This presentation was presented in Session 6.4 Reports of Current Research (Juried Papers), at the 2005 ALISE Conference. It summarizes current situations and developing trends in information technologies. Africa is used as a case to illustrate how local policies have played important roles in the process of information globalization.

Report for an Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) Grant Partner Uplift Project. This report reviews the tools and software to support interoperability between digital repositories and the Library of Texas federated search. This review will be used for providing recommendations for best practices and workflows for installing software and tools onto Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS) and selected databases that support search interoperability.

This paper presents a method for automatic topic identification using an encyclopedic graph derived from Wikipedia. The system is found to exceed the performance of previously proposed machine learning algorithms for topic identification, with an annotation consistency comparable to human annotations.

This article discusses automatic keyword extraction for learning object repositories.

This article discusses semantic document engineering with WordNet and PageRank.

The notion of open access to scholarly information is not new. In recent years, however, it has taken on prominence within the broader context of scholarly work, communication, and publishing. This brief paper intends to highlight and clarify key aspects of open access to assist UNTs initial discussions of the utility of open access for UNT researchers and scholars.

This report is part of the Web-at-Risk project. The Web-at-Risk project is one of eight digital preservation projects funded in 2004 by the Library of Congress. Each of the projects represents a collaborative effort to preserve for future generations born-digital or digitized cultural heritage materials and collections. The Web-at-Risk project is a 3-year collaborative effort of the California Digital Library, the University of North Texas (UNT), and New York University. The project will develop a Web Archiving Service that enables curators to build collections of web-published materials. The content will be collected largely from US federal and state government agencies, but will also include political policy documents, campaign literature, and information surrounding political movements. The project work will be conducted along four paths of overlapping activities. The Web-at-Risk Project work paths include (1) Content identification, selection, and acquisition; (2) Content harvest and analysis; (3) Content ingest, retention, and transfer; and (4) Partnership building.

Presentation discussing the use of special diagnostic records in the context of Z39.50 and online library catalogs.

Article discussing a service-based approach for virtual libraries and the provision of services to patrons and other users built upon the collective personnel, information, and technological resources that constitute the library.

This report discusses standards in state library agencies. Little is known about state library agencies' policies for standards adoption and use. This study, undertaken in 1998, attempted to bridge the gap of information and understanding about the current situation of state library agencies' use, opportunities and issues related to technical standards.

Article discussing the deep web and the new resource discovery service of the statewide virtual Library of Texas (LOT).

This lecture script examines the nature and role of standards for the emerging 21st century library. Given the dynamic character of the networked environment, when are standards appropriate and how can they be developed in a manner consistent with the volatility of information technologies and changing library services? What are the roles and responsibilities of standards developing organizations, technology vendors, content creators, and librarians for standards? Do local practices of libraries threaten standards-based resource sharing and resource access technologies? Can local needs be balanced with broader library community responsibilities, and how do standards affect this balance? The speaker's assumption is that adherence to standards has never been more critical, yet his implementation experience with Z39.50 and MARC suggests that the commitment to national and international standards by librarians, technology vendors, and content creators are often an example of good intentions rather than actual practice. This standards disconnect threatens the emerging 21st century library's ability to deliver fundamental services in appropriate ways to their users.

This report is part of the Web-at-Risk project. The Web-at-Risk project is one of eight digital preservation projects funded in 2004 by the Library of Congress. The project is a 3-year collaborative effort of the California Digital Library (CDL), the University of North Texas (UNT), and New York University (NYU). The project will develop a Web Archiving Service that enables curators to build collections of web-published materials. The content of the collections for this project will be largely from US federal and state government agencies, but will also include political policy documents, campaign literature, and information surrounding political movements and labor unions. This report includes the methods, results, discussion, and appendices related to the Web-at-Risk project.

This report is part of the Web-at-Risk project. The Needs Assessment Toolkit created for the Web-at-Risk project describes the project's needs assessment activities and includes data collection tools, which are designated to identify the needs and requirements of curators, web-content producers, and end users with regard to the Web Archive Service. Additionally, information gathered by some of the data collection tools will help to identify curators' requirements for the web crawler and its crawl analyzer tool, which will be developed as part of the project. Each of the assessment activities described in the Needs Assessment Toolkit was designated to follow a collection development framework for web archives. This report contains a data analysis of the survey results. Results from focus group discussions and interviews with content providers and end users are presented in separate reports.

This presentation discusses the MARC Content Designation Utilization (MCDU) Project. It presents information about the goals and scope of the project, the methodology and information about the process, and the implications of this project.

An operating assumption for the networked environment is that many different information systems need to interoperate for users to successfully discover and retrieve distributed resources. Meaningful interoperability is often elusive. In the library community, the Z39.50 standard protocol (ISO 23950/ANSI/NISO Z39.50) for information retrieval promised seamless and transparent networked access to library resources. Too often, the reality has not lived up to the promise. This paper discusses two efforts that offer solution paths to Z39.50 interoperability.

Paper discussing a two-dimensional approach for investigating issues of semantic interoperability in digital libraries.

This paper discusses metadata utilization. This paper reports results of an analysis of a large sample of MARC 21 bibliographic records.

This paper describes the MARC Content Designation Utilization Project, which is examining a very large set of metadata records as artifacts of the library cataloging enterprise. This is the first large-scale examination of descriptive metadata utilization. Presents an overview of study activities and suggests the study's significance to the broader use of metadata in digital libraries.

Article dicsussing the Metadata Education and Research Information Commons (MERIC), a collaborative teaching and research initiative.

This paper discusses interoperability of networked information. Interoperability is a fundamental challenge for networked information discovery and retrieval. Often treated monolithically in the literature, interoperability is multifaceted and can be analyzed into different types and levels. This paper discusses an approach to map the interoperability landscape for networked information retrieval as part of an interoperability assessment research project.

This paper presents an overview of an exploratory research project to identify, describe, and investigate the applicability of the Web services (WS) approach to access legacy data.

This paper discusses the Z39.50 protocol. The ANSI/NISO Z39.50 protocol for information retrieval addresses the complex challenges of intersystem communication. Original uses envisioned for the protocol look very little like current implementations and uses. In the 1980s, users on one library catalog system would search and retrieve bibliographic records on a remote system. By the late 1990s, there was a need for discovering networked resources and integrating access to them. Yet, the Z39.50 protocol has addressed both these scenarios. This paper provides a portrayal of Z39.50 that explains its flexibility in response to a variety of information retrieval requirements in the networked environment.

Article on developing the Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for Africa and an overview of the barriers to harnessing the full power of the internet.