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Newsletter November 2000 
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Anyone with a LANL IP address can access the standards through the "IHS Specs & Standards" page on the Research Library web site. Because LANL is limited to 2 simultaneous users, it is very important to formally logout using the logout button at the upper right corner of the screen. The following codes, standards and databases are included in our current subscription for full-text printing and downloading:
In addition to the online service, FWO Division and the Research Library will continue to maintain various hardcopy volumes of standards information. Information on these can be found at http://arania.lanl.gov:8080/fpub/engineering/html/National%20Codes_Stds_Pubs.html for FWO and the Standards FAQ page for the Research Library. Questions and comments can be forwarded to Tobin Oruch of FWO-SEM, Wilbur Bergquist, NW-M&M or the Research Library. If your group is interested in partnering with the Research Library to make more standards available, please contact the library. Jeane Strub
One of the Lab's most important resources is the reports that contribute to scholarly communication of scientific information. Lab reports, the products of LANL research, are published either as LA's (Los Alamos series reports) or as LA-UR's (Los Alamos Unlimited Release). Many LA-UR's are later published in books, conference proceedings or journals, but for others the LA-UR is the only "publication" of the research, cited by the LA-UR report number, and often difficult to find. The Research Library gets copies of all LA reports as a part of the formal Lab process. However LA-UR's are not automatically sent to the Library. For us to make them available, we need LANL authors to send us copies. The Research Library will take your LA-UR's, either in electronic or hard copy format, and make them available electronically as PDF's via the Library Catalog. This helps disseminate the results of Lab research for all. We are looking for LA-UR's that contain scientific and technical data. In particular we are looking for LA-UR's that will not appear in journals or books, so that they can be made accessible via the Web. Please send your LA-UR's to: la-pubs@lanl.gov or Report Library MS P364 Please direct questions to: Mona L. Mosier, e-mail: mmosier@lanl.gov, telephone: 7-4446. Jack Carter
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and National Information Standards Organizations' (NISO) Electronic Book 2000 conference was held in Washington, DC September 25-27, 2000. This is the 3rd NIST e-book conference. Why is NIST involved? New technology. Low-weight, long-lasting batteries and high density storage are spin-offs of e-book technologies. Why NISO? Trying to get more producers to comply with standards, which to date has been a long, slow battle. A common theme of the meeting was stated precisely by Ray Kammer, the director of NIST: All digital media should be: available; accessible; authentic; auditable. If the e-book world complies with these guidelines, it can decide now to avoid the legal entanglements faced by Napster and Gnutella, music sites often in the news these days because of copyright infringement. There was an afternoon panel session that focused on the library side of the house and what a handful of institutions are doing with the technology. The overarching theme here was lack of appropriate content, lack of appropriate content, lack of appropriate content. Admittedly by most speakers, libraries play/have a small part in the market at this time. The NASA Goddard librarian spoke of their experimental program, i.e. internet access to a product rather than hand-held devices. The most serious issue was the lack of relevant content for a sci/tech library. Currently available hand-held devices can access proprietary materials, allowing no interoperability (i.e. reading Glassbook content on a Rocket book). If devices were utilized, who would pay? The user? And the library purchase the content? Or, would the library acquire the entire package? The more sophisticated readers fall into the "property" category, i.e. accountable in the government's property management system! Finally, how would users access the materials? Would items be cataloged? Ultimately, Goddard went with the internet access approach, and the items are cataloged. Some products have been implemented, but the researchers are asking for more "solid" information. The NIST library noted another drawback: the readers at this point don't display graphics, charts or TeX. A preliminary version of the conference proceedings was handed out to participants when they picked up their name tags - however there were no plans to make the proceedings available electronically! More action still needs to occur to integrate the e-book into daily activities. Marie Harper If you have been reading the headlines about Napster, then you are aware of the MP3 file searching application that has turned the music industry upside down and is challenging our copyright ideas. Napster and similar applications are introducing a new way to search for information, one that could do away with the need for search engines. This idea is based on the cooperation of all Web publishers, who would have to actively share their hard drives with the rest of the world. Is this a concept that could fly? One of the earliest Internet ideas was that you share out the workload of processing across a network of computers. Now known as P2P software or Peer-to-Peer, this is being talked about as the "new-new thing'. Napster and the well-known Gnutella are file-searching programs which work in a fundamentally different way from traditional search engines. Google, Altavista and others use spiders which crawl over the Web, deconstructing Web pages and recording their finds in their search index. In the new model, sites agree to be part of the network and run a piece of software inside their databases. They share the very latest search results, with people searching for it via the main software site. New products using this model are from companies such as InfraSearch/gonesilent, Flycode (previously known as Applesoup) or Pointera. As interesting as these concepts are there are some serious problems to be solved. Slow computers hooked into the network can reduce work to a crawl; but a greater problem is the complete 'buy-in' necessary from others, including sharing and being truthful about your information. The opportunity to misrepresent is always a concern. When users mislabeled their files in Napster this became known as Napster Bombing. However, the use of this new technology in a subject sphere or among a group of colleagues could open up a vast amount of information in the near future. Donna Berg Need a refresher on trigonometry or intregrals? SparkNotes Mathematics web site might be a good starting place - http://www.sparknotes.com/math/.dir/. SparkNotes are study guides written by students and recent graduates
of Harvard. All of the writers specialize in the subjects they cover.
SparkNotes also covers biology, physics, chemistry, computer science,
and geography. There is also test preparation help and information on
the SAT, LSAT, GMAT, MACT, GRE. Frances Knudson
The following new electronic journals have been added to the library
collection and are available from your desktop: Biology Chemistry Environment Mathematics Physics Carol Hoover
FindSame, at http://www.findsame.com/ is an interesting new search engine of a different type than most Web search engines. It allows you to search for documents using large pieces of text rather than keywords. Submit an entire document, and FindSame "returns a list of Web pages that contain any fragment of that document longer than about one line of text." You can paste in text, give a URL or upload a file. The site suggests a number of uses, including uncovering plagiarism in a student's report, checking to see if you have the most recent version of a given document, and tracking how a press release or speech is being quoted online. Kathy Varjabedian Want a reminder? Newsletter Editorial Team: Donna Berg, Helen Boorman, Jack Carter, Lou Pray, and Kathy Varjabedian. The name and e-mail address of the Library member who contributed an article appears at the end of the article. If you have comments or further questions, please contact that person. If you have general questions or comments about the Newsletter itself, please contact the Newsletter Editor, Kathy Varjabedian. |
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