.P. "Evaluating user needs for a digital library for engineers." Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Oct. 11, 1995, Chicago, IL.
Bishop, A.P. "Creating a digital library for science and engineering". Invited presentation in the Fermilab Colloquium Series, Oct. 20, 1995, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL.
Neumann, L.J., & Star, S.L. "Object worlds and shifting infrastructure: Building a digital library for engineers." Paper presented at the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) Meetings, Oct. 18-22, Charlottesville, VA.
Mischo, W. Committee on Institutional Cooperation presentation to University Librarians and Systems Librarians, August 2, 1995, Chicago, IL.
Mischo, W. & Schlembach, M. "Creating a Digital Virtual Library: Creating a Digital Library." Presentation at the Coalition for Networked Information/CAUSE Midwest Regional Conference, August 28, 1995, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
Mischo, W. "Top Ten Emerging Information Technologies." Presentation at the Connection to Technology Workshop, Illinois Library Computer Systems Organization Conference, September 15, 1995 Urbana, IL.
Mischo, W. University of Illinois College of Engineering Advisory Board Workshop, September 21, 1995, Urbana, IL.
Mischo, W. "Digital Libraries Initiative Project: Infrastructure of Images." Presentation at the Art Libraries Society Midstates Fall Meeting, October 7, 1995, Urbana, IL.
Mischo, W. and Schlembach, M. "Advanced Information Retrieval Systems: System Design and Significance of Interfaces." Presentation at the American Society for Information Science Annual Meeting, October 10, 1995, Chicago, IL.
Schatz, B. R. "Information Analysis in the Net: The Interspace of the Twenty-First Century". Plenary address at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Oct. 11, 1995, Chicago, IL.
Schatz, B. R. "Building the Interspace: Digital Library Infrastructure for a University Engineering Community". Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Oct. 9 1995, Chicago, IL.
Schatz, B. R. "The Worm Community System". Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Oct. 10 1995, Chicago, IL.
Schatz, B. R., The Illinois Digital Library Project: Towards Search in the Net. NSF/NCSA WWW Federal Consortium Annual Meeting, Urbana, Aug 2, 1995, Urbana, IL.
Schatz, B. R., The Illinois Digital Library Project, Connecting with Technology symposium, Lincoln Trails Library System, Sep 14, 1995, Urbana, IL. plenary speaker.
Star, S.L. and Bowker, G.C. "A Round-Table Discussion of Social and Organizational Issues in Classification" Invited presentation at 37th Allerton Institute -- How We Do User-Centered Design and Evaluation of Digital Libraries: A Methodological Forum, sponsored by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois and the National Science Foundation, Oct. 30, 1995, Monticello, IL.
Star, Susan Leigh and Karen Ruhleder. "Theoretical Problems in the Social Analysis of Collaborative Systems," Paper presented at ASIS, Chicago, October, 1995.
Star, Susan Leigh. "Containing Multitudes? : Communities, Strangers and Material Culture in Cyberspace", Plenary address to the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Charlottesville, VA, October 18-22, 1995.
Visitors/Demonstrations
8/24/95 IEEE Computer Society, Electronic Publications
9/12-14/95 APS (American Physical Society), Beacon Graphics, AIP (American Institute of Physics, LARL (Los Alamos Research Lab), NRL (National Research Lab), Yale Science Library
9/15/95 OVID Technologies Full-Text Retrieval Group.
9/17/95 Teikyo University President and Systems staff.
9/18/95 NACSIS, the National Center for Science Information Systems, Japan.
9/19/95 University of Indonesia and Indonesian Institute of Sciences
9/20/95 ALA Office of Research.
10/5/95 Dusseldorf University, Copenhagen University, The Royal Danish School of Educational Studies, Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark
10/26/95 Stanford DLI Interoperability Experiment group.
Appendix: Status of Publisher Material in Illinois DLI
AIAA
We have received the text in SGML from the May '95 issue of the AIAA journal. The figures for AIAA Journal will be available as TIFF files in January '96. Until then, we are going to scan the figures and insert them into the text files.
AIAA is moving from converting TeX files into SGML to producing the journal in SGML format. We are still working on converting the TeX (imbedded math) in AIAA files. This is an issue with several of our publishing partners and has an impact on performance. See IEEE below.
AIP
The processing of AIP files is now at production level (we're receiving and processing materials on a regular schedule). We have processed over 2,000 articles fromApplied Physics Letters, from January 2, 1995 to September 4, 1995.
APS
APS will begin sending us more issues of Physical Review Letters . The material will include the backlog of issues from the beginning of 1995.
ASCE
In addition to the Journal of Transportation Engineering, ASCE has sent us new SGML material from the following journals:
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Journal in Computing in Civil Engineering
Journal in Materials in Civil Engineering
Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities
We have begun working on their files and establishing procedures for production.
IEEE
The back issues of IEEE Transactions have much TeX imbedded in the SGML. We now have a program, written by one of our programmers, that converts the TeX to GIFs, leaving a marker that points to an URL. As would be expected, an article with numerous GIF files to bring over the WEB is pretty slow to retrieve and some of the IEEE Transaction articles have as many as 450 GIFs. Some of our publishers are using SGML for math and using TeX for only the most complex equations.
IEEE Computer Society
In addition to sending us SGML material from Computer, IEEE Software, and IEEE Design and Test, IEEE Computer Society has begun sending us material from the following journals:
IEEE Computational Science and Engineering
IEEE Graphics
IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and their Applications
IEEE Micro: Chips, Systems, Software and Applications
IEEE Parallel and Distributed Technologies
Go back to the DLI progress reports page