http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1000 Library Trends 53 (4) Spring 2005: The Commercialized Web: Challenges for Libraries and Democracy; edited by Bettina Fabos http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1755 Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web Walker, Jill Search engines like Google interpret links to a Web page as objective, peer-endorsed, and machine-readable signs of value. Links have become the currency of the Web. With this economic value they also have power, affecting accessibility and knowledge on the Web. Links have always been fundamental to the Web. In the last few years their value has become regulated as search engines and other systems that find and define the structures of the Web increasingly index links and anchor text in addition to keywords and page content. In these projects, links are seen as objective, democratic, and machine-readable signs of value. There has been little or no critical discussion about this aspect of links, though link data is heavily used. This article discusses the implications and the power structures inherent in this relatively undocumented but influential change in the structuring of the World Wide Web and is an attempt to scan the field from a critical, humanist perspective. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1754 Current Developments and Future Trends for the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Shreeves, Sarah L. Habing, Thomas G. Hagedorn, Kat Young, Jeffrey A. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) has been widely adopted since its initial release in 2001. Initially developed as a means to federate access to diverse e-print archives through metadata harvesting and aggregation, the protocol has demonstrated its potential usefulness to a broad range of communities. Two years out from the release of the stable production version of the protocol (2.0), there are many interesting developments within the OAI community. Communities of interest have begun to use the protocol to aggregate metadata relative to their needs. The development of a registry of OAI data providers with browsing and searching capabilities as well as accessibility to machine processing is helping to provide a scalable solution to the question of who is providing what via the OAI protocol. Work is progressing on the technical infrastructure for extending the OAI protocol beyond the traditional harvesting structure. However, serious challenges, particularly for service providers, still exist. This article provides an overview of the current OAI environment and speculates on future directions for the protocol and OAI community. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1753 Collaboration Enabling Internet Resource Collection-Building Software and Technologies Mitchell, Steve Over the last decade the Library of the University of California, Riverside and its collaborators have developed a number of systems, service designs, and projects that utilize innovative technologies to foster better Internet finding tools in libraries and more cooperative and efficient effort in Internet link and metadata collection building. The open-source software and projects discussed represent appropriate technologies and sustainable strategies that we believe will help Internet portals, digital libraries, virtual libraries, library catalogs-with-portal-like-capabilities (IPDVLCs), and related collection-building efforts in academia to better scale and more accurately anticipate and meet the needs of scholarly and educational users. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1752 Lessons Learned with Arc, an OAI-PMH Service Provider Liu, Xiaoming Maly, Kurt Nelson, Michael L. Zubair, Mohammad Web-based digital libraries have historically been built in isolation utilizing different technologies, protocols, and metadata. These differences hindered the development of digital library services that enable users to discover information from multiple libraries through a single unified interface. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAIPMH) is a major, international effort to address technical interoperability among distributed repositories. Arc debuted in 2000 as the first end-user OAI-PMH service provider. Since that time, Arc has grown to include nearly 7,000,000 metadata records. Arc has been deployed in a number of environments and has served as the basis for many other OAI-PMH projects, including Archon, Kepler, NCSTRL, and DP9. In this article we review the history of OAI-PMH and Arc, as well as some of the lessons learned while developing Arc and related OAI-PMH services. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1751 Gateway Standardization: A Quality Assurance Framework for Metadata Kelly, Brian Closier, Amanda Hiom, Debra As digital library services develop from project demonstrators to mature, mission-critical services, it becomes necessary to develop and implement systematic procedures that will ensure the quality of the content, the functionality of the service, accessibility to a wide range of users and devices, and interoperability with other services. This article describes a quality assurance methodology that has been developed to support digital library programs in the United Kingdom higher and further education sectors. The article describes the approaches taken by the SOSIG subject gateway service in developing and maintaining a national service that is dependent on quality metadata. The article then outlines a quality assurance framework, which has been developed to support the Joint Information Systems Committee’s ( JISC) digital library programs in the UK and its application to metadata. The article concludes by describing a self-assessment toolkit that can be used by service providers to ensure that they have addressed the key areas. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1750 Strategies and Technologies of Sharing in Contributor-Run Archives Jones, Paul While we argue about and discuss the plusses and minuses of contributorrun archives, groups formed by people of shared interests and of varied technical competencies have been creating, maintaining, sustaining, and growing their archives for over a decade in several cases. These contributor- run archives make use of powerful open technologies to facilitate their projects. In this article I will focus on three different volunteer-run projects that involve worldwide cooperation using advanced technologies to further their ends. The Linux Documentation Project, the Degree Confluence Project, and Etree.org are all large projects that involve many contributors with technical teams of various sizes using a variety of technologies. Each project will be described in terms of its aims; its history; its rules, or lack thereof, for contribution; its technologies; and its current state of practice. From these examples we can draw some lessons as well as some enhanced awareness of technologies of cooperation. Among the technologies used by the projects are wiki, mailman, Shorten (SHN), FLAC, PHP, mySQL, PHPbb, Postnuke, BitTorrent, rsync, XML, and CVS. All of these technologies are “open” and available for installation, customization, and further sharing of their code. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1749 Student Searching Behavior and the Web: Use of Academic Resources and Google Griffiths, Jillian R. Brophy, Peter This article reports results of two user studies of search engine use conducted to evaluate the United Kingdom’s national academic sector digital information services and projects. The results presented here focus on student searching behavior and show that commercial Internet search engines dominate students’ information-seeking strategy. Forty-five percent of students use Google as their first port of call when locating information, with the university library catalogue used by 10 percent of the sample. Results of students’ perceptions of ease of use, success, time taken to search, and reasons for stopping a search are also presented. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1748 Cyber-Democracy or Cyber-Hegemony? Exploring the Political and Economic Structures of the Internet as an Alternative Source of Information Frechette, Julie Although government regulation of the Internet has been decried as undercutting free speech, the control of Internet content through capitalist gateways—namely, profit-driven software companies—has gone largely uncriticized. The author argues that this discursive trend manufactures consent through a hegemonic force neglecting to confront the invasion of online advertising or marketing strategies directed at children. This study suggests that “inappropriate content” (that is, nudity, pornography, obscenities) constitutes a cultural currency through which concerns and responses to the Internet have been articulated within the mainstream. By examining the rhetorical and financial investments of the telecommunications business sector, the author contends that the rhetorical elements creating “cyber-safety” concerns within the mainstream attempt to reach the consent of parents and educators by asking them to see some Internet content as value laden (sexuality, trigger words, or adult content), while disguising the interests and authority of profitable computer software and hardware industries (advertising and marketing). Although most online “safety measures” neglect to confront the emerging invasion of advertising/marketing directed at children and youth, the author argues that media literacy in cyberspace demands such scrutiny. Unlike measures to block or filter online information, students need an empowerment approach that will enable them to analyze, evaluate, and judge the information they receive. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1747 On Their Own: Students’ Academic Use of the Commercialized Web Ebersole, Samuel E. This article reviews research conducted in 1998–99 examining students’ perceptions and uses of the World Wide Web for academic purposes. Recent developments in the Web that may be of particular interest to educators and parents of students are considered. Since the mid-1990s the Internet, and more specifically the World Wide Web, has been eagerly adopted by school districts, administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Recent data from the National Center for Educational Statistics indicates that, in the fall of 2002, 99 percent of public schools and 92 percent of instructional classrooms were wired for Internet access (Kleiner, Lewis, & Greene, 2003). This is even more impressive when you compare 1994 figures, which estimated that 35 percent of schools and 3 percent of classrooms had Internet access. The latest in a long line of technological solutions to our educational woes, the Web, and its evangelists, promise no less than a radical restructuring of the way that students access and acquire information. However, some have raised concerns about the value of the Web as an educational resource. Historians have noted that the use of the Web in a public school setting marks the first time that the end user controls the process of choosing the content to be consumed. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1746 Tools for Creating Your Own Resource Portal: CWIS and the Scout Portal Toolkit Almasy, Edward Creating a full-featured resource portal on the Web is no small task, and it can be even more of a challenge without a team of Web designers and programmers. In the fall of 2000 the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Internet Scout Project (Scout) received funding from the Mellon Foundation to build an open-source software package intended to enable collection developers to share their collection’s metadata via the Web. In October of 2002 Scout began a new effort, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) initiative, to build upon prior work and create a software package that would help STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Math) content authors and collection developers share their work online and integrate it into NSDL. The software packages resulting from these two projects, the Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) and the Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS), are very inexpensive to maintain and operate and easy for nontechnical staff to download, set up, and populate with metadata. Conforming to international standards for metadata, data harvesting, and Web technology makes SPT and CWIS useful for and usable by a wide variety of projects and organizations, allowing and encouraging collaboration and record sharing among projects. Commercialization Internet Libraries and the World Wide Web World Wide Web