The Digital Library from Information Superhighway to the Semiotic Web

Suzanne C. Pilsk

and

Martin R. Kalfatovic

Smithsonian Institution Libraries

The Scarecrow

Dedicated Terminals vs. the Personal Computer

Dedicated Terminal

Proprietary

Single function

Expensive

The vendor’s dream machine

The Personal Computer

Client/server paradigm

Multi-use

Open (as defined by Microsoft)

Can be expensive

Bill Gates and Andy Groves’ dream machine

Munchkinland

Early Internet Experiments

Finger

Weather Conditions

Checking the status of the Coke machine down the hall

“ Finger” is a simple protocol used to retrieve information about users and return the information in a simple string

Anonymous FTP

Transfer of large file sets that the user could reassemble

Mastering the art of spelling “A-N-O-N-Y-M-U-S”

Though still useful for various technical operations, as an “end-user” Internet experience, Anonymous FTP’s life is at an end

Telnet

Fast, even with a “slow” Internet connection (the remember 2400 baud modem?)

Efficient (the telnet client was usually quite “lite”)

Blinking white letters on a black screen!

Gopher

The first widely accepted Internet “publishing” tool

Librarian friendly (who doesn’t love a strict hierarchy of information?)

Acronym friendly

LC MARVEL

L ibrary of C ongress

M achine

A ssisted

R ealization (of the)

V irtual

E lectronic

L ibrary

SI Library Gopher: SILENUS ?

S mithsonian

I nstitution

L ibraries

E lectronic

N ode (of)

U seful

S tuff

Rescue of the Tin Woodman: Libraries Go Online

Dewey to LC classification (ca. 1965)

Input of data into OCLC (1974)

GEAC (1984)

NOTIS – TELNET (1994)

Web access to the catalog (1996)

Horizon (1998-1999)

Rescue of the Tin Woodman: Libraries Go Online

The Cowardly Lion

Communication is King of the Jungle!

Communication is King

Bulletin Boards : in the early days of the personal computer, one of the wonders of having a computer in your home was the ability to plug an acoustic coupler into the machine and snug your telephone handset into the device and connect to a bulletin board. Bulletin boards allowed communities to form around topics, buy and sell things

Email : the next step was direct communication with others in a nearly asynchronous manner. Soon the ubiquitous “@” became a regular part of our language.

GEAC Mail : Many of our fist experiences with email were not the global email we’re used to today, but instead, in-house or system dependant “electronic messaging systems”.

BITNet : BITNet hit the Smithsonian around 1988 and suddenly email went beyond the walls of the library (SI used that now primitive IBM system, PROFS, I still remember my BITNet email: libem071@sivm.

Webmail : Now, with web accessible email, email systems are available on any web enabled PC, and of course, cell phones and PDAs

Listservs : with “beyond the walls” email, the world of listserv where, again, communities coud form simply by typing “sub me listserv x”. Communication became a “Push Technology” where people’s opinions, thoughts, questions, and even rants (remember “flame wars”?) came into our in box.

BLOGS : and now, here we are again. How many of you have participated in some sort of BLOG? Once again we see the concept of the bulletin boards rising in the form of the BLOG.

Deadly Poppy Fields of Jargon From Smithsonian Libraries On Display: Seed Catalogs

Deadly Poppy Fields of Jargon

Firewall

Surfing

Link

Link rot

Burn

Web Master

Rip

Zip and Unzip

Online

Java

Googling

Metadata

24/7

HTML

XML

Taxomony

Taxomony

Merriam Webster Online

1) The study of the general principles of scientific classification : systematics

2) Classification; especially : orderly classification of plants and animals according to their presumed natural relationships

Webopedia

Taxonomy is the way it organizes its data into categories and subcategories, sometimes displayed in a site map

InformationWeek

Taxonomy-creation tools that scan documents and suggest logical categories based on common themes that occur across an organization's data

Deadly Poppy Fields of Jargon

Cataloging

Classification

Thesauri

Metadata

Schemas

Ontologies

Dublin Core Metadata

Open Archives Initiative

Open = Not Supported

Archives = Means “Repository”

Initiative = Yet Not Ready

Open Archives Initiative

MARC and METS and MODS

MARC

MARC XML

MODS

Oh My! http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/turner/meta/english/indexacroeng.html

The Emerald City of Oz

Building and Maintaining the Library Website

The Library Website

Mosaic marries graphics, text, and the hyper text transfer protocol

Information becomes less linear and more relational

Librarians become graphic designers (ack!)

The Library Website

The “public site”

The “library staff site”

The “scholars’ portal”

The “Intranet site”

The “fully customizable with features that only I can find and find useful site”

The Search for the Wicked Witch

Internet on Your Desk: A Long Hard Battle

“ I don’t see why any one needs access to the internet at their offices or in the library because they can come to the central Smithsonian computer office and use it there. What would they be doing on this “internet”?”

The Discovery of Oz, the Terrible

Taking Content Online

The Library Catalog

Citation Databases

Full-text Databases

Electronic Journals

Digital Collections

Digital Books

Online Exhibitions

ASCII text

HTML

SGML

EAD

XHTML

XML

The Discovery of Oz, the Terrible You see Scarecrow, you always had content, you just need acronyms!

Library Science vs. Rocket Science

Case Study: “Sewing Machines: Historical Trade Literature in Smithsonian Collections” - inches and centimeter mix up leads to confusion

Library Science vs. Rocket Science

Case Study: NASA Mars Climate Orbiter (1999) - The peer review preliminary findings indicate that one team used English units (e.g., inches, feet and pounds) while the other used metric units for a key spacecraft operation.

The Magic Art of the Great Humbug