Dublin Core Metadata Initiative News
The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set: ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2001 [pdf]
http://www.techstreet.com/cgi-bin/pdf/free/335284/Z39.85-2001.pdf
Announcement: "Dublin Core Metatdata Element Set Approved"
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0110&L=dc-general&F=&S=&P=2142
International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001
http://www.nii.ac.jp/dc2001/
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
http://www.dublincore.org/
National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) recently approved and published this standard set of fifteen metadata elements for resource description. The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (discussed in the September 11, 1998 Scout Report) brings together librarians, digital library researchers, content providers, and text-markup experts who seek to increase the visibility of resources by establishing a common, low-cost framework for description. The official approval by ANSI/ NISO of this DC element set is a major step forward in more widespread adoption. Through a series of ongoing workshops, DCMI developed and refined these elements into an easily applied standard meant to coexist with other metadata standards. The next of these workshops is in Tokyo, October 22-26, 2001. Ninth in the series, this workshop, sponsored by Japan's National Institute of Informatics, will examine the emerging Semantic Web and the broader metadata community. [DJS]
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Eukaryotic Promoter Database
http://www.epd.isb-sib.ch/promoter_elements/
Attention genetics and bioinformatics researchers. The Eukaryotic Promoter Database (EPD), developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and currently maintained at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, is an annotated collection of eukaryotic POL II promoters intended to assist experimental researchers as well as computer analysts in the investigation of eukaryotic transcription signals. Promoters are included in EPD if they are recognized by eukaryotic RNA POL II, active in a higher eukaryote, experimentally defined or homologous and sufficiently similar to an experimentally defined promoter, biologically functional, available in the current EMBL release, and distinct from other promoters in the database. Database entries (searchable by organism, homology group, sequence, keywords, references, etc.) include promoter identifications and descriptions, information on the experimental evidence, various kinds of promoter classifications and regulatory properties, as well as bibliographic references and cross-references to other databases. The EPD Website also features yearly-updated base frequency matrices for major eukaryotic promoter elements, a user manual, and a link to a complementary database called EPDX, which allows users to view available gene expression data for human EPD promoters. [HCS]
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World Biodiversity Database
http://www.eti.uva.nl/Database/WBD.html
The World Biodiversity Database, provided by the Expert Center for Taxonomic Identification (ETI), seeks to "document all presently known species (about 1.7 million) and to make this important biological information worldwide accessible." This continually growing database "provides taxonomic information, species names, synonyms, descriptions, illustrations and literature references when available" on 200,000 taxa. The searchable database can be explored using an expandable tree of the five taxonomic kingdoms or by typing in a common or scientific name. Both educators and students should find this site easy to navigate, informative, and useful. [JB]
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Labor Research Portal
http://iir.berkeley.edu/library/laborportal.html
Berkeley's Institute of Industrial Relations Library offers this useful metasite. While not new, the site is kept current, and the information here will be useful for anyone involved in any aspect of labor relations. Resources are divided into nine sections, including Labor Unions, Government, Labor Libraries, Globalization, and more. While these sections bill themselves as "Web guides," many span a host of resource types, such as print works, songs, and videos. Brief annotations are supplied where useful, but in other cases, such as the links to labor unions around the country and world, having all of these references in one list is sufficiently helpful. Some of the lists are far from comprehensive, but they will surely grow over time. This is a must-bookmark for labor activists and researchers. [TK]
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Two from NCES
Characteristics of the 100 Largest Public Elementary and Secondary School Districts in the United States: 1999-2000 [.pdf]
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001346
"Overview of Public Elementary and Secondary Schools and Districts"
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/overview/
The first of these new reports from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) describes the 100 largest US school districts, responsible for the education of nearly 25 percent of public school students. The 66-page report includes sixteen tables, a section presenting the highlights of the data, and a discussion section, which briefly reviews the characteristics of these large districts, including their greater student/ teacher ratio and the higher percentage of minority students. The second report, "Overview of Public Elementary and Secondary Schools and Districts," is provided on NCES' site. Here users will find information gleaned from the Common Core of Data (CCD) survey system about US public elementary and secondary schools and local education agencies, 1999-2000. More than a dozen tables cover distribution of schools, numbers of students, and student/ teacher ratios. [TK]
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Special Briefing: The Terrorist Attack on America: Background -- Foreign Affairs
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/home/terrorism.asp
This special briefing from Foreign Affairs collects the full text of ten previously published articles and thirteen book reviews that "contribute to an understanding of the tragic attacks on New York and Washington." The articles range from David Fromkin's 1975 "The Strategy of Terrorism," which gives the history of terrorism and some governmental strategies for combatting it, to Richard K. Betts' prescient 1998 "The New Threat of Mass Destruction," discussing the dangers of terrorist attacks on the US. Other writers include Ahmed Rashid, Walter Laqueur, and Ashton Carter. [TK]
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Shattered! 50 Years of Silence
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/c/carmelly-felicia/
The Nizkor Project (first mentioned in the May 19, 1998 Scout Report for Social Sciences) has just posted online Dr. Felicia (Steigman) Carmelly's 1997 book, Shattered! 50 Years of Silence. The book, which focuses on the Holocaust in Romania and Transnistria, has been revised and updated for this Internet edition, which includes more current information about political groups and several new personal testimonies. The book is divided into three main parts: Geographic and Historical Background, Personal Testimonies, and Psychological Implications, with plenty of additional information: a conversion guide for Romanian tender, an index of Transnistrian Camps, a bibliography, etc. Note that most of the book's graphics are not yet on-site and will be added over time. [TK]
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Bibliography of the History of American Education
http://www.zzbw.uni-hannover.de/HerbstStart.htm
This extensive bibliography by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus Jurgen Herbst covers the historical literature of American education. It is organized in four sections: General Works, The Colonial Period, From Revolution to Reconstruction, and America in the Urban Age, with each section subdivided into thematic lists of scholarly, historical journals, and government reports. A smattering of the many topics includes Government, The Courts, and Education; Racial Minorities and Education; The Education of Women; Americanization: The Response to Immigration; Youth, the Arts, and Psychoanalysis; Nineteenth Century Pedagogy; and Teachers and Teaching. One might wish for additional features such as annotations and/or the ability to search across these topics, but the scope of this compilation is impressive. [DJS]
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Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song: Correspondence, 1940-1950
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wwghtml/wwghome.html
Correspondence between Woody Guthrie and staff of the Archive of American Folk Song (now the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center) at the Library of Congress are at the heart of this new site from the Library of Congress American Memory series. The featured 53 items (84 pages) of material by, about, and to Woody Guthrie were penned mostly in the early 1940s. The collection provides "reflections on [Woody Guthrie's] past, his art, his life in New York City, and the looming Second World War. . . ." Materials on this site are part of the Woody Guthrie Manuscript Collection and the American Folklife Center. Along with the letters themselves, the site also features a well organized finding aid to give users an overview of all Guthrie archival materials at the Library of Congress, a biographical sketch, and a timeline of Guthrie's life. [REB]
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The 2001 Nobel and Ig Nobel Prizes
2001 Nobel Prize Winners
http://www.nobel.se/
2001 Ig Nobel Prize Winners
http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2001
This week, the Nobel Foundation announced the winners of its six awards for 2001, the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize. The United Nations and its Secretary General Kofi Annan were awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Prize in Literature went to V.S. Naipaul "for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories." Three Physics laureates were awarded, and the Nobel prize for Chemistry went to an international team of researchers. (The Nobel Foundation's online "e-museum" was reviewed in the August 8, 2000 Scout Report for Social Sciences & Humanities.) At the official Nobel Website, press releases for these categories, as well as Economics and Physiology/ Medicine, can be read in English, French, German, or Swedish, and links to the Curriculum Vitae and publication lists of the laureates are given. Back in the United States, another set of awards were passed out this week: the Ig Nobels. Awarded by humor rag The Annals of Improbable Research, the Ig Nobels honor people whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." This year's illustrious Ig Nobel laureates include, for Medicine, the publisher of "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts," in the Journal of Trauma, the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society (Literature), and the Peace Prize goes to the Lithuanian who built an amusement park known colloquially as "Stalin World." [HCS]
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Quadrennial Defense Review, 2001 [.pdf]
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/qdr2001.pdf
Every four years, the military issues the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) Report, a document that is key in setting military goals and priorities. This 79-page report, issued September 30, 2001, is divided into seven main sections (e.g., Defense Strategy, Revitalizing the DoD Establishment) and includes a statement by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The report explains that, "Even before the attack of September 11, 2001, the senior leaders of the Defense Department set out to establish a new strategy for America's defense that would embrace uncertainty and contend with surprise, a strategy premised on the idea that to be effective abroad, America must be safe at home." In the service of that new strategy, the QDR outlines DoD's four main policy objectives: to assure allies and friends of the US' steadfastness and military capability, to dissuade adversaries from undertaking programs potentially threatening to the US, to deter threats by increasing "the capacity to swiftly defeat attacks and impose severe penalties for aggression," and when deterrence fails, to decisively defeat any adversary. A central objective of this review was to shift the basis of defense planning. The report explains that overall the strategy seeks to move the US military "from a 'threat-based' model that has dominated thinking in the past to a 'capabilities-based' model for the future." [TK]
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"Responsibility for the Terrorist Atrocities in the United States, 11 September 2001" [MS Word, .pdf]
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/news.asp?NewsId=2686
10 Downing Street has posted a sixteen-page document reviewing the evidence that points to Usama Bin Laden as the agent of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. The document, which is available in HTML, .pdf, and MS Word formats, opens with a disclaimer: "This document does not purport to provide a prosecutable case against Usama Bin Laden in a court of law. Intelligence often cannot be used evidentially, due both to the strict rules of admissibility and to the need to protect the safety of sources. But on the basis of all the information available HMG is confident of its conclusions as expressed in this document." The document covers a great deal of ground, tending more toward assertion than a display of the evidence itself. It begins with the bold statement, "Usama Bin Laden and Al Qaida, the terrorist network which he heads, planned and carried out the atrocities on 11 September 2001," and repeatedly emphasizes the involvement of the Taleban in Bin Laden's activities, but those looking for the specific documents or intelligence leading to these conclusions will find only minimal satisfaction here. The penultimate page explains: "There is evidence of a very specific nature relating to the guilt of Bin Laden and his associates that is too sensitive to release." [TK]
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Biological and Chemical Weapons -- MEDLINEplus
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/biologicalandchemicalweapons.html
One of the latest in MEDLINEplus' special collections, the Biological and Chemical Weapons page addresses health issues at the forefront of many people's minds these days. As with other MEDLINEplus special collections, this page offers links to news stories, sites providing general information and overviews, information about specific conditions, and relevant organizations. While the sites are not annotated, the page provides a useful introduction to these health issues. The links here are all authoritative and range from the National Center for Infectious Diseases' (NCID) faq on anthrax to Johns Hopkins University's Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies to National Library of Medicine's TOXNET Databases. MEDLINEplus is offered by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and was last mentioned in the April 14, 2000 Scout Report. [TK]
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Aurora Gallery
http://www.spaceweather.com/aurora/gallery_01oct01.html
Those living in lower latitudes might not have been aware of the recent solar and geomagnetic activities that triggered a spectacular aurora borealis the week of September 30. Two interplanetary shock waves, spawned by solar coronal mass ejections, swept past our planet September 28-29. Then on October 1, the interplanetary magnetic field around Earth turned south, causing geomagnetic storms to rage off-and-on for the next 48 hours. Luckily for those who missed the excitement, SpaceWeather,com features a page of beautiful, color .jpeg photographs of the auroras from such places as Finland, Quebec, and Alaska during September 29-October 3. Along with the images are the photographers' names, comments, and camera setting specifics. [HCS]
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healthfinder Espanol -- HHS
http://www.healthfinder.gov/espanol
This site is a Spanish language edition of the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) healthfinder page (the English language version was reviewed in the April 18, 1997 Scout Report). healthfinder provides sources of selected information in Spanish and is intended to serve as a guide for pragmatic, health-related decision-making. The page opens with immediate access to sixteen pre-selected themes ranging from cholesterol to diabetes to AIDS and provides further access to a larger range of topics through an alphabetical listing. Users may also search for information not directly accessible under the pre-established headings. Although this version of the site is not as comprehensive as the English version, users will find it a good starting point to access consumer health information in Spanish. [LMB]
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Two for Teachers
Apple Learning Exchange [QuickTime]
http://ali.apple.com/ali/
TeacherNet
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/teachers/
The Apple Learning Interchange (API) site contains a wealth of educational resources, spanning the full spectrum from preschool through to college. Subject areas (including math, science, English, language arts, the humanities, and even philosophy) are highlighted and indexed cleanly with an eye to satisfying both students and teachers. Arguably the site's strongest assets are its QuickTime clips, several of which feature the University of Chicago's Tyrannosaurus Rex, Sue. For all its glitziness, ALI offers a great deal, especially from a pedagogical point of view, including a list of ready reference materials, such as the new Roget II Thesaurus and a periodic table as well as games and puzzles to teach science and math facts. As if all of this weren't enough, ALI's site also provides registered users (registration is free) with online pedagogical instruction. Of course, as the name implies, the site does prominently feature Apple technology. The second site listed above, Teachernet, is geared toward British educators and those interested in the British educational system, especially parents. The site gives a full overview of Britain's educational apparatus, its nationally administered curriculum, as well as extensive lists of national, regional, and community contacts for organizations of all sorts. While not yet operational, another attractive feature of the site will allow anyone to ask an "expert" questions regarding education in Britain. From a pedagogical perspective, one of the most useful elements of the site is its Teaching and Learning component, which offers a fully stocked bank of lesson plans across numerous disciplines. An interactive discussion area, a repository of educational case studies across the curriculum, and suggested plans for classroom day trips round out the site. [WH]
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Northern Light Special Edition: Windows XP
http://special.northernlight.com/windowsxp/
This new special edition from Northern Light (last mentioned in the January 11, 2001 Scout Report for Business & Economics) features selected and organized resources on Windows XP. The resources, which will be updated weekly, include links to external sites, documents from Northern Light's library, and search results generated on-the-fly for selected phrases. The special edition is divided into eleven sections, such as Office XP, Security, Legal Issues, and News & Reviews. [TK]
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Google News
"Google's New Look & New File Types"
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/01/10-google.html
"The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine" -- First Monday
http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_10/wiggins/index.html
Google Searches Related to 9/11 Terrorists Attacks
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/9-11-search.html
Google Zeitgeist
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
Some of our readers may already have noticed that Google (last mentioned in the July 20, 2001 Scout Report) is sporting a new look these days. Running along the top of the search page are now four tabs: Web, Images, Groups (newsgroups), and Directory (Open Directory's human-selected listings) that enable users to see different sets of search results. We reported on the Beta version of Google's image search engine in the June 29, 2001 Scout Report and find its results quite good. The Search Engine Report covers these latest improvements to Google. The next two URLs, from First Monday and Google's own Zeitgeist, reveal the ways that people used Google (and other search engines) to find information after the September 11 attacks. Perhaps most notably, the top ten search terms for the week do not include any of the usual sex-related suspects but instead are comprised of "CNN," "World Trade Center," "BBC," etc. Google Zeitgeist offers lists and graphs keeping track of the latest search queries. Archived pages are also available. [TK]
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Remembering Herblock
Herblock
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23223-2001Oct8.html
Five Decades of Herblock
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/herblock/5decades.htm
"Herblock, Washington Post Cartoonist With Wit and Bite, Is Dead at 91"
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/09/obituaries/09HERB.html
In Memoriam: Herb Block [RealPlayer]
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/remember/july-dec01/herblock_10-8.html
Herblock's Special for Today
http://www.editorialcartoons.net/herblock1.html
"Herblock's History"
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0010/herblock.html
Editorial Cartooning Pulitzers
http://www.pulitzer.org/cgi-bin/catquery.cgi?type=w&category=Editorial+Cartooning&FormsButton5=Retrieve
Association of American Editorial Cartoonists
http://pc99.detnews.com/aaec/
The Washington Post's celebrated political cartoonist Herbert L. Block, who signed his strips "Herblock," died on Monday at the age of 91. His spare-no-one, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoons have covered such charged topics as McCarthyism (he coined the term), de-segregation of public schools, the Vietnam war, and more recently, welfare reform and the possibility of Clinton's impeachment. Hailed by many as the most gifted political cartoonist of all time, Herblock's presence in the newspapers and public consciousness will surely be missed.
The Washington Post presents an in-depth, online feature (first on this list) about Herblock, with a photo gallery, tributes and memorials from fans and colleagues, and oodles of his cartoons. For readers eager to get straight to the cartoons, check out the Post's Five Decades of Herb Block. Other thoughtful obituaries worth visiting online are a piece from the New York Times and a RealAudio recording and transcript from the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Another Herblock resource is Editorialcartoons.net's brief visual review of his 1958 book entitled Herblock's Special for Today, a grim reminder of the Cold War era. In late 2000, a retrospective of Herblock's work was held at the Library of Congress, whose Website contains an illustrated overview of the exhibit. A list of all Editorial Cartooning Pulitzer winners 1917-2001 is available from Pulitzer.org (previously reviewed in the April 12, 1996 Scout Report). To get a taste of editorial cartooning life, visit the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) Website, featuring a history corner, member homepages, and news. In 1999, Herblock made the AAEC's suggested list (by R.C. Harvey) of the 20th century's top political cartoonists. [HCS]
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