Simmons ASIS&T News & Events
The Latest in Information Science: Presentations from the ASIS&T Annual Meeting
Tuesday November 8th, 5:30pm
P208 (Palace Road Building)
Come for a concentrated dose of the most important and interesting things happening in LIS around the country. The students who travelled to Charlotte, North Carolina for the ASIS&T Annual Meeting will give short presentations of the conference highlights.
POST-EVENT UPDATE
Frances summarized Personal Information Management, which as you can guess means managing information for an individual's personal use. Marcia Bates divides personal information into urban and rural types. She also stressed the importance of mapping social networks of information (who you look to for certain types of information), having without needing to find, and that finding and re-finding are not the same thing. (Frances' slides)
Corinna outlined work in visual informatics, mostly showing live demos of some of the visualization software that has been developed recently. She also highlighted the work of some librarians with their university's digital library. Initially, they hadn't been called in to work on the project. Instead of acting insulted and demanding to be included, they offered to help. Now in its second year, the librarians are in charge of the project and the computer science department has created Library and Information Science course as one of its prerequisites.
Peishan demonstrated a number of innovative new digital libraries. Information from libraries is no longer limited to text. The University of Miami Libraries have put together a digital library on the Cuban Rafter Phenomenon (balseros.miami.edu) with unique map-based navigation options and chock full of multimedia. Whyville.net is an initiative from the Getty Museum. In Whyville, kids can play educational games about science and art, earn "clams" and chat with other kids from around the world.
Kjersten discussed JPEG 2000 (JP2), the popular new file format used in digital libraries. Previously, digital libraries would have to store multiple files for each picture - an archival TIF file, a large JPEG for near-photo quality, a medium-sized JPEG for the majority of views, a thumbnail JPEG for results lists. With JPEG 2000, libraries only store one JPEG file and all of the needed sizes are dynamically extracted from that single file. JP2 also enables region of interest (ROI) viewing of a picture, which is basically a very sophisticated zoom function. JPEG 2000 compression algorithms allow for much better picture quality even at small file sizes.
Julka talked about differences in librarians' approach to intellectual property in the United States, Israel and Russia. Russia's laws were the most lax of the three, and their enforcement is almost non-existent. The ethical principles in the library association's code of ethics were analyzed. Russian libraries made no reference to copyright or intellectual property on their websites. Israeli libraries mentioned it on 70% of their websites, often with only one click to get to copyright information. US libraries mentioned copyright on 85% of their websites but often had two or more clicks to get to copyright information.
(Attendees: 19. Presenters: Frances McConihe, Corinna Baksik, Peishan Tsai, Kjersten Elias, and Julka Grodel.)
updated November 28, 2005 by Frances McConihe