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Online, from Online Inc, has an excellent reputation among library professionals. Over the past 18 months Online has come to appreciate the Web as an invaluable resource for information. Fortunately they evaluate it with the same critical eye they direct at traditional online services, and highlight the gems when they find them.
The May/June 1998 issue contains a guide to field searching when using search engines. Experienced searchers know that field searching can really refine a search, and identify useful results. In the same way, limiting a web search to Title, URL or Image can bring a much more useful result.
The article is also available on the Online web site. Print it out and keep it beside you and it may stop you feeling like you're trawling when you're searching the Net.
http://www.onlineinc.com/onlinemag/OL1998/hock5.htmlILANET announces that the GUI site can now be accessed faster than ever with the addition of another 128k link to the State Library. The Library is using the new link for all its outbound traffic, allowing much more access to incoming users to ILANET.
We expect clients to notice a considerable improvement in performance when using the ILANET GUI System, ILANET Resources gateway, and the Forum.
You can check the performance of the ILANET Internet connection in real time from the Internet Statistics page.
http://www.slnsw.gov.au/internet_stats.htmlThe first keynote speaker at WWW7 was Tim Berners-Lee, (one of the "fathers of the Web"). His talk on evolvability covered 'the architecture of the Web and the relationship between specifications such as HTTP, XML, RDF and HTML in this context.'
What this means is designing technology to be part of 'something bigger'. The explosion of the Web has opened the way for many new technologies to become available and be widely disseminated around the world. It has become crucial when designing new technology to ensure that it 'interoperates' - it talks to other systems.
The 'thought experiment' at the basis of Tim's talk was: "You designed a system, and someone else independently designed a system to do the same thing. When you put the two systems together, can they talk?"
No matter what kind of system or process you are trying to design is a good idea to keep this in mind. We at ILANET think about it a lot in terms of document delivery and InterLibrary Loans. In the past you were a member of ABN or a member of ILANET, but requests couldn't go from one system to the other. If we base our new services on standard protocols (ISO-ILL) the new systems we design will interoperate. We will be able to provide access to a wider range of services, or be able to choose the service that offers the most suitably customised service, but with interoperability to all systems using the standard protocol.
The slides from Tim's talk are available on the w3 site. http://www.w3.org/Talks/1998/0415-Evolvability/overview.htm
Still on the Web and interoperability, HTML 4.0 and Cascading
Style Sheets Level 2 have both been released as recommendations
by the World Wide Web Consortium. See news at the forum
for links to more information:
http://slim.slnsw.gov.au/forum/news/
May 31 marks the end of ILANET's redistribution arrangement with AUSINET. After almost 2 years, the AUSINET service is being incorporated into a new combined service with Dow Jones to create a new service called Fairfax Dow Jones Interactive.
The Fairfax/Dow Jones contract does not allow for redistribution by third parties (like ILANET), and the proprietary data is not available on many other database services.
ILANET is investigating other sources of Australian information to fill the gap created by the loss of AUSINET. Also, alternate providers like Lexis-Nexis are increasing their Australian content. We are also looking into other means of providing access to the Fairfax data in the future.
If you have an opinion about what ILANET should do, send it to ILANETnews in the forum.
http://slim.slnsw.gov.au/forum/ILANETnews/
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