D-Lib Magazine
July/August 1997

ISSN 1082-9873

Clips and Pointers

NSF Awards $3 million to the Internet Scout Project; Expansion Planned

Amy Tracy Wells, Coordinator, Scout Report Signpost
Internet Scout, University of Wisconsin-Madison
[email protected]

The Internet Scout Project, located in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and is a project of the InterNIC. Developed in response to a 1992 project solicitation by NSF, the first services came online in 1993 and have been in continuous production since the Spring of that year. In April of this year, NSF awarded Internet Scout an additional $3,000,000 to continue providing current awareness and resource discovery services on the Internet.

The mission of the Internet Scout Project is to promote the progress of research and education in the U.S. by improving the Internet's information infrastructure. This is done generally through the advancement of information and resource discovery and specifically by providing selections of Internet resources which are content-rich, authoritative, and effectively presented. The primary audience for these services is the U.S. research and education, science and engineering community although, in point of fact, the Internet Scout Project serves a much broader audience. This audience includes people involved in the Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities. Additionally, there is both a K-12 and an international audience. The project currently employs thirteen persons, full and part-time, including librarians and content specialists with interdisciplinary backgrounds.

Internet Scout currently has five current awareness services. Its flagship, the Scout Report, is in its fourth year of production and enjoys a readership in excess of 100,000 per week. It is a guide to new Internet resources. Net-Happenings, in its fifth year, reaches in excess of 25,000 readers per day. It filters over 110 listservs and newsgroups and provides the detail and currency necessary to stay abreast of Internet developments in a variety of areas. K.I.D.S. (Kids Identifying and Discovering Sites) is a cooperative effort between K-12 students in the Madison Metropolitan School District (Madison, Wisconsin) and Boulder Valley School District (Boulder, Colorado). Students from four schools alternate annotating thematic sites of interest to them twice a month throughout the school year. Scout Toolkit is a resource guide to effectively using informational and software-based services on the Internet. The Scout Report Signpost, the newest service, provides access to the Scout Report's critical summaries. This service can be both browsed or queried.

Internet Scout plans for selective dissemination of information include the development of three additional Scout Reports, each of which will have a disciplinary focus and will be available this Fall; in specific, Science and Engineering, Business and Economics, and Arts and Humanities. These new reports will, in turn, further populate the Scout Report Signpost. Signpost will continue to explore various taxonomies for representing information and will serve as a testbed for the development of Uniform Resource Names (URN). Additionally, Internet Scout plans to continue its outreach efforts for promoting quality resources on the Internet, Internet II and Next Generation Internet.


ISO Working Group for Transliteration from Indic to Latin script

Dr Anthony P. Stone, Project Leader, ISO/TC46/SC2/WG12 Transliteration of Indic Scripts
[email protected]

ISO [International Organization for Standardization] has recently set up a working group to develop standards for transliteration from Indic scripts to Latin script. The scripts involved are Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Oriya, Malayalam, Sinhala, Telugu, and Tamil. To make the work of the working group more visible and more relevant to end users than has been usual in the past, an electronic mailing list, Conv-dev, has been set up.

The purpose of this list is restricted to the development of transliteration standards, rather than general discussion on Indic scripts. Anyone actively involved in using or developing relevant transliteration systems and who is prepared to contribute to the list from time to time, is very welcome to join.

To join the list, send an email to: [email protected] with this message in the body of the text: subscribe conv-dev [email protected] (but with your real email address replacing the string [email protected]).

Once you are subscribed, you will receive further necessary information.


Point-to-Point


In Print


Goings On


Pointers in This Column:

18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
May 26 - 29, 1998
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://icdcs.fernuni-hagen.de/
Eleventh International Unicode Conference
September 2 - 5, 1997
San Jose, California.
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/iuc11/
Ethics of Electronic Information in the 21st Century
September 26-28, 1997
Memphis, Tennessee
http://www.memphis.edu/ethics21/
Evaluation of the U.S. Government's Implementation of the Government Information Locator Service (GILS)
Final Report
http://www.unt.edu/slis/research/gilseval/gilsdocs.htm
Federal Electronic Research and Review Extraction Tool
(FERRET)
http://ferret.bls.census.gov/cgi-bin/ferret
IFLA '97
August 31 - September 5, 1997
Copenhagen, Denmark
http://www.db.dk/ifla97/
Information Resources in Academic Medicine:
Strategies for Turbulent Times
September 7 - 9, 1997
Leesburg, Virginia
http://www.aamc.org/events/specmtgs/inforeso/start.htm
Internet Scout Project http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/
Nanotechnology http://www.iop.org/Journals/na
Second IEEE Metadata Conference
September 16 - 17, 1997
Silver Spring, Maryland
http://www.llnl.gov/liv_comp/metadata/md97.html
Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA)
Guidelines for Cataloging Electronic Resources
http://poe.acc.virginia.edu/~ejs7y/vivacat/vivacat.htm
Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/

Copyright © 1997 Corporation for National Research Initiatives

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