Boston, Massachusetts
May 17-19, 1995
Mary Jane Starr, Director General, Reference and Information Services National Library of Canada
The National Library of Canada will play an active role in the creation of an electronic library by initiating efforts to digitize Canadian material and make it available on the Information Highway as part of a demonstration project involving both the National Library of Canada and the Library of Congress. Two schools, East Pictou Rural High School in Sutherland’s River, Nova Scotia, and Hammond Middle School in Alexandria, Virginia, will participate in a week-long demonstration of the project by accessing information on Canada’s Confederation and the U.S. Civil War through Internet links to both libraries. The National Library’s long-term objective is to provide electronic access to a much greater volume of Canadian material, both in Canada and around the world.
William Hornish Executive Office of the President, Office of Automation
Last year, the White House made its debut on the World Wide Web. In a very short time, it has become one of the most frequently and heavily consulted sites on the Internet. Through a mixture of information and personal touches (photos of the First Family and their cat Socks, for example) it offers citizens of the world a glimpse of the American president and presidency. What are the objectives for the White House Web? What purposes and readership does it serve? What are the informational, strategic, security, and other issues that its creators must solve daily? Bill Hornish, the person who created the site, discusses its inception, growth, and use; shows some of its features; and answers questions for the ARL directors.
Robert McHenry, Editor-in-Chief Encyclopædia Britannica Online
The Encyclopædia Britannica has itself been an institution for at least a millennium, spawning some indisputably memorable, revered editions and countless scholarly articles by its distinguished researchers. Robert McHenry, Editor-in-Chief, will describe the present and future of the Encyclopædia, a publishing system with three incarnations: the traditional print set; EB Online, which is designed an available on a number of campus networks; and the Britannica Instant Research System, a ready-reference and fact-checking product. The session will include demos of the powerful natural language searching system that runs with the Online version as well as a discussion of how a major publishing enterprise makes strategic choices during periods of intense technology changes.
Virginia Sorkin, Senior Staff Analyst, Information Technology Services Office Library of Congress
Ms. Sorkin will demonstrate THOMAS, the Library of Congress legislative system, as well as selections from the 300,000 historical items that have been digitized by the Library so far in its National Digital Library Program. These items are pertinent to the study of the Nation’s culture and help tell its story through text, recorded sound, and photographs. For the past three years, the Library has made all of its major exhibits available online at the same time that it has opened the physical exhibit. Also available for demonstration will be Country Studies and the Library’s organization of external resources.
Larry Carver, Head, Map and Imagery Laboratory University of California, Santa Barbara
The primary goal of the Alexandria Project is to design, implement, and deploy a digital library for spatially-indexed information. A digital library supporting such materials is needed because spatially-indexed information is an extremely valuable resource in many applications but is currently costly to access. Many important collections of such information, such as maps, photographs, atlases, and gazetteers, are currently stored only in non-digital form, and collections of considerable size and diversity are found only in the largest research libraries. Although a growing amount of such information is available in digital form, it is still inaccessible to most individuals. The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) will provide a framework for putting these collections online, providing search and access to these collections to broad classes of users, and allowing both collections and users to be distributed throughout the Internet.
Dan Cabirac, Electronic Publishing Specialist National Agricultural Library
Many libraries want to provide multimedia materials to their patrons via the Internet. Materials ranging from document delivery information and bibliographies to complete monographs with images can be digitized. Even small libraries can create hyperlinked documents which contain well-formatted text, as well as images and sounds. This presentation will show some WWW projects done by the National Agricultural Library, and describe the hardware, software, and training needed to do multimedia projects on the Internet.