[Bug-gnupedia] Recommended Reading for those building a `digital library' or encyclopedia ...

[<address@hidden>]

Hello Everyone

Many points made in the last couple of days on this list I've seen much 
material rehashed both material already covered in the list and material 
already covered elsewhere in the field, so I've put together a list of 
resources to try and prevent further rehashing. The focus is on the librarian 
/ digital library / document oriented side of things (I know very little about 
XML so I won't try and give references for it).

I'd put these up as a web site, but in New Zealand web traffic is charged by 
the byte...

The first and most important resource is the legacy of Xanadu. Xanadu was a 
pre-WWW attempt to build a universal digital library. Need to say it failed, 
but along the way words like hypertext were coined and the WWW was built in 
it's ashes.

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0155.html

http://www.wirednews.com/wired/archive//3.06/xanadu.html?person=ted_nelson&topi
c_set=wiredpeople

Theodor Holm Nelson, ``Literary Machines'' Mindful Press 1993


Dublin Core is the most widely used standard for encoding metadata for digital 
resources (author, title, etc, etc). If we want our system to be able to 
interact widely with digital libraries etc, then Dublin Core is the way to go.

http://purl.oclc.org/dc/


There are, of course, an number of encyclopedia and encyclopedi-like 
collections which we need to think about---which we want to take features 
from, which we can take content from, which we can learn from:

http://www.nupedia.org/ (previously discussed)

http://www.everything2.org/ (a bizarre approach, generating a great deal of 
chaff)

http://www.oed.com/ (they two are appealing to the public for contributions of 
material, see the ``Reading Scheme'' http://dictionary.oed.com/public/news/0002
.htm)

http://www.eb.com/ (these ppl have lately edited large numbers of their 
articles to give them a 'current' feel, destroying the integrity of many of 
the them. I believe that there are out-of-copyright editions of Britannica 
which should be available for scanning if we want)

http://www.wired.com/ (are we going to cover `topic' subjects? These people 
have an interesting policy in relation to news ... they move articles from the 
`live' to the `archive' area breaking all links...)

http://www.h2g2.com/ (an interesting cathedral approach, aimed at eventual 
publication )

http://news.bbc.co.uk/ (compare with an interesting text-only parallel set of 
web pages at  http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm)

http://www.dlib.org/ (an information science magazine covering the digital 
presentation of information)


There are more resources out there we should be examining I'm sure, if you 
know of one, post it.

stuart


--    stuart yeates <address@hidden> aka `loam'
"Oh, havoc," cried Pooh, as he let slip the heffalumps of war.
X-no-archive:yes