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In our ongoing efforts to develop clearinghouses to support researchers in
creating the next generation of on-line public access catalog systems, we
have been taking a topical approach with surveys of data mining and
knowledge discovery, concept maps, structured browsing, the use of agent
technology, and visualization to name just a few. For a complete overview of
this work, please visit the
Net
Projects page
of the
CyberStacks(sm)
.
It should be quite clear from the breadth and depth of this work that no one
approach will offer a silver bullet to meet our ever more complex
information retrieval needs. Each New Millennium OPAC can be expected to
support many ways of viewing and exploring its collection and will
accordingly draw on a range of sources and services both traditional and
unconventional.
Unfortunately with the resource constraints and vagaries of funding that we
all face, it is unlikely that any one site will be able to independently
develop the critical mass of functionality needed to create anything close
to the "Library of the Future" that J.C.R. Licklider had envisioned in his
seminal work of the same title, which had been released by The Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in 1965.
Fortunately, the Net has ushered in a new era of collaborative efforts
across institutions which is manifesting itself at the technological level
with the widespread exploration of distributed systems, knowledge
representation & ontology development, object oriented programing and
design pattern techniques, new languages better suited to the integration of
distributed code, platform independent computing environments, and related
topics.
Cross-platform development environments such as FramerD, Scheme-48, Juice,
and Java make it increasingly practical to incorporate code modules from
other sites in one's own programs. At the same time, the emergence of
high-level networking packages in these programming languages makes it just
as convenient to access and provide such functionality indirectly over the
Net.
Moreover, this trend to greater modularization of systems with well factored
designs makes them less brittle and static, hinting at a day in which the
Library Catalog will look more like a network operating system with a
dynamically extensible design opening the door for end-users to augment its
capabilities. (Such a vision lies at the core of my own research in
The Continuity
Project,
an initiative which seeks to integrate a number of new facilities along with
Epoch
a literate development environment and end-user extension framework through
which the system can evolve over time. - PJW).
And yet, many of these developments are seen as belonging primarily in the
domain of the AI, CSCW, CASE, and Computer Science communities, while
information about potentially useful tools,libraries, and remote services in
the context of OPAC development is much harder to access.
The Stone Soup(sm) clearinghouse will provide a jump-point for the Library
and Information Science community to exchange code, tools, and to otherwise
link up their efforts. Like the ingredients in the proverbial Stone Soup
each of our systems could become so much better if augmented with services
offered by our neighbors. (eg. a visualization tool would be infinitely more
interesting when applied to
WordNet
than to a simulated database.)
To this end, we would appreciate hearing from any researchers offering or
currently making use of library code, databases & knowledge bases, or
computational services. Tell us what requirements must be met by other sites
that would like to leverage these offerings in new applications, including
any legal encumbrances on their use. We would also like to hear how other
sites are already using your tools.
We are also interested in any articles, reports, papers that describe the
design and development of OPAC software components, test beds, frameworks,
and distributed services.
Individuals interested in contributing to a possible anthology on Libraries
of the Future & New Millennium OPACs that would explore representative
technologies along with the collaborative software development issues raised
herein are encouraged to contact the clearinghouse coordinator, Peter J.
Wasilko.
Projects will be incorporated within the Stone Soup(sm) clearinghouse at
<http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/StoneSoup.htm>
as they are identified and reviewed.
As always, any and all leads, suggestions, recommendations, opinions,
citations, etc. would be most welcome!
Please direct all electronic and hard copy submissions to Peter J. Wasilko.
Regards,
Peter J. Wasilko, Esq., J.D., LL.M.
Director,
The Continuity
Project
3 Meadowbrook Drive
Ossining, NY 10562-2916
futurist@cloud9.net
http://www.cloud9.net/~futurist/continuity/
Gerry McKiernan, A.B., M.S.
Curator,
CyberStacks(sm)
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
gerrymck@iastate.edu
http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/
P.S. For a wonderful treatment of end-user programming issues see "A Small
Matter of Programming : Perspectives on End User Computing" by Bonnie A.
Nardi, MIT Press, 1993, ISBN: 0-262-14053-5.
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