The American Library Association and Microsoft announced "Libraries Online!" on November 21, 1995. This $3 million, one-year pilot project will support nine public libraries to test multimedia technology, software applications, and ways of providing public access to the Internet, particularly to underserved populations in urban and rural environs. The library systems participating in the project have demonstrated leadership in implementing networked and other digital technologies for their users and/or serve the study's target populations. Participants include the following: Seattle Public Library, Pend Oreille County Library in northeast Washington, Charlotte-Mecklenberg County Public Library in North Carolina, Brooklyn Public Library, Tucson-Pima Public Library, Mississippi Library Commission, South Dakota State Library, Baltimore County Public Library, and Los Angeles Public Library.
National Digital Library Federation Receives IBM Support. The IBM corporation has awarded the National Digital Library Federation a grant of $100,000 and has contributed the services of a consultant for nine months to assist the 15-member federation in its planning activities. The federation, which includes the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and the Commission on Preservation and Access, was organized to examine broad questions related to the transition from traditional library services to the networked environment and has set a broadly accessible, open, digital library as its goal. Henry Gladney, a researcher at IBM Almaden Research Center (http://www-i.almaden.ibm.com/almaden/), will provide technical guidance during this planning period. For more information on the Commission on Preservation and Access, consult the commission's site at http://www.cpa.org.
SilverPlatter Education has introduced Physicians' Home Page, an Internet-based on-line service for physicians (http://www.silverplatter.com/physicians/). For a monthly fee, Physicians' Home Page members have unlimited access to the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE (a database covering the professional literature), CancerLIT, and AIDLINE. Through this service, SilverPlatter also offers subscribers "digests" or abstracts of original articles, written for the clinician; access to other Internet resources; information on continuing education programs; and a section called "MD Opinions™" in which "one hundred questions in the field of medicine are posed for consensus and member input." Member submissions are reviewed by a panel of experts, which also provides opinions. Finally, the site also offers Embedded Annotations™, which comprises links from the references and keywords contained in the digests to words that generate searches in the most recent MEDLINE.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) continues to add new publications to their electronic service, IFLANET [URL: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/ ]. Recent releases from the IFLA Section on Information Technology include an Inventory of Multimedia Software [URL: http://www.nlc -bnc.ca/ifla/pubs/sections/sit/sitp2.htm ] and the Database of Multiscript Bibliographic Systems [URL: http://www.nlc -bnc.ca/ifla/pubs/sections/sit/sitp1.htm ]. The Universal Dataflow and Telecommunications Core Programme is making their reports on Data Communication Technologies and Standards for Libraries available [URL: http://ww w.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/pubs/core/udt/reports/udtrep.htm]. The first of these reports to be posted include:
IFLANET is also maintaining a collection of documents and links relating to metadata [URL: http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/services/metadata.htm]. Contributed by: Terry Kuny, IFLANET Administration, ifla@nlc-bnc.ca
The Network Startup Resource Center and PSGnet with partial funding from the National Science Foundation maintain a site that provides access to information about computer networking (http://www.nsrc.org/). The intent is to facilitate the global expansion of connectivity, and in so doing, to stimulate scientific discourse. There is also a initiative directed toward K-12. The site contains pointers to networking software that is available free-of-charge as well as various types of educational and informational tools (e.g., FAQs, technical papers, bibliographies). The server also houses a database of information on international networking developments and connectivity providers with particular focus on Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, and Latin America.
AgNIC, the Agriculture Network Information Center (http://www.agnic.nal.usda.gov/index.html), has introduced AgDB, the Agriculture-Related Information Systems, Databases, and Datasets prototype (http://www.agnic.nal.usda.gov/agdb/). The prototype system is part of a more general initiative within the National Agricultural Library (NAL) to identify and describe databases, datasets, and information systems related to agriculture. Links are provided to those collections identified by AgDB that are available over the Internet. A second information resource made available by the NAL is its thesaursus, the Agricola subject category codes, which supports cataloging of materials at the NAL and indexing agricultural journals (http://www.agnic.nal.usda.gov/cc/).
The US National Archives Center for Electronic Records makes many of its vast collections available electronically at http://www.nara.gov/ The site contains information about collections open to the public, and exhibits and programs at the archives. A Title List of information (http://gopher.nara.gov:70/1/inform/dc/electr/titlelst) identifies records that are available in electronic form.
NASA encourages graduate students to attend the ADL96 (Advances in Digital Libraries) conference in May and will pay the expenses for a group of competitively-selected graduate students to attend the meeting and demonstrate their research. For further information, see http://dlt.gsfc.nasa.gov/adl96/ or contact Dr. Susan Hoban (susan.hoban@gsfc.nasa.gov) directly.
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has established a site at http://www.cni.org/pub/NISO/www/nisoweb.html. The site includes basic information about the organization, its publications, and an opportunity for users to provide information on their use of NISO standards.
Law Journal Extra is conducting an on-line, moderated discussion of the white paper, Intellectual Property Rights in the Electronic Age (http://www.ljx.com/). Readers who wish to comment must join the LJX Forum, which is free. Readers who do not wish to join the forum may still browse the comments and responses.
The Association for Computing (ACM) maintains a site devoted to policy issues at http://www.acm.org/usacm/, which includes information on activities and conferences; issues of concern to the society's members (funding, intellectual property, free speech on the Internet, and encryption and privacy); and membership. Among the recently-posted materials is the organization's revised Interim Copyright Policy, issued by the ACM Publications Board on November 15, 1995 (http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_policy/).
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