The VALA2000 10th Biennial Conference and Exhibition was held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Melbourne, Australia from 16 – 18 February 2000. The theme of the conference was Books and bytes : technologies for the hybrid library.
Over the past 5 years or so the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) working on behalf of UK Higher Education has sponsored a series of initiatives in the field of electronic information. The main aim of the paper is to illustrate how this has led through successive refinements via the idea of the hybrid library, and through this to the Distributed National Electronic Resource (the DNER). Some links with related work in Australia are mentioned.
In this paper we discuss the role of the OPAC as a hybrid library service and of the catalogue server as a provider element in a hybrid information environment. We identify developments required in the search and retrieval capabilities of the catalogue server to operate effectively in such an environment. We look under the hybrid library bonnet at the functions and metadata needed for management of online and physical collections. Lastly, we look at the architecture needing to be supported by library systems for storage and delivery of digital collections in a hybrid information environment.
In 1998/99 the State Library of Victoria conducted a usability evaluation of the Library’s Web site. This paper examines the evaluation process and the consequent recommendations and implementation. Issues to be addressed include:
the evaluation process
the recommendations from the evaluation report
the development and project management of a web strategy
the role of State Library staff in the production of online content
the relationships between our online and onsite users
the re-engineering of the navigational infrastructure, and
proposals for e-commerce, specialist channels, visitors’ centre, visitor registration and Victorian Certificate of Education targeted material.
First, Gulliver is described and put into a Victorian Government policy context – what is it, and what does it aim to achieve?
Gulliver is part of Libraries Online, a Victorian Government program which links with the Commonwealth’s Rural Libraries Online.
Gulliver builds on these development initiatives by adding content to the network. Gulliver is one of a group of Victorian Government information society initiatives. It will ensure that quality, easy-to-use and up-to-date information on a diverse range of topics is available to all Victorians.
Second, the global context – is Gulliver head, shoulders (and knees) above the rest? The Gulliver initiative will be placed in a wider context and linked to the Virtual Victorian Library.
Thin client or network computing is a hot topic. The hype claims lower total cost of ownership, faster applications deployment and reduced management pain, compared to traditional computing architectures. Early in 1998 the Flinders University Library installed network computers in the Central and branch libraries for student access to the Internet. This paper is a review of network computers in the light of our experience over the past two years. Do network computers offer all that is claimed in the hype? Are there hidden costs? What are the issues of configuration, server scaling, network performance and fault diagnosis? Do they have a future in the Library arena?
eCommerce heralds a revolution in which businesses interact, collaborate and communicate electronically. Typically, this is based on the Internet; a global public network in which chaos seems to reign supreme.
Companies at the forefront of the eCommerce revolution are developing business strategies that incorporate advanced technologies to redefine industries to their advantage. Many of the fastest growing companies operate solely as an eBusiness. Many global enterprises are now recognising that the development of a sound eCommerce strategy is not just a prerequisite to remaining competitive – it is paramount to survival. As a result, every company is faced with the question of how to rapidly grow and extend their eBusiness, at the same time ensuring that all interactions are authenticated and can be audited.
Dealing with this transformation, or making use of the revolution to one’s competitive advantage, requires transcending the technology landscape. SAFECommerce involves underpinning an eBusiness with a set of services that allow for a secure foundation to be built upon. It is essential that the development of an eBusiness incorporates services that track its complete lifecycle from developing an eBusiness concept through to implementing a solution and finally to transforming it as the marketplace demands.
Literature search and delivery in the World Wide Web becomes a rapidly expanding market. Up to now the search is mostly cost-free. But in the future we expect the appearance of more and more providers charging for their services. The main problems are finding the right provider and extracting the information. UniCats is a system for intelligent information search and extraction from multiple providers Web sites. One important part of the system is the so-called wrapper. This paper concentrates on wrappers and their generators. The wrappers’ task is the translation of a customer’s query into the source’s syntax and the re-translation of the answer. Applying these wrappers in an electronic commerce environment needs additional functionality, e.g., navigation through a provider’s site, collection of the information the customer desires or cost pre-calculation. Because of the variety of the source’s functionality, we need a flexible and individually built wrapper. This could be achieved using a modular concept. For a wide acceptance of our system, easy wrapper generation is important. Thus, we develop a wrapper generator which enables laymen with no programming skills to build an individual wrapper for an information provider in an electronic commerce environment.
This paper aims to provide an overview of developments to date in the evolution of the scholarly journal in terms of the transformation of the form and function of the artefacts of scholarly communication (journals and the articles they contain). The paper starts by first outlining three critical theoretical perspectives. It then proceeds to consider the transformations in the form and function of journals that are occurring or might occur. In each of these cases the insights from the relevant body of theory are drawn upon. The paper concludes by speculating on the future of the form and functions of the journal based on the discussion of theory and the literature.
Libraries have always been adopters of new technology and the integration of such technology has enhanced the range of services and resources that can be supplied from a single library. The traditional publisher may have been lagging behind in the adoption of new technologies and it is only in recent times that publishers are using digital delivery to enhance their print-based titles. However, as the publisher is the holder of copyright to a large body of information, they could enter into competition with libraries by providing direct access to this content. This paper explores whether, in the digital age, the publisher and library are competitors or whether the real need is for synergy and partnership to create a critical mass of Australian digital content.
This paper discusses the various full text models that have emerged in the last few years. Three basic models of full text, with variations, will be submitted to a reality check as concerns their advantages, disadvantages and challenges that lay ahead. We will be discussing Publisher-supplied full text; third-party, or Aggregator supplied full text; and Distributed, “linked” full text – in which a bibliographic database provider links to (usually) publisher-supplied full text.
