http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/ Recent content in Issue 21 on Ariadne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/at-the-event/aliss.html Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/at-the-event/aliss.html The 1999 Annual Conference & AGM of ALISS (Academic Librarians in the Social Sciences) was held at the University of Wales at Bangor 30 June-1 July. The conference theme was the very current and increasingly important one of provision for non-traditional students in academic libraries. Indeed, the concept of flexibility and diversity in learning and the great variety found in today’s student population in the age of lifelong learning was highlighted at breakfast - before the conference actually started. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/subject-gateways/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/subject-gateways/ This information paper was written by the National Library of Australia to describe the scope and intent of four of Australia's national subject gateways: Agrigate [2], the Australian Virtual Engineering Library (AVEL) [3], EdNA Online - the website of the Education Network of Australia (EdNA) [4], and MetaChem [5]. The four criteria shaping subject gateway development were identified as an operational framework, standards & guidelines, quality of service delivery, and scope. They have been mapped to the characteristics of the Australian subject gateways as described below. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/bized/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/bized/ The HubFrom 1 August Biz/ed is continuing resource discovery for the subject areas business, economics and management under the auspices of the Social Science, Business and Law Hub funded by JISC through the Resource Discovery Network Centre [1]. SOSIG [2] will act as an umbrella to a number of catalogues including Biz/ed’s. Biz/ed will continue to have its own interface and look and feel, and Biz/ed’s records will continue to form the economics and business sections of the SOSIG hub. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/disinhe/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/disinhe/ The web is one of the most rapidly developing media for communication and information storage and retrieval available today. Many people with extra-ordinary needs (such as users of palm-tops, legacy systems, and car-based systems, as well as disabled people using special technology) are restricted from access to the information available on the web, due to poor design caused by both a lack of information and sources of good advice for developers. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/at-the-event/bath-profile.html Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/at-the-event/bath-profile.html The Bath Profile: An International Z39.50 Specification for Library Applications and Resource DiscoveryA meeting [1] was held in Bath from 15-17 August in order to progress work on the evolving international Z39.50 Profile to improve semantic interoperability when searching across diverse systems. For further information on Z39.50, see a separate article in this issue of Ariadne [2] Discussion of this Profile began on a listserv (ZIP-PIZ-L) and was continued through teleconferences involving a small group of librarians, vendors and others prior to this meeting. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/digiwilf/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/digiwilf/ PH How did the WWW1 JTAP seminars get started? SL A long time ago we did a set of Hypercard stacks on Isaac Rosenberg, which I converted for the web in January ‘95, and then when the JTAP call came out I thought that we could expand the tutorial and make four tutorials. And then we had all the archive nearby: we thought we would tackle the idea of creating both online tutorials and a digital archive which lecturers could use. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/ecms/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/ecms/ Technology issues are of utmost importance in Electronic Copyright Management Systems (ECMS). In fact, these technologies can in part determine the success or failure of these systems. In a traditional environment, consumers enjoy buying with efficient systems and security. This is even truer in the Internet. Thus the need to develop and deploy technologies that are efficient and can assure security. This work covers these technology issues, illustrating the following points in an objective way: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/eevl/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/eevl/ It is fairly common practice for anyone writing about a service or project with which they are involved to emphasise its benefits, popularity and plus points, and so perhaps the title of this article EEVL ‘not a success’ may seem a little abstruse and may even have grabbed your attention. If that’s the case, let me explain what I mean by “EEVL ‘not a success’”. I do not mean that EEVL [01] has been unsuccessful. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/editorial/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/editorial/ This is the twenty first issue of Ariadne. Our first issue was published in January 1996, under the editorship of John Kirriemuir. Twenty one issues is not exactly a birthday, but nevertheless a significant milestone: I'm reasonably sure that when the idea of a web magazine was first floated in 1995, it was not imagined that it would still be around five years later. There are five main articles in this issue, each covering aspects of library networking which have to be synthesised effectively if we are to achieve the kind of seamlessly interconnected and useful electronic resources which the community is aiming at. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/planet-sosig/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/planet-sosig/ Social Science Business and Law HubWe are pleased to announce that as of August 1999 SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway), the UK’s number one place to find social science information on the Internet will be expanding its service. SOSIG provides a browsable and searchable database of thousands of high quality Internet resources of relevance to social science researchers, academics and practitioners. The gateway will draw on the expertise of a number of specialist organisations within the social sciences to help build its database of resources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/search-engines/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/search-engines/ FAST - new but better?FAST - Fast Search and Transfer ASA was established on July 16th 1997 and the search engine (1) arose out of a project initiated at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, Trondheim. Their system is powered by Dell Systems and they have an impressive grouping of partners, such as 3Com, CompuServe, Corbis, Lycos, and almost inevitably, Microsoft and Sun. The aim of FAST is to index the entire web by the end of this year; they expect to be able to index one billion documents and beyond. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/pubmed/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/pubmed/ In my opinion, there is no real question that completely paperless systems will emerge in science and in other fields. The only real question is “when will it happen?” We can reasonably expect, I feel, that a rather fully developed electronic information system … will exist by the year 2000, although it could conceivably come earlier. F. Wilfrid Lancaster (1978) [1] Predicting the future is very dangerous. Wilfrid Lancaster’s 21 year old comment may seem unduly optimistic when it mentions the arrival of ‘completely paperless’ systems, but the Internet and the World Wide Web would appear (almost) to be his ‘fully developed electronic information system’. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-editor/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-editor/ I work in a discipline where scholars are as likely to be interested in a three-quarter-century-old article written in an obscure journal with a circulation of a thousand copies as they are in a lavish and masterly new publication of an international exhibition of never-before-seen artifacts. The archaeologies of scholarship on the ancient Near East are complex and arcane. The skills required to interpret them are taken for granted on the assumption that university students should already know how to use a library (as any schoolboy knows. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/unix/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/unix/ mod_perl [1] has to be one of the most useful and powerful of the Apache modules. Beneath the inconspicuous name, this module marries two of the most successful and widely acclaimed products of OSS, the Apache Webserver [2] and Perl [3]. The result is a kind of Web developers Utopia, with Perl providing easy access to, and control of, the formidable Apache API. Powerful applications can be rapidly created and deployed as solutions to anything from an office Intranet to Enterprise level Web requirements. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/public-libraries/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/public-libraries/ Since the publication of the hugely influential New Library: the People’s Network, [1] and the follow-up document detailing the plans for rolling out the network, Building the New Library Network, [2] we have seen a whole range of government policy documents and initiatives stressing the importance of the role of the public library in the developing “information society” [3]. Public libraries are increasingly being recognised and heralded as ideal local delivery points for a range of national programmes addressing lifelong learning, access to IT skills and services and the delivery of government services. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-cache/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-cache/ Why are UK universities using Web caches?Whenever a student or academic tries to connect to a Web page, there is a significant chance that another person has already viewed the same Web page in the not too distant past. If a Web page is based on a US machine, it can be slow and expensive to load directly from the US, so it is worth saving a copy of the Web page on a UK-based ‘Web cache’ (which is sometimes called a ‘proxy cache’, to distinguish it from the cache on the user’s hard drive). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-focus/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-focus/ The "Institutional Web Management: The Next Steps" workshop took place at Goldsmiths College, London on 7-9 September 1999. This was the third annual event for institutional web managers which has been organised by UK Web Focus. The first workshop was held over 2 day (16/17 July 1997) at Kings College London. As described in the workshop report published in Ariadne [1] the event attracted a total of 95 participants. The workshop provided a valuable opportunity for web editors to meet their peers at other institutions and compare experiences. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/webwatch/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/webwatch/ In the previous issue of Ariadne an analysis of 404 error messages provided on UK University web sites was carried out [1]. In this issue an analysis of indexing software used to provide searches on UK University web sites is given. Although the WebWatch project [2] has finished, UKOLN will continue to carry out occasional surveys across UK HE web sites and publish reports in Ariadne. This will enable trends to be observed and documented. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/nt-explorer/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/nt-explorer/ IIS has been around for quite some time now. IIS 2.0 can be found on the Windows NT 4.0 Server installation CD-ROM. This version of IIS was pretty basic, and changing advanced settings usually involved messing around with the Windows registry. Version 3.0 was little different from 2.0, but it did see the introduction of server-side scripting through the use of the innovative Active Server Pages [1]. By contrast, version 4. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/z3950/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/z3950/ Z39.50. Despite certain nominative similarities, it's not a robot from that other blockbuster of the summer, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, but rather the cuddly and approachable name for an important standard of relevance to many working with information resources in a distributed environment. In this particular summer blockbuster (Ariadne, to which I'm sure many readers frequently refer in the same paragraph as Star Wars), I'll attempt to remove some of the mystique surrounding this much-maligned standard, and illustrate some of what it can be used for.