D-Lib Magazine
June 1996

ISSN 1082-9873

Clips and Pointers

Point-to-Point

• The Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park, has made available its technical and video reports back to 1984. Abstracts of technical reports covering dynamic queries, hypertext, touchscreen, and information visualization are also available. Some of these reports are also accessible through the University of Maryland at College Park Department of Computer Science Technical Report Library.

• IFLANET has posted a list of Metadata Resources. This broadly construed resource includes pointers to sites and documents that address naming and identifiers as well as metadata elements and schemes. This is a comprehensive list that identifies proposed protocols and standards; Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), Internet Drafts and Requests for Comment (RFCs) projects and systems (e.g., Harvest, GILS); and technical reports and documents.

Gerry McKiernan's Beyond Bookmarks: Schemes for Organizing the Web identifies sites that have used classification systems or controlled vocabularies to organize Internet resources.

Where to Go: Mathematics

Modern computing was invented in part to handle very large problems, such as processing census data or calculating artillery tables. Not surprisingly, the Internet hosts many sites related to mathematics and identifying resources in mathematics. Here are a few to get you started:

Clearinghouses

The Mathematics WWW Archives, maintained by the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is a comprehensive collection with an emphasis on education in K- 12 through undergraduate settings. Included in the list are pointers to collections of teaching materials, software, and other sites related to mathematics. The Department of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin Marathon Center has compiled a Catalog of Mathematics-related Servers with thirteen sections covering: General Mathematics WWW Servers - in the United States, General Mathematics WWW Servers - in other countries, Pure Mathematics, History of Mathematics and Biographies, Applied Mathematics, Math Teaching, Math Education and Math Student Servers, Statistics, Mathematics Gophers, Mathematics Discussion Groups, Mathematics Newsletters and Announcements, Mathematics Newsgroups, Mathematics Software, Books and Publications, Mathematical Art and Graphics, and Miscellaneous Web Pages in Mathematics. The Department of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University also maintains a comprehensive list of mathematics resources as well as a directory of mathematicians and archives of teaching aids and preprints.

Mathematics Preprints

Preprints allow researchers to communicate the newest research quickly but without the benefit of formal peer review. In general, the preprint sites support searching and browsing; include submission, distribution, and notification procedures; and identify related sites. Among the oldest and best-developed of the preprint archives is the Physics e-Print archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Both LANL and Penn State identify mathematics pre-print collections maintained by Duke/MSRI/SISSA and by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). LANL also notes the resources maintained by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and the preprint collections at the University of Texas (mathematical physics). Penn State identifies the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) Electronic Preprints and Hypatia, a directory of researchers in mathematics and computer science as well as their papers, in addition to numerous collections maintained by departments in more specialized sub-fields.

The AMS Preprint Server supports browsing and searching Abstracts of the entire collection may be browsed by the mathematics subject classification, and the titles of most recent 100 submittals may also be browsed. The abstracts retrieved contain pointers to the full document, which is housed either by AMS or at remote locations. The archives at Duke/MSRI/SISSA have been divided into four topical areas, which may be individually searched by author/title or words and further limited by year (back to 1992 for two of the sub-archives). CMS Electronic Preprints also supports searching and browsing by general topics and includes a French version as well as a list of electronic journals in mathematics.

Curriculum and Tutorials

In addition to expediting communication of research, numerous sites devoted to mathematics offer tools for curriculum development and on-line tutorials targeting the full range of settings from K-12 to undergraduate. The April issue of Syllabus Magazine provides a good introduction to mathematics and software tools for mathematics instruction at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels including resources accessible on the Internet (note: the site provides highlights of the issue's contents). On the net, a useful place to start looking for information is NASA's Aerospace Education Services Program, which includes descriptions of other sites in addition to links to them. The Office for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education (MSTE) at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign also maintains Math Education Resources, which identifies resources by topic (e.g., General Mathematics Resources, K-12). Both the Mathematics Archive (especially What's New; Software, abstracts, and Reviews; and Other Teaching Materials) and the Eisenhower Clearinghouse provide links to software and curriculum development materials.

A few favorites:

• The Geometry Center, which is maintained by the Center for the Computation and Visualization of Geometric Structures, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, offers interactive applications in addition to technical papers, software, and course materials.

• Sites built around fractals, such as The Fractal Microscope, take advantage of the visual and interactive character of the web as well as the ability of the network to support resource sharing to depict through images the inherent abstractions of mathematics.

• MendelWeb is an ongoing project at Brown University, which is built around Gregor Mendel's 1865 paper "Versuche �ber Pflanzen-Hybriden" and a revised version of C.T. Druery and William Bateson's English translation of it: "Experiments in Plant Hybridization". Writes Roger Blumberg, who conceived and constructed the interactive resource, "the links integrate elementary mathematics (i.e. probability and statistics), classical genetics, European history, and the history of early modern biology" (from Robert B. Blumberg, MendelWeb: An electronic science/math/history resource for the WWW). The site is in German and English and offers tools, homework sets, technical papers, reference material, and a copy of Mendel's original paper.

• Finally, MEGA Mathematics, a project hosted by the Computer Research and Applications Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory with input from professional mathematicians and educators, parents, and students, offers a series of problems and games designed to illustrated concepts in advanced mathematics (e.g.,knots) primarily for elementary students.

In Print

• The proceedings of the First IEEE Metadata Conference, April 16-18, 1996, have been posted. They comprise 43 papers covering metadata issues from numerous perspectives, e.g., standards, geospatial, semantic interoperability, and information retrieval. Also available is a description of the conference, which contains a statement of objectives and links to the original call for papers.

• Untangling the Web the proceedings of a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) on April 26, 1996 are now available. Among the topics covered are cataloging, searching, electronic publishing, managing a web server, and education.

• The Research Libraries Group (RLG) and the Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA) has made available Preserving Digital Information, the final report of the 21-member Digital Archiving Task Force. The draft report, issued in September 1995, is still available. Several of the Commission's nine recommendations have been incorporated into RLG's agenda.

• The ALCTS Task Force on Meta Access has posted its minutes from its Midwinter (January 1996) meeting. The document comprises nine sections, including a summary of its discussions; statement of focus; list of action items; and framework for recommendations.

• Version 21 of Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography is available; the bibliography covers a wide range of topics including legal, economic, and library issues. With a few exceptions, most of the entries have been published since 1990; links are provided to on-line sources where possible. Information in the bibliography is updated periodically. (Information contributed with permission from Charles Bailey, [email protected])

• A description of the Workshop on Collaborative Filtering held at the University of California, Berkeley, on March 16, 1996 has been posted. The page includes the conference announcement and agenda, a summary of the workshop discussions, and an archive of the collaborative filtering mailing list.

Pointers in This Column:

ALCTS Task Force on Meta Access Minutes from Midwinter (January 1996) meeting	http://www.lib.virginia.edu/alcts/about/meet.html
American Mathematical Society (AMS) Preprint Server	http://e- math.ams.org/preprints/preprints-home.html
Beyond Bookmarks: Schemes for Organizing the Web	http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERST ACKS/CTW.htm
Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) Electronic Preprints	http://camel.math.ca/Preprints/
Catalog of Mathematics-related Servers	http://mthwww.uwc.edu/wwwmahes/files/math01.htm
Duke/MSRI/SISSA Preprint Archives	http://www.msri.org/preprints/archive.html
Eisenhower Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education	http://www.enc.org/
Fractal Microscope	http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Edu/Fractal/Fracta l_Home.html
Geometry Center	http://www.geom.umn.edu/
Hypatia	http://hypatia.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/
Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory University of Maryland, College Park Technical and Video Reports	http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/hcil/Research/tech-report-list.html
IFLANET Metadata Resources	http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/II/metadata.htm
Math Education Resources	http://mstemac4.ed.uiuc.edu/mathed/mathedlinks/html
Mathematics Archive	http://archives.math.utk.edu/
MEGA Mathematics	http://www.c3.lanl.gov/mega- math/index.html
MendelWeb	http://www.stg.brown.edu/MendelWeb/
NASA's Aerospace Education Services Program	http://www.okstate.edu/aesp/resource.html
Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography	http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v6/n1/bail6n1.html
Pennsylvania State University Mathematics Resources	http://alf1.cii.fc.ul.pt/EMIS/PSU-mirror/MathLists/Contents.html
Pennsylvania State University Teaching aids	gopher://gopher.math.psu.edu/11/pub/teaching_ai ds/
Physics e-Print archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)	http://xxx.lanl.gov/
Preserving Digital Information	http://www.rlg.org/ArchTF/
Proceedings of the First IEEE Metadata Conference April 16-18, 1996	http://www.nml.org/resources/misc/metadata/proceedings/paper_list.html
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)	http://www.siam.org/
Syllabus Magazine April (1996) issue (Highlights)	http://www.syllabus.com/april96mag.html
Untangling the Web	http://www.library.ucsb.edu/untangle/
Workshop on Collaborative Filtering University of California, Berkeley, March 16, 1996	http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/collab/

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