SPEIR: Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research. Final Project Report: Elements and Future Development Requirements of a Common Information Environment for Scotland

The SPEIR (Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research) project was funded by the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC). It ran from February 2003 to September 2004, slightly longer than the 18 months originally scheduled and was managed by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR). With SLIC's agreement, community stakeholders were represented in the project by the Confederation of Scottish Mini-Cooperatives (CoSMiC), an organisation whose members include SLIC, the National Library of Scotland (NLS), the Scottish Further Education Unit (SFEU), the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), regional cooperatives such as the Ayrshire Libraries Forum (ALF)1, and representatives from the Museums and Archives communities in Scotland. Aims; A Common Information Environment For Scotland The aims of the project were to: o Conduct basic research into the distributed information infrastructure requirements of the Scottish Cultural Portal pilot and the public library CAIRNS integration proposal; o Develop associated pilot facilities by enhancing existing facilities or developing new ones; o Ensure that both infrastructure proposals and pilot facilities were sufficiently generic to be utilised in support of other portals developed by the Scottish information community; o Ensure the interoperability of infrastructural elements beyond Scotland through adherence to established or developing national and international standards. Since the Scottish information landscape is taken by CoSMiC members to encompass relevant activities in Archives, Libraries, Museums, and related domains, the project was, in essence, concerned with identifying, researching, and developing the elements of an internationally interoperable common information environment for Scotland, and of determining the best path for future progress

HILT IV : subject interoperability through building and embedding pilot terminology web services

A report of work carried out within the JISC-funded HILT Phase IV project, the paper looks at the project's context against the background of other recent and ongoing terminologies work, describes its outcome and conclusions, including technical outcomes and terminological characteristics, and considers possible future research and development directions. The Phase IV project has taken HILT to the point where the launch of an operational support service in the area of subject interoperability is a feasible option and where both investigation of specific needs in this area and practical collaborative work are sensible and feasible next steps. Moving forward requires detailed work, not only on terminology interoperability and associated service delivery issues, but also on service and end user needs and engagement, service sustainability issues, and the practicalities of interworking with other terminology services and projects in UK, Europe, and global contexts

Evaluation of an Internet Document Delivery Service

An Internet-based Document Delivery Service (DDS) has been developed within the framework of the CNR ( the Italian Research National Council) Project BiblioMIME, in order to take advantage of new Internet technologies and promote cooperation among CNR and Italian university libraries. Adopting such technologies changes the traditional organisation of DDS and may drastically reduce costs and delivery times. An information system managing DDS requests and monitoring the temporal evolution of the service has been implemented, running on the local-area network of a test-site library. It aims to track number and types of documents requested and received, user distribution, delivery times and types (surface mail, fax, Internet), to automate repetitive manual procedures and to deal with the various accounting methods used by other libraries. Transmission of documents is carried out by means of an e-mail/Web gateway system supporting document exchange via Internet, which assists receiving libraries in retrieving requested documents. This paper describes the architecture and main design features of the e-mail/Web gateway server (the BiblioMime server). This approach permits librarians to continue using e-mail service to send large documents, while resolving problems that users may encounter when downloading large size files with e-mail agents. The library operator sends the document as an attachment to the destination address; on fly the e-mail server extracts and saves the attachments in a web-server disk file and substitutes them with a new message part that includes an URL pointing to the saved document. The receiver can download these large objects by means of a user-friendly browser. We further discuss the data gathered during the triennium 1998-2000; this consists of about 5,000 DDS transactions per annum with 300 other Italian scientific and bio-medical libraries and commercial document suppliers. Use of the instruments described above allowed us to evaluate the performance of service “before” and “after” the use of Internet Document Delivery and to extract some critical data regarding DDS. Those include: a) libraries with which we have greater numbers of exchanges and their turnaround times; b) extraordinary reduction in costs and delivery times; c) the most frequently requested serial titles (allowing cost-effective decisions on new subscriptions); d) impact on DDS of library participation in consortia which allow user access to greater numbers of online serials

The case for preserving our knowledge and data in physics experiments

This proceeding covers tools and technologies at our disposal for scientific data preservation and shows that this extends the scientific reach of our experiments. It is cost-efficient to warehouse data from completed experiments on the tape archives of our national and international laboratories. These subject-specific data stores also offer the technologies to capture and archive knowledge about experiments in the form of technical notes, electronic logs, websites, etc. Furthermore, it is possible to archive our source code and computing environments. The paper illustrates these challenges with experience from preserving the LEP data for the long term.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Digital technology and governance in transition: The case of the British Library

Comment on the organizational consequences of the new information and communications technologies (ICTs) is pervaded by a powerful imagery of disaggregation and a tendency for ?virtual? forms of production to be seen as synonymous with the ?end? of bureaucracy. This paper questions the underlying assumptions of the ?virtual organization?, highlighting the historically enduring, diversified character of the bureaucratic form. The paper then presents case study findings on the web-based access to information resources now being provided by the British Library (BL). The case study evidence produces two main findings. First, radically decentralised virtual forms of service delivery are heavily dependent on new forms of capacity-building and information aggregation. Second, digital technology is embedded in an inherently contested and contradictory context of institutional change. Current developments in the management and control of digital rights are consistent with the commodification of the public sphere. However, the evidence also suggests that scholarly access to information resources is being significantly influenced by the ?information society? objectives of the BL and other institutional players within the network of UK research libraries

Newly available technologies present expanding opportunities for scientific and technical information exchange

The potential for expanded communication among researchers, scholars, and students is supported by growth in the capabilities for electronic communication as well as expanding access to various forms of electronic interchange and computing capabilities. Research supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration points to a future where workstations with audio and video monitors and screen-sharing protocols are used to support collaborations with colleagues located throughout the world. Instruments and sensors all over the world will produce data streams that will be brought together and analyzed to produce new findings, which in turn can be distributed electronically. New forms of electronic journals will emerge and provide opportunities for researchers and scientists to electronically and interactively exchange information in a wide range of structures and formats. Ultimately, the wide-scale use of these technologies in the dissemination of research results and the stimulation of collegial dialogue will change the way we represent and express our knowledge of the world. A new paradigm will evolve-perhaps a truly worldwide 'invisible college'

Formal Verification of Security Protocol Implementations: A Survey

Automated formal verification of security protocols has been mostly focused on analyzing high-level abstract models which, however, are significantly different from real protocol implementations written in programming languages. Recently, some researchers have started investigating techniques that bring automated formal proofs closer to real implementations. This paper surveys these attempts, focusing on approaches that target the application code that implements protocol logic, rather than the libraries that implement cryptography. According to these approaches, libraries are assumed to correctly implement some models. The aim is to derive formal proofs that, under this assumption, give assurance about the application code that implements the protocol logic. The two main approaches of model extraction and code generation are presented, along with the main techniques adopted for each approac