Communications of the ACM articles from April 1995

Communications of the ACM archives from April 1995

Copyright and digital libraries.
April 1, 1995... This issue of Communications highlights some of the many projects underway for the creation or enhancement of digital libraries. At the moment, no one seems to think there will be only one gargantuan digital library to sate the public's appetite...

Digital libraries. (Cover Story)
April 1, 1995... This year marks the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush's seminal article [3] that paved the way for fields like information retrieval and hypertext. Bush's efforts helped raise the level of public support for scientific research at the end of...

Rich interaction in the digital library.
April 1, 1995... Effective information access involves rich interactions between users and information residing in diverse locations. Users seek and retrieve information from the sources - for example, file servers, databases, and digital libraries - and use...

The MG retrieval system: compressing for space and speed. (experimental full-text retrieval system)(includes related article)
April 1, 1995... Recent advances in compression and indexing techniques have yielded a qualitative change in the feasibility of large-scale full-text retrieval. Compression is important not just for economical storage of documents, but also for efficient...

Wide area technical report service: technical reports online.
April 1, 1995... Wide Area Technical Report Service (WATERS) is a distributed database of computer science technical reports. Contributors are departments of computer science that make their reports, stored locally at their sites, available through World-Wide Web...

The information zone system.
April 1, 1995... Spatial data is complex data composed of hundreds or thousands of attribute/value pairs that define logical, physical, and abstract geographic features. It has traditionally been available to researchers and other users as paper maps, but it is...

Dienst: an architecture for distributed document libraries. (Cornell University's digital library architecture)
April 1, 1995... As one of the five universities participating in the ARPA-sponsored Computer Science Technical Report project, we at Cornell have developed a digital library architecture called Dienst. Dienst is a protocol and implementation that provides...

Knowledge-based editing and visualization for hypermedia encyclopedias.
April 1, 1995... One of the main goals in developing digital libraries is to provide users with opportunities for accessing and using information in highly flexible and user-oriented ways not available in current information repositories. This implies a focus on...

Envision: a user-centered database of computer science literature.
April 1, 1995... Project Envision is an early NSF-funded digital library effort to develop a multimedia collection of computer science literature with full-text searching and full-content retrieval capabilities. Envision was launched in 1991 in accordance with...

Making a digital library: the chemistry online retrieval experiment.
April 1, 1995... The CORE project is an electronic library of primary journal articles in chemistry, containing about five years of twenty primary journals published by the American Chemical Society (about 425,000 pages). Unlike many digital library projects,...

An appreciation of Laurence Rosenberg. (National Science Foundation's departed program manager and deputy director)
April 1, 1995... It takes many different kinds of contributions to create a viable research community, and many dedicated people have made major contributions in the past decade to make things like the NSF Digital Libraries initiative happen. I'd like to take a...

Informedia Digital Video Library.
April 1, 1995... The Informedia Digital Video Library Project is developing new technologies for creating full-content search and retrieval digital video libraries. Working in collaboration with WQED Pittsburgh, the project is creating a test-bed that will enable...

The Stanford digital library project. (Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project)
April 1, 1995... The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project will develop enabling technologies for an integrated "virtual" library to provide an array of new services and uniform access to networked information collections. The Integrated Digital Library...

UC Berkeley's digital library project. (University of California at Berkeley)
April 1, 1995... For digital libraries to succeed, we must abandon the traditional notion of "library" altogether. The reason is as follows: The digital "library" Will be a collection of distributed information services; producers of material will make it...

Alexandria Digital Library.
April 1, 1995... The goal of the Alexandria Digital Library Project is to develop a distributed system that provides a comprehensive range of library services for collections of spatially indexed and graphical information. While such collections include digitized...

Building the Interspace: the Illinois digital library project. (University of Illinois)
April 1, 1995... The University of Illinois is building a large-scale digital library testbed, planned to grow to thousands of users and thousands of documents, with the goal of bringing professional quality search and display to Internet information services....

University of Michigan Digital Library Project.
April 1, 1995... The University of Michigan Digital Library Project (NSF-UMDL) is a multidisciplinary collaboration among faculty and staff throughout the University of Michigan. Initial use and evaluation of the NSF-UMDL will take place in science classes in Ann...

The British Library's Initiatives for Access projects.
April 1, 1995... The British Library holds over 18 million volumes and is one of the world's greatest treasure houses of written information from every age and culture. In 1993 it published its Strategic Objectives for the Year 2000, which made a commitment to...

Library of Congress digital library effort.
April 1, 1995... The Library of Congress has been actively seeking gift funds to continue the digitization efforts begun five years ago by its American Memory pilot project, which has successfully digitized more than 210,000 items. Many of these items have been...

The roles of digital libraries in teaching and learning. (includes related article)
April 1, 1995... Libraries have long served crucial roles in learning. The first great library, in Alexandria 2,000 years ago, was really the first university. It consisted of a zoo and various cultural artifacts in addition to much of the ancient world's written...

Going digital: a look at assumptions underlying digital libraries.
April 1, 1995... What are digital libraries, how should they be designed, how will they be used, and what relationship will they bear to what we now call "libraries"? Although we cannot hope to answer all these crucial questions in this short article, we do hope...

Digital libraries, value, and productivity.
April 1, 1995... A digital library is popularly viewed as an electronic version of a public library. But replacing paper by electronic storage leads to three major differences: storage in digital form, direct communication to obtain material, and copying from a...