Communications of the ACM articles from April 1998

Communications of the ACM archives from April 1998

Editorial pointers.(Editorial)
April 1, 1998... THE last time we took an extended look at the state of digital library technologies (April 1995), it resulted in one of the most sought-after issues in the history of Communications. It was only three short years ago that we covered the...

A gamer's continuing education.(News Track)(Brief Article)
April 1, 1998... A new four-year college that specializes solely in computer-game programming opened in Redmond, Wash. Part trade school, part boot camp, the DigiPen Institute of Technology is the natural outgrowth of a booming video-game industry in desperate...

Gimme bandwidth.(News Track)(Brief Article)
April 1, 1998... Telephone, satellite, and cable companies are spending billions in the race to introduce technology so users can link to the Net at lightning speeds--up to 250 times faster than the fastest modem. Speedier connections on the Net are long...

Colleges ranked.(URL Watch)(Brief Article)
April 1, 1998... U.S. News Online's ".EDU," a college and career Web site, published the magazine's annual ranking of 1998's America's Best Graduate Schools. The online version expands on the printed version and offers full searchability. The site features...

Where's that ISP.(URL Watch)(Brief Article)
April 1, 1998... A new Internet search engine called ISP check provides visitors with service and pricing information on dial-up and leased-line access, virtual Web hosting, and dedicated hosting and server collocation. The site claims uniqueness because it...

The Times's daily news.(URL Watch)(Brief Article)
April 1, 1998... For your daily computer news, www.computernewsdaily.com, is a redesigned New York Times Syndicate Web site offering highlights on industry issues, hardware, software, technology, and deal-making, utilizing worldwide news partnerships with top...

10 trillion calcs/sec.(News Track)(Brief Article)
April 1, 1998... IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, the machine that beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov last May, will soon be eclipsed by one 1,000 times faster. The computer, code named "Option White," was commissioned by the Department of Energy to be built...

China's Search Fox.(News Track)(Brief Article)
April 1, 1998... Officials from Internet Technologies China (ITC) formally unveiled Sohoo, or "Search Fox" in English (www.sohoo. com.cn), a search engine for the Chinese portion of the Web. The absence of a powerful Chinese-based search engine has made it...

Surgery by voice command.(News Track)(Brief Article)
April 1, 1998... Surgeons, greatly assisted by the endoscope (a tiny optical tube connected to a video camera and light gear) allowing operations to be viewed on video monitors, may soon have another high-tech hand. A voice-activated robot, the Aesop 3000, that...

Monica Lewinsky as net bait.(News Track)(Brief Article)
April 1, 1998... Several enterprising and exploitive online businesses have cashed in on the latest Washington scandal, using the former White House intern at the center of the Administration's tempest to lure anyone looking for the name Lewinsky through an...

Passing time on the PC.(News Track)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
April 1, 1998... PASSING TIME ON THE PC Average usage in minutes per day All age groups 117.8 55+ men and women 130.2 55+ men 146.3 55+ women 114.1 Source: Media Metrix Inc., SoftUsage Report 1997 (based on data...

Encoding the law into digital libraries.(Legally Speaking)
April 1, 1998... Information technology policy is too important to leave entirely to lawyers. This theme has been at the core of my work in the past decade. It is the reason I have entreated computing professionals, including readers of Communications, to...

Whose net is it anyway?(Viewpoint)
April 1, 1998... I DON'T WATCH TELEVISION ALL THAT OFTEN, but lately when I do it seems as though half the commercials are trying to convince me that some company--Microsoft, AT&T, MCI, IBM, it doesn't really matter who--deserves my undying gratitude, or at...

Readers "thinking objectively".(Forum)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 1998... The following letters are in response to Mauri Laitinen's and Mohamed Fayad's "Thinking Objectively" column (Nov. 1997, p. 125). While Laitinen and Fayad have many valid points, the essence of their arguments revolves around the...

Toward a worldwide digital library.
April 1, 1998... DIGITAL LIBRARIES CAN BE AMONG THE MOST COMPLEX AND advanced forms of information systems because they often involve collaboration support, digital document preservation, distributed database management, hypertext, information filtering,...

Interoperability for digital libraries worldwide: how to achieve interoperability among the world's scattered digital libraries? Nobody knows exactly, though it's worth keeping several points in mind when creating the links.(Interoperability)
April 1, 1998... Interoperability is a central concern when building digital libraries as collections of independently developed components that rely on each other to accomplish larger tasks. The ultimate goal for such systems is for the components to evolve...

Accessing distributed cultural heritage information: a consortium's use of the international Z39.50 standard moves access to museum-based digital collections to a new plateau.(Interoperability)
April 1, 1998... THE CONSORTIUM FOR THE COMPUTER INTERCHANGE OF MUSEUM INFORMATION (CIMI) is leading an international effort to provide distributed search and retrieval of cultural heritage information [1]. A primary aspect of CIMI's work utilizes ANSI/NISO...

Digital access to antiquities: as a direct path to original sources, digitized manuscripts and images should reflect not only the artists' values but the readers' privacy and the owners' confidentiality.(Special Types of Digital Libraries)(Industry Overview)
April 1, 1998... WE AT IBM, ALONG WITH OUR COLLABORATORS, ARE MAKING PROGRESS toward worldwide access to digital images of art, ancient artifacts, historic manuscripts, and other materials of worldwide significance. Since 1985 we have worked with collections of...

FedStats promotes statistical literacy.(Special Types of Libraries)
April 1, 1998... THE MAJOR STATISTICAL AGENCIES OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT HAVE CREATED a publicly accessible digital library called FedStats (www.FedStats.gov). The library's holdings--accessed by millions of people each month--are stored and maintained...

New role for community networks: communities as very large repositories of information are digital libraries with some unique browsing and data acquisition characteristics.(Special Types of Libraries)
April 1, 1998... COMMUNITY INFORMATION COVERS A WIDE RANGE OF SOURCES. IT ALSO serves many users, encompassing government, health and public safety organizations, businesses of all types, service organizations, tourist attractions, historical societies, and...

Viewing multilingual documents on your local Web browser: a new technology allows users to browse multilingual documents on the Internet.(Multilingual Support)
April 1, 1998... MULTILINGUALITY IS AN IMPORTANT ASPECT OF THE DIGITAL LIBRARY AND ITS INTERNATIONAL network, and a multilingual browser is an essential tool for international access to and sharing of global information. The Web has expanded very rapidly...

Distributed Chinese bibliographic searching: a Singaporean project delivers multilingual support.(Multilingual Support)
April 1, 1998... CHINESE LIBRARY (CLIB) WAS CREATED AS A PILOT PROJECT IN SINGAPORE to demonstrate distributed multilingual searching of heterogeneous bibliographic library databases. The first phase focused on supporting access to Chinese bibliographic records...

NSF-EU Multilingual Information Access: imagine information storage, access, and presentation without first translating into the user's native language.(Multilingual Support)
April 1, 1998... THE FIRST MEETING OF A NEW WORKING GROUP ON MULTILINGUAL INFORMATION Access for Digital Libraries was held last November in New York under the joint sponsorship of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the European Union (EU). This...

A public library based on full-text retrieval: full-text retrieval can substitute for bibliographic metadata as a means of accessing large library collections.(New Zealand)
April 1, 1998... THE NEW ZEALAND DIGITAL LIBRARY AIMS TO IMPOSE STRUCTURE ON ANARCHIC and uncataloged repositories of information providing information consumers with effective tools to locate and peruse what they need. Our goal is to produce an easy-to-use...

Students access books and journals through MeDoc: the MeDoc digital library operates as a network of distributed servers.(Germany)
April 1, 1998... ROJECT MEDOC (MULTIMEDIA ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTS) IS AN EXPERIMENTAL digital library initiative promoted by the German Informatics Society (GI). The project, whose full title is Development and Evaluation of Open Fulltext Information Systems for...

Discovery of resources within a distributed library system: digital library technologies benefit from an international talent base.(Central Europe)
April 1, 1998... THE COMPUTER AND AUTOMATION RESEARCH INSTITUTE OF THE HUNGARIAN Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) is actively involved in the foundation and management of a globally distributed digital library within Central Europe called the Networked Computer...

Initiatives that center on scientific dissemination: recent projects focus on collecting and sharing environmental and scientific data.(Brazil)
April 1, 1998... WORK IN DIGITAL LIBRARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN BRAZIL IS JUST beginning. Some of the most relevant efforts involve gathering and consolidating data on environmental planning and disseminating scientific publications. There is growing...

R&D for a nationwide general-purpose system: the Korean language and literary styles pose special challenges between links.(Korea)
April 1, 1998... FOLLOWING THE 1995 GOVERNMENT-INITIATED EFFORT TO DEVELOP A HIGH-SPEED network infrastructure in Korea, the idea of building digital libraries has become a popular topic among Korean librarians, researchers, and government officials. While...

Many projects that depend on collaboration: like traditional libraries, their digital counterparts unite to serve higher education.(United Kingdom)
April 1, 1998... LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY HAS A LONG HISTORY OF DIGITAL LIBRARY research projects, including BLEND [4], Quartet, ELVYN [3], Cafe Jus [5], and HyperLib [1]. All, with the exception of the last, were funded by the British Library's Research and...

Libraries' new role in electronic scholarly publishing: five high-profile projects show how it's working and (sometimes) making money, too.(Supporting Technologies)
April 1, 1998... MANY DIGITAL LIBRARY PROJECTS INVOLVE LIBRARIES SERVING AS ACCESS POINTS for materials provided by others, usually publishers. Here, I discuss some results from a research survey that considered how university libraries might take active roles...

Semantic information retrieval: let industrial designers learn from the experts in the human sciences as well as from their companies' collective memories.(Supporting Technologies)
April 1, 1998... DESIGN OF SEMANTIC INFORMATION RETRIEVAL FOR DIGITAL LIBRARIES RAISES several issues that call for cross-disciplinary cooperation with such human science disciplines as psychology, sociology, and information science. Therefore, an international...

Discourse analysis of user requests: discourse analysis reveals user vocabularies for inclusion in interfaces when you don't speak a Web page's language.(Supporting Technologies)
April 1, 1998... WHEN USING RETRIEVAL ENGINES TO SEARCH THE WORLD-WIDE WEB, USERS need to use the vocabulary of the relevant Web pages. However, the vocabularies of many public service providers consist of professional, technical, and official terminology users...

Sorting out searching: a user-interface framework for text searches: how to satisfy users whose searches return mountains of irrelevant documents--or nothing at all? Emphasize user-interface clarity and consistency.(Supporting Technologies)
April 1, 1998... INDIVIDUAL USER INTERFACES FOR TEXT SEARCHING ARE OFTEN CONFUSING; AS a group they are seriously inconsistent. We propose a four-phase framework for user-interface design that provides common structure and terminology for searching while...

Strong vs. weak: approaches to systems development: there are many different roads to follow when it comes to problem solving.
April 1, 1998... Systems development is, fundamentally, a problem-solving activity. A problem in an application domain is transformed by the systems development process into a solution in the computer's implementation domain. What can systems development...

Yin and Yang in computer science.
April 1, 1998... "The most fruitful developments have always emerged where two different kinds of thinking met." --Heisenberg Medical research has produced interesting results with respect to the contrary qualities of the left and right portions of the...

On concurrent programming.(Insider)
April 1, 1998... Concurrent programs are notoriously difficult to get right. This is as true today as it was 30 years ago. But 30 years ago, concurrent programs would be found only in the bowels of operating systems, and these were built by specialists. Today,...