Description: Dienst is a distributed digital library system developed at Cornell. It is used for the Networked Computer Science Reference Library (NCSTRL), which has more than 100 hundred locations around the world. Dienst plans to use location independent names (URNs) to identify materials in the library rather than URLs. The URN system to be used is the CNRI Handle System, a Java-based name service. The task of this project is to create a specifc set of requirements, to analyze the impact that this change will have on every aspect of the service -- in particular the providers of information and the end users -- and to design and implement the changes that are needed.
Client: Carl Lagoze, head NCSTRL (lagoze@cs.cornell.edu)
See: NCSTRL -- http://www.ncstrl.org
Handle system -- http:// handle.net
Description: The use by physicists of the Eprint Archive at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the success stories of electronic publishing. Physicists post copies of their research papers on the archive before they are formally reviewed or published, so that research results are available to other researchers. Recently, an additional archive has been added for computing, known as CoRR (the Computing Research Repository), but it is not yet widely used. One reason for this is that the interface developed by physicists has proved inconvenient for computing researchers. The task of this project is to enhance the usability of CoRR by studying the requirements of computing researchers, designing modifications to the interface, and implementing them.
Client: William Y. Arms, chair ACM Publications Board (wya@cs.cornell.edu)
Other contact: Joe Halpern, chair CoRR working group (halpern@cs.cornell.edu)
See: Los Alamos Eprint Archive -- http://xxx.lanl.gov
CoRR -- http://www.acm.org/corr
Description: Dienst is a distributed digital library system developed at Cornell. It is used for the Networked Computer Science Reference Library (NCSTRL), which has more than 100 hundred locations around the world. Dienst was developed for Unix computers and many Unix concepts are buried in the architecture and the implementation details. The task of this project is to create a Dienst package for Wintel computers, specifically the NT operating system. An important part of the task is to determine the requirements, including which features of Dienst need to be re-engineeered and how the software should be packaged.
Client: Carl Lagoze, head NCSTRL (lagoze@cs.cornell.edu)
See: NCSTRL -- http://www.ncstrl.org
Description: Publishers of online magazines and journals need information about how many people read their publications. Although web servers and databases keep count of how many times each file is sent out over the Internet, it is unknown how this correlates to actual readership. A proposed strategy is to add monitoring software to pages of journals and magazines that reports back when the pages are actually rendered by a browser. Apart from the technical challenges, this raises serious issues of privacy. The task of this project is to analyze the requirements, consider technical alternatives, design and implement monitoring tools, and test them on an actual online magazine, D-Lib Magazine.
Client: William Y. Arms, editor-in-chief D-Lib Magazine (wya@cs.cornell.edu)
See: D-Lib Magazine -- http://www.dlib.org
Description: Dienst is a distributed digital library system developed at Cornell. It is used for the Networked Computer Science Reference Library (NCSTRL), which has more than 100 hundred locations around the world. Dienst, currently, has a simple document model in which each work is represented by an identifier and a set of formats, one of which contains cataloging information (metadata). The task of this project is to extend this document model to support a very broad range of digital objects. Enhancements include support for versions of digital objects, distributed components, and dynamic components.
Client: Carl Lagoze, head NCSTRL (lagoze@cs.cornell.edu)
See: NCSTRL -- http://www.ncstrl.org
William Y. Arms
August 27, 1999