_Current Cites_ Volume 7, no. 5 May 1996 The Library University of California, Berkeley Edited by Teri Andrews Rinne ISSN: 1060-2356 http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/1996/cc96.7.5.html Contributors: Campbell Crabtree, John Ober, Margaret Phillips, David Rez, Richard Rinehart, Teri Rinne, Roy Tennant Networks and Networking James-Catalano, Cynthia N. "The Virtual Wordsmith" Internet World 7(6) (June 1996):30-31. -- A descriptive, narrative list of more than 25 URL's (mostly Web sites) that provides an interesting variety of dictionaries, encyclopedias and thesauri. -- DR Kalfatovic, Martin R. "Internet Resources in the Visual Arts" College & Research Libraries News 57(5) (May 1996): 289-293. -- The Web's ability to display images means that it has attracted many artists, museums and galleries to its realm. Among the sites listed in this article are indexes and general resources, sites devoted to artists and artistic movements (check out !Surrealisme!), online exhibitions, museums (the Smithsonian, the Met, the Andy Warhol Museum, etc.), and commercial galleries and auction houses (find out just how much those fake Jackie-O pearls went for at the Sotheby's web site). Also listed are definitive e-journals in the art world as well as discussion lists, newsgroups, and usenet groups. The list is very selective but offers a good representative sample of international resources. -- MP Maddox, Kate. "Masters of the Web" Information Week [http://techweb.cmp.com/iw] 577 (April 29, 1996): 46-54. -- This article is not about technology per se, but about technology managers - especially WebMasters. The article explains some of the difficulty in integrating newly formed "WebMaster" positions into the larger enterprise and how some companies are doing it. Although written from the corporate point of view, many of the same issues overlap with educational institutions. -- RR Pack, Thomas. "Electronic Words: A Word Lover's Guide to Digital Dictionaries, Thesauri, and Other Cyberplaces" Database 19(2) (April/May 1996): 25-31. -- Yet another offering for logophiles. Pack describes the variety of electronic resources available on consumer online systems, the Internet, and CD-ROM. -- TR Steinberg, Steve G. "Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe)" Wired 4(5) (May 1996): 108-114, 172-182. -- To ponder the question of how to organize the rapidly growing and ever-chaotic Web, is really to explore age-old attempts to organize human knowledge. But efforts to classify the Web have been developed anyway in the form of search engines. An exploration of Yahoo!, Inktomi and Excite and a still-under development project at Oracle called ConText, illustrated for Steinberg the essential conundrum of classification: a catalog (which some may consider Yahoo! to be) in which a human being analyzes an object of human knowledge (such as a book or, in Yahoo!'s case, a Web site), then categorizes it under a prescribed classification scheme will always be subjective; automated indexing systems (found in various forms in Inktomi, Excite and ConText) lack the ability to provide context (something that, so far, only humans can provide). While Steinberg didn't find an answer to the question of how to classify human knowledge (or at least how to better organize the Web) he did discover that while humans, (i.e. librarians and information scientists) may not have figured out how to organize human knowledge, neither have the computer scientists. -- MP Young, Jeffrey R. "'Indecency' on the Internet: Court Hearing Stirs Fears of Censorship of Student and College Web Pages" Chronicle of Higher Education XLII(33) (April 26, 1996): A21, A25-A26 -- Surely among the first of many articles on how the "Decency in Communications" rider to the 1996 Telecommunications Act will affect the sharing of scholarly and cultural knowledge, both in the academic sphere itself, and with the outside world. Among the cases cited are a university art museum identified as showing potentially "indecent" images of nude greek statues in their WWW site. Of course more contemporary art and discourse will be seen as even more dangerous. Though the Internet started largely as a way to freely share scholarly information, this component of law poses a serious reconsideration of just that use. -- RR Query Based on Image Content [http://wwwqbic.almaden.ibm.com] -- This WWW site is a demonstration of a new tool for content-based retrieval (searching the images themselves, rather than textual meta-data). These tools are almost ready for commercial use, and are being demo'd on the vendors' WWW sites: Query by Image Content, from IBM [http://wwwqbic.almaden.ibm.com] and Visual Information Retrieval System, from Virage Inc. [http://www.virage.com]. Even the old demo of QBIC (for HTML 2.0 browsers) works with a surprising degree of accuracy, searching from one image for similar images based on color percentage or layout. These types of tools have profound implications for content provision and research in visual disciplines, from Art History and Architecture to Archaeology and Paleontology. The fact that they are integrated with the Web increases their potential usefulness. -- RR Optical Disc Technology Guenette, David R. "Document Imaging, CD-ROM, and CD-R: A Starting Point" CD-ROM Professional 9(4) (April 1996): 32- 44. -- Guenette begins with the dream of the paperless office and the concurrent irony of contemporary office culture: as more documents are digitally generated, we continue to produce and handle more paper-based documents each year. The answer to this irony may be CD-Recordable technology with increasingly affordable scanner devices, document imaging systems and OCR technologies combined with cheap, networkable high-storage media devices such as CD-ROM and CD-R. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the document imaging process as well as the important questions you need to ask before designing a system. -- TR ------------------------------------------------------------------- Current Cites 7(5) (May 1996) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright (C) 1996 by the Library, University of California, Berkeley. All rights reserved. All product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Mention of a product in this publication does not necessarily imply endorsement of the product. [URL:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/CurrentCites/] To subscribe, send the message "sub cites [your name]" to listproc@library.berkeley.edu, replacing "[your name]" with your name. Copying is permitted for noncommercial use by computerized bulletin board/conference systems, individual scholars, and libraries. Libraries are authorized to add the journal to their collections at no cost. 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