Reports on the third national conference of the American Library Association's Library and Information Technology Association, which was held September 13-16, 1992, in Denver, Colorado. Program highlights are summarized, including virtual communities, virtual reality, the electronic library, artificial intelligence and expert-systems, navigating…

Examines the development of electronic books and traditional libraries in relation to the history of books and publishing. An ongoing project is described that is developing two forms of electronic books: hyper-books (built from paper books) and visual-books (built from electronic texts). (22 references) (EAM)

Describes the development of a model for future national and international digital libraries. Four aspects of the model are presented: (1) nine principles underlying constructing electronic archives; (2) a study of potential user needs; (3) the design and evaluation of the user interface; and (4) objects and document type definition development.…

Presents a statement by the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC) that addresses concerns about the current electronic information environment, the desired environment for the future, and the preferred practices for library consortia and their member libraries for the selection and purchase of electronic information. (LRW)

Defines and describes cyber-collaboration as the process by which disparate-appearing components wired to the Internet (e.g., libraries, publishers, bookstores) deliberately move beyond their boundaries and merge so that mutually beneficial improvements occur. Discusses technological juxtaposition, creative collaboration, and opportunities for…

Presents ideas and strategies to enhance digital reference services available via the Internet in public libraries. Describes print publications which include Web reference columns; subject guides, both print and online; and the resources of the Internet Public Library and other virtual reference desks. (LRW)

Describes a Delphi study of digital libraries (DL; January 1998) focusing on issues related to digital libraries. Highlights include an overview of the Delphi technique; its shortcomings; use of the Delphi Planning System, a Web-based software application; methods for identifying experts and identifying/selection questions; and results of the…

Describes the methods and results of a user-centered field study that investigated the design requirements for a Web-based research library, a digital library representing a collection of large domain-specific documents that can be accessed remotely to support scholarly research. Results provide insight into Web-based inquiry and requirements for…

The most important decisions in extending utility and power of computing and telecommunications to delivery of scholarly information are the adoption of standards and protocols which ensure that the issues of migration, and refreshing of electronic information are as straightforward and routine as possible. Standard generalized markup language…

Discussion of the professional education of information workers argues the importance of core skills development but also reaffirms the value of library history. Examines the historical dynamics of the birth of the profession, alongside the modern library, in order to gain a critical perspective on contemporary postmodern libraries. (Contains 25…

This study examines publishing and indexing patterns in the area of digital libraries to identify the core journals and the most effective descriptor terms for online searching. Results show that indexing is inconsistent and subject searching is unreliable for full retrieval. (Author/LRW)

Identifies and defines the more commonly used terms and phrases which have been used to describe the evolving online/electronic/virtual/digital library phenomenon. Includes findings from an examination of keywords increasingly found in the literature of library and information science as well as of computer science based on a 1970-1997…

Discusses access to digital libraries on the World Wide Web via Web browsers and describes the design of a language-independent document classification system to help users of the Florida Center for Library Automation analyze search query results. Highlights include similarity scores, clustering, graphical representation of document similarity,…

Describes the card sort technique that was used by Cornell University to help determine how users would organize a set of concepts to be included in an online digital library help system. Presents Cornell's experiences as a case study with detailed instructions for conducting and evaluating the card sort technique. (Contains 13 references.)…

Discussion of information retrieval and automatic indexing in digital libraries focuses on Chinese indexing and cross-lingual information retrieval. Investigates the combination and boundary detection approaches based on mutual information for word segmentation, using lexical and statistical information. Reports results of experiments that…