D-Lib Magazine
November 2000

Volume 6 Number 11

ISSN 1082-9873

In Brief

A MAGiC Project

Contributed by:
Paul A.S. Needham
MAGiC Project Officer
Cranfield University
Cranfield, Bedforshire MK43 0AL, United Kingdom
<p.a.s.needham@ntlworld.com>

In the US, report literature is readily available on the Internet from various agencies. Services on offer include the US NASA Technical Reports Server and the Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), GrayLIT Network In the UK, apart from the substantial holdings of the British Library Document Supply Centre (BLDSC), other major collections of technical reports tend to be scattered across academia, government and industry. These resources are difficult to identify, locate and access.

MAGiC - Managing Access to Grey Literature Collections - is a new project which aims to address these issues. The project web site, at <http://www.magic.ac.uk/> will be our primary means of disseminating project information and will contain frequent news, progress reports and updates throughout the eighteen-month life of the project. … Watch the MAGiC space!

The project aims to enhance awareness, access and utilisation of key collections of technical reports (one form of grey literature) for the benefit of the UK engineering community.

Our main objectives are:

• collection development, management and retention;
• enhancing the visibility of key collections;
• enhancing access via electronic storage and document supply.

Key outcomes will include:

• a directory of engineering grey literature providing more accurate information on the location and composition of key collections;

• case studies on the issues involved in collection rationalisation leading to a greater openness in the disposition of public records;

• the production of a collection analysis methodology for the prioritisation of digitisation decisions.

We are currently engaging in a survey of key collections of engineering technical reports in the UK and we invite all interested parties to take part. If you know of an important UK collection, please submit the details using our survey form at <http://www.magic.ac.uk/collection.html>.

Importantly, MAGiC will also lay the foundations for the development of a distributed National Reports Catalogue (see <http://www.magic.ac.uk/about/keytasks.html#dnrc>) and establish a digital engineering technical reports archive using Cranfield’s digital media archive, Hyperion, from Sirsi Limited,. With interoperability in mind, we are looking at the Open Archives Initiative and following developments to the Bath Profile and DC metadata.

MAGiC is funded jointly by the British Library’s Co-operation and Partnership Fund and the (JISC) Research Support Libraries Programme.

The People's Network

Contributed by:
Helen Baigent
Network Adviser
Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries
London, United Kingdom
<helen.baigent@resource.gov.uk>

There are already signs that ubiquitous access to Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) like the Internet is fast becoming as natural and indispensable as having access to a telephone. The Government has responded to the concept of a wired world and the imperative for change by pledging to provide universal access to the Internet by 2005 -- a commitment supported through a multi-million pound series of inter-related programmes funded by the Government and the National Lottery under the umbrella initiative UK Online.

The public library service, reaching as it does to the heart of the community, is a key component in this agenda for social change. The £170 million People's Network project, funded by the National Lottery through the New Opportunities Fund, will deliver more than 4,300 ICT learning centres by the end of 2002, together with a trained workforce to support and advise users, and access to new high quality digital materials to support lifelong learning. The project is led by a team of advisers at Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries.

The People’s Network project has three main strands: £100 million for the network infrastructure as part of the New Opportunities Fund Community Access to Lifelong Learning (People's Network) programme, £20 million to train all 40,000 library workers to use and help members of the public to use this equipment, and the opportunity to take part in the £50 million nof-digitise content creation programme. The project has been running for just over a year now, and significant progress has been made in each key area.

All 209 library authorities are either in the process of preparing or have already submitted business plans to the New Opportunities Fund and can begin to draw down funding from October of this year for ICT training, January 2001 for the network infrastructure and June 2001 for the nof-digitise programme.

Nof-digitise is unique in the UK in its scale and scope, encompassing libraries, museums, archives, voluntary and other community organisations with the aim of creating new digital resources to support lifelong learning in its broadest sense, and will be made freely available through the People’s Network and equivalent initiative for schools, the National Grid for Learning.

In order to build on a wealth of synergies from initial project proposals, applicants have been encouraged to pool ideas, expertise and resources to form themed consortia. This framework is being underpinned by common technical standards to ensure that materials created will be widely accessible both now and in the longer term. In addition, the applicants are being supported by a special advisory service which has been set up specifically for this programme. The service, delivered in partnership by the UK Office for Library and Information Networking, the New Opportunities Fund and Resource through the People's Network and UKOLN websites, includes workshops, issues papers on various topics relating to the digitisation process, technical advice, a discussion list and a helpline.

The significance of nof-digitise was recently acknowledged in a Government press release which announced plans to establish a national cultural portal -- Culture Online. Seen as a pathfinder for this, nof-digitise represents a significant step towards widening access to the rich cultural and intellectual assets in our libraries, archives and museums. In the broader context of the People’s Network project as a whole, allied to opportunities to learn new skills, will be a genuine and lasting impact on people’s lives. To my mind there is no better way to demonstrate this than to close with one of my favourite quotes from a satisfied library user:

“I am a 57 year old and have never, up until recently, had an interest in computers….; but in January this year, after enforced retirement, I enrolled at Huyton library for an Open Learning Course in Information Technology. I am very proud of myself because I now have four certificates in Word, Excel, Access and the Internet. My tutors are even more proud of me as I suffer from Dyslexia. Using the Internet has opened up a whole new world of information for me -- so thank you for the free access and tuition.”

Building an Audio-visual Digital Library of Historical Documentaries: the ECHO Project

Contributed by:
Pasquale Savino
ECHO Project Director
I.E.I - CNR (Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione - National Research Council)
Via Alfieri, 1
56010 Ghezzano (PI) - Italy
<P.Savino@iei.pi.cnr.it>

The ECHO Project -- launched in February 2000 and whose completion is expected by July 2002 -- is funded by the European Community within the V Framework Program, KA III. It aims at developing a long term reusable software infrastructure and new metadata models for films in order to support the development of interoperable audiovisual digital libraries. In addition, it intends to develop new models for intelligent content-based searching and film-sequence retrieval, video abstracting tools, and appropriate user interfaces. Through the implementation of multilingual services and cross language retrieval tools, the project intends to support users when accessing across linguistic, cultural and national boundaries. The ECHO system will be experimented, in the first place, on four national collections of documentary film archives (Dutch, French, Italian, Swiss). This will enable the access and valorisation of precious historical material, from the cultural as well as from the commercial points of view. Users will be able, for example, to see an event which was documented in the country of origin and how that same event was documented in other countries, or to investigate how different countries have documented a particular historical period of their lives.

Distinct features of the ECHO system will be:

• semi-automatic metadata extraction and acquisition from digital film information
• non-English speech recognizers (Italian, French, Dutch) for the purpose of indexing
• searching, and retrieval
• cross-language retrieval capabilities
• intelligent access to digital films
• automatic film summary creation
• privacy and billing mechanisms.

The ECHO system prototypes will be based on two existing Audio/Video Digital Libraries systems: Informedia and Media Archive. The Informedia Digital Video Library was funded by the first NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Library Initiative (DLI) from 1994-1998, and was the only DLI project focusing on full-content indexing and retrieval of audio and video material. Media Archive® is a content management system built with a client/server architecture. The Media Archive® client components form an integrated application suite supporting a continuous workflow in documentation, retrieval and reuse.

The project is co-ordinated by IEI-CNR (Italy). It involves a number of European institutions (Istituto Luce, Italy; Institut Nationale Audiovisuel, France; Netherlands Audiovisual Archive, the Netherlands; and Memoriav, Switzerland) holding or managing unique collections of documentary films dating from the beginning of the century up to the seventies. Tecmath, EIT, and Mediasite are the industrial partners that will develop and implement the ECHO system. There are two main academic partners: IEI-CNR and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and four associate partners: CNRS-LIMSI, IRST, University of Twente, and University of Mannheim.

Expected Results

The project will follow an incremental approach with a design phase followed by the development of three prototypes offering an increasing number of functionalities. The starting point of the project will be a software infrastructure resulting from an integration of the Informedia and Media Archive® technologies.

• The first phase -- completed in September 2000 -- provided the User Requirements, the Metadata Model for films, and the ECHO System Functionality and Global Architecture.

• The first prototype (Multiple Language Access to Digital Film Collections) -- expected by April 2001 -- will integrate the speech recognition engines with the infrastructure for content-based indexing. It will demonstrate an open system architecture for digital film libraries with automatically indexed film collections and intelligent access to them on a national language basis.

• The second prototype (Multilingual Access to Digital Film Collections) -- expected by July 2001 -- will add a metadata editor which will be used to index the film collections according to a common metadata model. Index terms, extracted automatically during the indexing/segmentation of the film material (first prototype), will be integrated with local metadata, extracted manually, in a common description (defined by the common metadata model). The second prototype will support the interoperability of the four collections and content based searching and retrieval.

• The third prototype (ECHO Digital Film Library) -- which will be completed on November 2001 -- will add summarization, authentication, privacy and charging functionalities in order to provide the system with full capabilities.

• During the final phase of the project the system prototype will be demonstrated in two different application environments, namely the Educational Environment and the Film and Entertainment Industry.

Further information can be found at the ECHO web site: <http://pc-erato2.iei.pi.cnr.it/echo/>

High-Level Thesaurus Project - HILT

Contributed by:
Susannah Wake
HILT Research Assistant
Centre for Digital Library Research
Andersonian Library
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, G4 0NS, United Kingdom
<susannah.wake@strath.ac.uk>

Finding information by subject is easy providing that every item is described using exactly the same subject term and the person searching knows what that subject term is. All other things being equal, the same is true where the search or browse is across a number of distributed services. However, if different services are using different terms for the same subject, and the user only knows one or none of these, the results retrieved are unlikely to be comprehensive and will contain much irrelevant material.

The project’s principle aims are to:

• thoroughly research the problem, analyse and document its exact nature in detail, focusing on UK requirements across the various communities, services and initiatives, but setting the study firmly in the context of international requirements and standards.

• analyse the data obtained, and discuss the results with the various communities with an aim to reaching a consensus within the project on how best to apply the findings in relation to existing or new subject schemes and thesauri.

• attempt to reach a similar consensus within the group of stakeholders generally, both at a workshop and through other methods.

• contribute to and co-operate with an external evaluation of the project.

• make a final report and recommendations to RSLP, JISC and various stakeholders, and the national and international community generally.

Dissemination

The HILT website contains more detailed information on the project, including the original project proposal and deliverables <http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk>. We also welcome membership to the HILT mailing list (mail <lis-hilt-org-request@mailbase.ac.uk>) though which progress will be reported and discussion will take place.

Invitation to interested parties

HILT is currently looking for parties who recognise the problem of cross-searching by subject and are interested in its resolution to participate in the study. Becoming a stakeholder will involve completing a questionnaire with the possibility of a follow up telephone interview. A list naming existing stakeholders can be found at <http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/AboutHILT/stakeholders.html>.

Sponsors and Partners

HILT, which began in September, is a one year project jointly funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Project partners include the Museum Documentation Association (MDA), National Council on Archives, National Grid for Learning - Scotland (NGfL), OCLC, Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC), Scottish University for Industry, and UKOLN <http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/AboutHILT/partners.html>.

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging Task Force on Multiple Manifestations of Electronic Resources

Contributed by:
Wayne Jones
Head, Serials Cataloging Section
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
<waynej@mit.edu>

One of the more intractable problems in providing cataloging access to electronic resources which exist in more than one format is deciding how many records to create. Should there be separate records for each of the formats, or should there just be one big record which accommodates them all?

That is one of the questions which the Task Force on Multiple Manifestations of Electronic Resources is trying to answer. Established last spring by the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), the task force is currently comprised of 14 representatives from PCC institutions, whose three-part charge is:

1. Identifying the most common types of versions and reproductions for textual resources currently available and the most bibliographically significant characteristics of each;

2. Recommending best practices for each, taking into account both cataloging staff and workload levels. Consideration should be given to:

• Methods of description that provide for clarity, efficiency, and low-maintenance

• Differing needs of shared and local catalogs

• The advisability of the single record technique (noting the existence of the electronic on the record for the print) and its applicability to monographic resources;

3. Defining principles by which determinations about whether to create single or separate records for versions and reproductions can be made in order to facilitate future decisions when new types of versions are published (e.g., Palm Pilot editions).

The task force also welcomes the opinions of catalogers, digital librarians, library managers -- anyone who has an interest in electronic resources and how bibliographic access is provided for them. You may provide general comments, or specific answers to the following questions derived from the charge above:

1. What are the most common types of versions and reproductions for textual resources, and what are their bibliographic characteristics?

2. What are the best practices for cataloging each type (e.g., separate records, or single "piggybacked" records)?

3. What are the defining principles on which to base decisions about whether to create single or separate records, for current as well as for future types?

These questions were posted in October to several relevant listservs, soliciting feedback from the subscribers (SERIALST, DIG_REF, AUTOCAT, OLAC, DIG-LIB, CORC). We welcome your input as well. Please send your own specific answers to these questions, or any general comments you might have, to the interim chair of the task force, Wayne Jones, <waynej@mit.edu>. If you'd like more background information about the task force, check out its website at <http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/tgmuler.html>.

The task force will be presenting an interim report to the PCC by the ALA Midwinter Meeting in January 2001, and the final report is due April 15, 2001.

Reference 24/7: High Tech or High Touch RUSA President's Program, American Library Association Annual Meeting, 2000

Contributed by:
George S. Porter
Engineering Librarian
Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science
Caltech, 1-43
Pasadena, California 91125-4300, USA <george@library.caltech.edu>

Reference services are evolving into the brave new world of 24/7 (24 hours a day / 7 days a week) global reference: automated, mediated, and mixed. A panel of 4 speakers offered insights through a 2-hour program and discussion in conjunction with the American Library Association Annual Meeting, 2000.

Email reference was pioneered a decade ago. Recent technological wrinkles have brought chat, MUDs (Multiple User Dialogue), MOOs (MUD, Object Oriented), and videoconferencing into the fray. Collaboration will enable librarians to offer services when they are needed from wherever they are available.

Where is technology taking us, or preferably, where it will enable us to go? How will the Collaborative Digital Reference Service function? Have information needs and information seeking behaviors changed with technology? What are the implications for the training of information providers?

All of these questions and more were addressed by the panelists:

Joe Janes
Professor, School of Information and Library Studies
University of Washington

Diane Kresh
Director, Public Service Collections
Library of Congress

Roy Tennant
Digital Library Project Manager
University of California, Berkeley

Sara K. Weissman
Reference Librarian
Morris County (NJ) Library

The prepared remarks of Joe Janes, Diane Kresh, and Roy Tennant have been posted on the RUSA (Reference and User Services Association) website as PowerPoint and PDF files <http://www.ala.org/rusa/presprog2000.html>.

New Developments at the Visual Arts Data Service (News Release)

Contributed by:
Philip Pothen
Information and Training Officer
Arts and Humanities Data Service
King's College London
75 - 79 York Road, 8th Floor
London, SE1 7AW United Kingdom <paivi.philip.pothen@ahds.ac.uk>

The Visual Arts Data Service is pleased to announce the following new collections available from its on-line catalogue at <http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/search.html>.

BRETTON HALL:

Two image databases from Bretton Hall, College of the University of Leeds, National Arts Education Archive Trust, resulting from the JISC Image Digitisation Initiative (JIDI) http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/jidi/ :

BASIC DESIGN COLLECTION: (c650 images)

The Basic Design Collection shows an approach to tertiary art education during the 1950s and 1960s which introduced notions of the European avant-garde through such artists / educators as: Richard Hamilton; Tom Hudson; Victor Pasmore and Harry Thubron. The collection includes examples of students' work, slides and photographs representing the Basic Design courses at King's College, Newcastle, Leeds, Leicester, Lancaster and Cardiff Colleges of Art, plus teaching programmes in Canada and in the USA

A.E. HALLIWELL COLLECTION: (c250 images)

A E Halliwell was a design educationist and professional graphic designer, who taught in higher education from the mid 1930's until the 1960's. The collection includes original designs by Halliwell for publicity posters, etc. from around the 1920s to 1940s e.g. for tourism and public services and material illustrating graphic and industrial design work by Halliwell and students at Camberwell College of Arts and Crafts and Central School of Art and Design.

Both these collections are now fully integrated and cross-searchable with VADS other image-database holdings:

'The Imperial War Museum: Concise Art Collection' (c1700 images)

'London College of Fashion: College Archive' (c1000 images)

OTHER NEW COLLECTIONS:

Millais Gallery Archive, Southhampton Institute

The Millais Gallery was opened in June 1996 to coincide with the opening of an exhibition organised in association with Southampton City Art Gallery to mark the centenary of Millais's death in August 1896. The Millais Gallery aims to focus on the work of young artists, designers, makers and curators; exhibitions of particular interest to the local and regional community; student exhibitions drawn from the Institute's art, design and media practice and theory courses; and historical/research-based exhibitions. The archive available from VADS currently represents shows at the Millais from 1996 - 1999 and contributes to VADS focus in the area of contemporary art and digital curatorship.

POSSE COLLECTIONS (Preserve Our Student Shows for Eternity)

With end of year shows at all levels in tertiary education increasingly documenting or indeed producing their work in digital media, VADS is undertaking an initiative to archive this material to provide an invaluable record of UK visual arts final year degree shows. We are thus very pleased to announce the three inaugural collections under this banner as:

Glasgow School of Art, (1995-1999)
University of Portsmouth Illustration Department (1995-1999)
Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University College (1998-2000)

Other collections currently available:

'Documentary Photography: Jacob Riis, Computer Aided Learning Package'

'Other Educated Persons: Art & Art Organisations in the East End of London, 1972 - 1999'

There is also now the facility for free-text selectable cross-searching of image database collections returning thumbnail to 'screen-size' images with accompanying 'brief', 'core' & 'full' catalogue records. Also available are links to: 'Search Help', 'Collection Information', 'Advanced Search' facilities and non 'image-database' collections.

VADS catalogue will continue to develop with new collections and enhancements to be announced periodically.

VADS welcomes feedback and enquiries to <info@vads.ahds.ac.uk>.

Further information: Philip Pothen 020 7928 7267.

UC Berkeley Professors Measure Exploding World Production of New Information (Excerpt from 18 Oct 2000 Press Release)

Courtesy of:
Kathleen Maclay
Media Relations
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, USA
<CKM@pa.urel.berkeley.edu>

The following is an excerpt from the press release, "UC Berkeley Professors Measure Exploding World Production of New Information" and is presented with the permission of Media Relations, University of California, Berkeley. The full press release may be seen at <http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2000/10/18_info.html>.

Two University of California, Berkeley, professors have just finished analyzing all new data produced worldwide last year -- on the Internet, in scholarly journals, even in junk mail -- and report not just staggering totals, but a "revolution" in information production and accessibility.

In their report, "How Much Information?" professors Hal Varian and Peter Lyman of the UC Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems (SIMS) report new information production in terms of paper, film, optical and magnetic data. They analyzed industry and government reports for production of information that also includes e-mail, digital production, videos, DVDs, CDs, broadcast outlets, photographs, books and newspapers.

The study has, for the first time, used "terabytes" as a common standard of measurement to compare the size of information in all media, linking and interpreting research reports from industry and academia. One terabyte equals a million megabytes or the text content of a million books. This standard makes it possible to compare growth trends for different media using one universal standard.

The numbers in the UC Berkeley report are mindboggling:

• The directly accessible "surface" Web consists of about 2.5 billion documents and is growing at a rate of 7.3 million pages per day.

• Counting the "surface" Web with the "deep" Web of connected databases, intranet sites and dynamic pages, there are about 550 billion documents, and 95 percent is publicly accessible.

• Fifty percent of all Internet users are native English speakers, while English language Web sites account for about 78 percent of all Web sites, and 96 percent of E-commerce Web sites.

• A white-collar worker receives about 40 e-mail messages daily at the office.

• Ninety percent of the world's e-mailboxes were found in the United States in 1984, but that dropped to 59 percent by the end of 1999. E-mail production accounts for about 500 times as much information as Web page production each year.

• Worldwide production of books increased by 2 percent in the last year.

• Production of newspapers in the last year decreased by 2 percent.

• The United States produces 35 percent of all print material, 40 percent of the images and more than half of the digitally stored material.

SIMS professors Lyman and Varian and their research assistants James Dunn, Aleksey Strygin and Kirsten Swearingen translated original content volume into bytes, using the terabyte as the project's smallest practical measure. Then they calculated how much storage each type of media takes when subjected to different compression techniques, and factored in anticipated duplication.

The professors said they were struck by three emerging trends.

One is "the 'democratization of data," the vast amount of unique information stored and also created by individuals. Original documents created by office workers represent nearly 90 percent of all original paper documents, while 56 percent of magnetic storage is in single-user desktop computers.

"A century ago, the average person could only create and access a small amount of information," wrote Varian and Lyman in their report. "Now, ordinary people not only have access to huge amounts of data, but are also able to create gigabytes of data themselves and, potentially, publish it to the world via the Internet."

The second surprise for the professors was the finding that print accounts for such a miniscule amount of the total information storage. But they said it doesn't mean print is dead, rather it is a very efficient and concentrated form for the communication of information.

The third striking finding for them was the dominance of digital information and its phenomenal growth. This further feeds the democratization of data, they said, because digital information is potentially accessible anywhere on the Internet and is a "universal" medium because it can copy from any other format.

The latest report is not in printed form, because its authors see it as a "living" document. It can be found at <http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/how-much-info/index.html> and will be updated periodically in response to comments from readers.

EMC Corp., the world's largest data storage systems company, financed the research.

OCLC Researchers Measure the World Wide Web

Courtesy of:
Ed O'Neill
Web Characterization Project Manager
OCLC Online Computer Library Center
Dublin,Ohio USA
<oneill@oclc.org>

OCLC Researchers Measure the World Wide Web
DUBLIN, Ohio, Oct. 16, 2000

In their annual review of the World Wide Web, researchers at OCLC have determined that the Web now contains about 7 million unique sites; that the public Web -- sites that offer content that is freely accessible by the general public -- constitutes about 40 percent of the total Web; and that the Web continues to expand at a rapid pace, but its rate of growth is diminishing over time.

According to the group's latest estimates, there were 7.1 million unique web sites, a 50 percent increase over the previous year's total of 4.7 million. Although the number of web sites has nearly tripled in size in the last two years, year-to-year growth rates are declining, falling from almost 80 percent between 1998 and 1999, to only about 50 percent between 1999 and 2000.

Public web sites constitute 41 percent of the Web, or about 2.9 million sites. Private sites -- whose content is subject to explicit access restrictions (e.g., Internet Protocol filters or password authentication), or is not intended for public use (e.g., web interfaces to privately owned hardware devices such as printers or routers) -- comprise 21 percent of the Web, or 1.5 million sites. The remaining 2.7 million sites -- or about 38 percent of the Web -- are provisional sites: their content is in an unfinished or transitory state (e.g., server default pages or "Site under construction" notices).

Adult sites -- those offering sexually explicit content -- now constitute about 2 percent of the public Web, or 70,000 sites. The proportion of the public Web occupied by adult sites has remained unchanged since 1998.

"The Web continues to grow at a substantial rate," said Ed O'Neill, manager of the OCLC Web Characterization Project. "But a comparison of the year-to-year growth rates suggests that the Web's expansion is slowing. This trend is even more pronounced in the public Web, which grew by about 80 percent between 1997 and 1998 but only by about a third between 1999 and 2000. Even in absolute terms, growth seems to be slowing: the public Web increased by 713,000 sites in the past year, compared to 772,000 sites between 1998 and 1999."

Brian Lavoie, a research scientist working on the Web Characterization Project, notes the increasing incidence of non-public web content. "For most people, the Web is the public Web -- that's where most web browsing takes place. But there's a lot of content out there that you would probably never encounter in the course of casual browsing; in other words, the private and provisional sites. Private sites in particular have exhibited steady growth relative to public sites in the past few years, accounting for about 12 percent of the Web two years ago, compared to over 20 percent today."

The Web Characterization Project, conducted by the OCLC Office of Research, has collected a random sample of web sites annually since 1997. Current results are based on analysis of the June 2000 sample. For analytical purposes, a web site is defined as content accessible through the HTTP protocol at a given location on the Internet.

More information on the Web Characterization Project is on the project web site <http://wcp.oclc.org/>

(Editor's note: Another interesting web characterization may be found in the report, White Paper: The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value, by Michael K. Bergman, Copyright 2000 BrightPlanet.com LLC, July 2000.)

IFLA Core Programme for the Advancement of Librarianship (ALP) Announces DANIDA Travel Grant 2001

Courtesy of:
Birgitta Sandell
Core Programme Director
IFLA ALP
c/o Uppsala University Library
SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
<ifla.alp@ub.uu.se>

IFLA ALP is pleased to announce the availability of the Danida Travel Grant, to support a number of delegates from developing countries to attend the 67th IFLA Council and General Conference, to be held in Boston, Massachusetts, 16-25 August 2001.

Background information about the Danida Travel Grant

In October 1998 the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Danida, allocated a generous grant, 900 000 DKK per year, for the purpose of setting up a Conference Travel Fund for Third World librarians.

For the 1999 Travel Grant, 305 valid applications were received by the application deadline. Of these applications 39 candidates were selected for support: 11 from Africa, 21 from Asia and Oceania and 7 from Latin America and the Caribbean. Another 11 applicants were placed on a waiting list. The selected candidates came from 35 different countries. For the Danida 2000 Travel Grant to attend the IFLA Conference in Jerusalem 263 valid applications were received and of these applications, 27 candidates were selected for support. They came from 27 different countries.

Danida Travel Grant 2001 - general information

Priority will be given to younger professionals with a minimum of 5 years of experience in the field of libraries.

In appointing the grants, the Grants Committee will look for a balance between all sectors of library and information work.

Applications, including professional curriculum vitae and information on present occupation should be submitted as soon as possible and should be received by the ALP Focal Point not later than 1 February 2001.

Criteria for allocation of the Danida Travel Grant:

• Candidates are from developing countries (according to Worldbank standards).

• Priority to younger professionals.

• Priority to applicants who are not regular IFLA conference attendees.

• Wide geographic distribution.

• General quality of application.

• Professional background and experience: level of education, positions held and professional experience in general. Type of library experience is also considered in order to get balance between all sectors of library and information work.

• Committed letter of application and well presented CV.

Application forms can be requested from the ALP office or you can print them in English, French or Spanish languages from the IFLA ALP web site located at: <http://www.ifla.org/VI/1/admin/grant01.htm>.

Copyright (c) 2000 Corporation for National Research Initiatives

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DOI: 10.1045/november2000-inbrief