LOC Workshop on Etexts - Library of Congress (life books to read .TXT) 📗

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DISCUSSION Re retrieval software “Digital file copyright” Scanning rate during production Autosegmentation Criteria employed in selecting books for scanning Compression and decompression of images OCR not precluded

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During the question-and-answer period that followed her presentation, PERSONIUS made these additional points:

* Re retrieval software, Cornell is developing a Unix-based server

as well as clients for the server that support multiple platforms

(Macintosh, IBM and Sun workstations), in the hope that people from

any of those platforms will retrieve books; a further operating

assumption is that standard interfaces will be used as much as

possible, where standards can be put in place, because CLASS

considers this retrieval software a library application and would

like to be able to look at material not only at Cornell but at other

institutions.

* The phrase “digital file copyright by Cornell University” was

added at the advice of Cornell’s legal staff with the caveat that it

probably would not hold up in court. Cornell does not want people

to copy its books and sell them but would like to keep them

available for use in a library environment for library purposes.

* In production the scanner can scan about 300 pages per hour,

capturing 600 dots per inch.

* The Xerox software has filters to scan halftone material and avoid

the moire patterns that occur when halftone material is scanned.

Xerox has been working on hardware and software that would enable

the scanner itself to recognize this situation and deal with it

appropriately—a kind of autosegmentation that would enable the

scanner to handle halftone material as well as text on a single page.

* The books subjected to the elaborate process described above were

selected because CLASS is a preservation project, with the first 500

books selected coming from Cornell’s mathematics collection, because

they were still being heavily used and because, although they were

in need of preservation, the mathematics library and the mathematics

faculty were uncomfortable having them microfilmed. (They wanted a

printed copy.) Thus, these books became a logical choice for this

project. Other books were chosen by the project’s selection committees

for experiments with the technology, as well as to meet a demand or need.

* Images will be decompressed before they are sent over the line; at

this time they are compressed and sent to the image filing system

and then sent to the printer as compressed images; they are returned

to the workstation as compressed 600-dpi images and the workstation

decompresses and scales them for display—an inefficient way to

access the material though it works quite well for printing and

other purposes.

* CLASS is also decompressing on Macintosh and IBM, a slow process

right now. Eventually, compression and decompression will take

place on an image conversion server. Trade-offs will be made, based

on future performance testing, concerning where the file is

compressed and what resolution image is sent.

* OCR has not been precluded; images are being stored that have been

scanned at a high resolution, which presumably would suit them well

to an OCR process. Because the material being scanned is about 100

years old and was printed with less-than-ideal technologies, very

early and preliminary tests have not produced good results. But the

project is capturing an image that is of sufficient resolution to be

subjected to OCR in the future. Moreover, the system architecture

and the system plan have a logical place to store an OCR image if it

has been captured. But that is not being done now.

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SESSION III. DISTRIBUTION, NETWORKS, AND NETWORKING: OPTIONS FOR DISSEMINATION

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ZICH Issues pertaining to CD-ROMs Options for publishing in CD-ROM *

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Robert ZICH, special assistant to the associate librarian for special projects, Library of Congress, and moderator of this session, first noted the blessed but somewhat awkward circumstance of having four very distinguished people representing networks and networking or at least leaning in that direction, while lacking anyone to speak from the strongest possible background in CD-ROMs. ZICH expressed the hope that members of the audience would join the discussion. He stressed the subtitle of this particular session, “Options for Dissemination,” and, concerning CD-ROMs, the importance of determining when it would be wise to consider dissemination in CD-ROM versus networks. A shopping list of issues pertaining to CD-ROMs included: the grounds for selecting commercial publishers, and inhouse publication where possible versus nonprofit or government publication. A similar list for networks included: determining when one should consider dissemination through a network, identifying the mechanisms or entities that exist to place items on networks, identifying the pool of existing networks, determining how a producer would choose between networks, and identifying the elements of a business arrangement in a network.

Options for publishing in CD-ROM: an outside publisher versus self-publication. If an outside publisher is used, it can be nonprofit, such as the Government Printing Office (GPO) or the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), in the case of government. The pros and cons associated with employing an outside publisher are obvious. Among the pros, there is no trouble getting accepted. One pays the bill and, in effect, goes one’s way. Among the cons, when one pays an outside publisher to perform the work, that publisher will perform the work it is obliged to do, but perhaps without the production expertise and skill in marketing and dissemination that some would seek. There is the body of commercial publishers that do possess that kind of expertise in distribution and marketing but that obviously are selective. In self-publication, one exercises full control, but then one must handle matters such as distribution and marketing. Such are some of the options for publishing in the case of CD-ROM.

In the case of technical and design issues, which are also important, there are many matters which many at the Workshop already knew a good deal about: retrieval system requirements and costs, what to do about images, the various capabilities and platforms, the trade-offs between cost and performance, concerns about local-area networkability, interoperability, etc.

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LYNCH Creating networked information is different from using networks as an access or dissemination vehicle Networked multimedia on a large scale does not yet work Typical CD-ROM publication model a two-edged sword Publishing information on a CD-ROM in the present world of immature standards Contrast between CD-ROM and network pricing Examples demonstrated earlier in the day as a set of insular information gems Paramount need to link databases Layering to become increasingly necessary Project NEEDS and the issues of information reuse and active versus passive use X-Windows as a way of differentiating between network access and networked information Barriers to the distribution of networked multimedia information Need for good, real-time delivery protocols The question of presentation integrity in client-server computing in the academic world Recommendations for producing multimedia

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Clifford LYNCH, director, Library Automation, University of California, opened his talk with the general observation that networked information constituted a difficult and elusive topic because it is something just starting to develop and not yet fully understood. LYNCH contended that creating genuinely networked information was different from using networks as an access or dissemination vehicle and was more sophisticated and more subtle. He invited the members of the audience to extrapolate, from what they heard about the preceding demonstration projects, to what sort of a world of electronics information—scholarly, archival, cultural, etc.—they wished to end up with ten or fifteen years from now. LYNCH suggested that to extrapolate directly from these projects would produce unpleasant results.

Putting the issue of CD-ROM in perspective before getting into generalities on networked information, LYNCH observed that those engaged in multimedia today who wish to ship a product, so to say, probably do not have much choice except to use CD-ROM: networked multimedia on a large scale basically does not yet work because the technology does not exist. For example, anybody who has tried moving images around over the Internet knows that this is an exciting touch-and-go process, a fascinating and fertile area for experimentation, research, and development, but not something that one can become deeply enthusiastic about committing to production systems at this time.

This situation will change, LYNCH said. He differentiated CD-ROM from the practices that have been followed up to now in distributing data on CD-ROM. For LYNCH the problem with CD-ROM is not its portability or its slowness but the two-edged sword of having the retrieval application and the user interface inextricably bound up with the data, which is the typical CD-ROM publication model. It is not a case of publishing data but of distributing a typically stand-alone, typically closed system, all—software, user interface, and data—on a little disk. Hence, all the between-disk navigational issues as well as the impossibility in most cases of integrating data on one disk with that on another. Most CD-ROM retrieval software does not network very gracefully at present. However, in the present world of immature standards and lack of understanding of what network information is or what the ground rules are for creating or using it, publishing information on a CD-ROM does add value in a very real sense.

LYNCH drew a contrast between CD-ROM and network pricing and in doing so highlighted something bizarre in information pricing. A large institution such as the University of California has vendors who will offer to sell information on CD-ROM for a price per year in four digits, but for the same data (e.g., an abstracting and indexing database) on magnetic tape, regardless of how many people may use it concurrently, will quote a price in six digits.

What is packaged with the CD-ROM in one sense adds value—a complete access system, not just raw, unrefined information—although it is not generally perceived that way. This is because the access software, although it adds value, is viewed by some people, particularly in the university environment where there is a very heavy commitment to networking, as being developed in the wrong direction.

Given that context, LYNCH described the examples demonstrated as a set of insular information gems—Perseus, for example, offers nicely linked information, but would be very difficult to integrate with other databases, that is, to link together seamlessly with other source files from other sources. It resembles an island, and in this respect is similar to numerous stand-alone projects that are based on videodiscs, that is, on the single-workstation concept.

As scholarship evolves in a network environment, the paramount need will be to link databases. We must link personal databases to public databases, to group databases, in fairly seamless ways—which is extremely difficult in the environments under discussion with copies of databases proliferating all over the place.

The notion of layering also struck LYNCH as lurking in several of the projects demonstrated. Several databases in a sense constitute information archives without a significant amount of navigation built in. Educators, critics, and others will want a layered structure—one that defines or links paths through the layers to allow users to reach specific points. In LYNCH’s view, layering will become increasingly necessary, and not just within a single resource but across resources (e.g., tracing mythology and cultural themes across several classics databases as well as a database of Renaissance culture). This ability to organize resources, to build things out of multiple other things on the network or select pieces of it, represented for LYNCH one of the key aspects of network information.

Contending that information reuse constituted another significant issue, LYNCH commended to the audience’s attention Project NEEDS (i.e., National Engineering Education Delivery System). This project’s objective is to produce a database of engineering courseware as well as the components that can be used to develop new courseware. In a number of the existing applications, LYNCH