From: LIBPACS@UHUPVM1.BITNET (Public-Access Computer Systems Forum)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.pacs-l
Subject: FYI France, Part I
Date: 17 Nov 92 19:52:25 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU

From: Jack Kessler <kessler@well.sf.ca.us>
Subject: Re: FYI France -- Europe, at least, discovers the users. Part 1 of 2.

        ===
        | |         ...The "OSI Seven-Layer Model", as seen by a
      =======       pretty rowdy crowd of networkers, librarians,
      ||   ||   7!  and Italian waiters at the banquet of the
     =======        Network Services Conference at Pisa,
     ||   ||   6    November 2-4...
    =======
    ||   ||   5     ..Hey, it was late at night, and we'd all
   =======          worked long and hard, and the food was good,
   ||   ||   4      and there was lots of wine...
  =======
  ||   ||   3
 =======            Conferences in Europe are a little different
 ||   ||   2        from conferences in other places. Ever try to
=======             build ten different six-foot towers-of-Pisa out
||   ||   1         of place cards, while "O Sole Mio" is crashing
                    out from the tables at the back?

     The idea of a "Network 'Services' Conference" came to Europe
last week. It hasn't arrived in the US or elsewhere, yet, and in
all cases is a bit overdue. There was much of interest for anyone
who loves libraries, books, networked information, or European ways
of looking at things, and for anyone blessed or cursed with the
need for working on a computer.

     The Pisa conference brought some leading lights from North
American information networking -- Peter Deutsch, creator of
"Archie" (not the comic book, although he carries that with him),
and John "Matrix" Quarterman -- together with network leaders from
all over Europe, to discuss what to do about a new topic: the
users. There were many librarians there: most of us were left
fascinated, but also shaking our heads and groaning. It seems that
the great amount of work so far done to help users on the networks
leaves much still to be done, in both Europe and elsewhere.

     The conference, sponsored by "EARN / the European Academic and
Research Network" and a group of several other organizations,
attracted 360 participants, from 46 countries, and by all accounts
was highly provocative and successful. There will be another one
next year, it seems. Sessions covered "New Global Information
Tools" (World-Wide Web, WAIS, Gopher, "Hyper-G", Archie, and the
"Soft Pages Project"), "Beyond ASCII" (imaging, and ISO standards),
"The Electronic Library" (projects in Israel and France, "The
Virtual Library", Project "PegUn/Janus" at Columbia U.),
"Delivering Messages to the Desktop", "Central and Eastern Europe",
"User Support", "Special Interest Communities" ("Electronic
Pierce", biology, chemistry, "Human Genome"), "Managing Network
Information Services", and "Information Overload". It was
for me a very different European version of the birthpangs of this
technology's application.

Keynote: Peter Deutsch, of "Archie"

     The first keynote speaker, Peter Deutsch, delivered a
fascinating and funny talk -- speaking at his accustomed rate,
described as "56k with no flow-control" -- about the necessity now
for "building networks, not just network links", for "real
services, not just projects", and for "not explaining, but hiding"
ftp and the various other user's tools so far developed. "Noone
ever wanted a 1/4 inch drill bit," he asserted, "they wanted a 1/4
inch hole." The time has come, he said, to provide real information
on the networks, and not just tools for getting there.

     Deutsch distinguished four purposes for existing network
tools: 1) Class Discovery -- more tools are needed, he said, 2)
Instance Location (indexing tools) -- we have lots now, 3) Access
(ftp, etc.) -- lots, 4) Management of Information (WAIS, 3W/WWW at
CERN) -- we could use some more.

     The tools and projects which exist, he said fall into four
groups: 1) Interactive Message Systems -- (telnet, rlogin, talk,
chat, MUDD / "Multi-user Dangerous Dragons"), 2) Store-and-Forward
-- (e-mail, news), 3) Information Delivery (anonymous ftp, Gopher,
3W/WWW, Prospero, WAIS, ALEX) -- the point being now to begin
hiding these, hide the network, make it transparent, and, 4) Tools
for Finding Things -- Peter's "own particular sandbox" at the
moment, he says, in which he's finding that, "a gigabyte no longer
is that big of a deal".

     But the networks will be "useful only if populated with useful
information", Deutsch said. "Librarians," moreover, "should be
running the networks, not the UNIX weenies." He is concerned about
the latter's penchant for reinventing the wheel first developed by
the former. "It's going to be services," he concluded, "if someone
around you starts talking technology, watch out."

Imaging Projects

     Anne Mumford, in "Beyond ASCII", pointed out that the problem with
images arriving now is their use, rather than the more technical
problems of their storage: image users will want to cut and paste,
insert, catalog, index, and change formats, just as they now do with
ASCII, she said. She mentioned CARL's Group 3 fax format journal
project, "CORE / Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment" which stores
the page and ASCII and a picture caption index, Northern Telecom's "CGM
/ Computer Graphics Metafile" format, and Elsevier's project for
issuing 35 imaged journals on cd-rom.

Standards: first round

     Borka Jerman-Blazic described the Herculean / Augean effort
currently going in to develop international standards for software.
The world has over 3000 spoken languages, she pointed out, over 100 of
these written: 50% use the Latin alphabet, but the other 50% use over
23 different alphabets, counting only those which have over 1 million
users. So users come to the networks familiar with Latin diacritic and
non-diacritic alphabets, non-Latin alphabets (Cyrillic, Greek),
diacritical scripts (Arabic, Hebrew), and syllabic (Kanna Japanese) and
ideographic (Chinese) written modes of expression. One might just make
them all learn American English, but then again they might not want to,
and they simply might not.  ISO 10646, a standard on which she's
working, specifies over 65,000 characters in world languages: she
bravely asserted both that it will accomodate UNICODE, and that
conforming commercial products will begin to appear next year.

The French -- libraries, and ILL

     Christine Deschamps delivered an elegant overview, despite
technical / microphone interruptions, of the vast array of current
events in France. She described their work on a national ILL "union
catalog": SQL request handling, an X.25 ILL system which batches
requests, and a project to develop an "OSI / Interlending OSI Network"
(ISO 10161 and 10162) to connect their effort to similar projects in
the Netherlands and the UK. In document delivery, she mentioned the
now-ended "FOUDRE" project, which used digital scanning and attempted
to capture and store text, as it was scanned, for future digital use:
this ran into both money and copyright problems. A newer "EDIL /
Electronic Document Interchange for Libraries" project, with the UK,
Germany, the Netherlands, and Portugal is proceeding, although there
still are copyright problems, she said.

Users

     Jill Foster, one of the Conference organizers, emphasized the pc
background of users, in her presentations on "User Support". She
mentioned the large and expanding work group on User Support, "RARE
ISUS WG", which now draws from many different international groups, and
itself supports user-support work groups in fields as diverse as
cetacean studies, developmental psychiatry, diabetes studies, and
marine technology. An excellent report edited by Foster, which arrived
belatedly after wrestling its way through Italian customs, summarizes
European efforts in the user support area ("User Support and
Information Services in the RARE Community -- A Status Report", RARE
Technical Report 1, RARE Working Group 3, Subgroup USIS, 1st edition,
March, 1992). Taking a phrase from her countryman, Lorcan Dempsey, Jill
reminded the conference that the networks now, "present users with a
flea market, when what's needed is a department store": user support
badly needs some such network organizing, she said.

User Support at Cornell

     Carole Lambert, from Cornell, described the hard-nosed managerial
analysis to which they subjected their local version of the
"computer-center-versus-library" competition in information provision
which plagues every campus. "We hit the wall," she said, "with a
service that wouldn't scale": 1) systems consulting services were
one-on-one, 2) classroom training focused on skills rather than on use
and resources, 3) documentation was labor- intensive, with limited
distribution, and 4) accounting went to and not always through a
central bottleneck. Their new model, she said, presents a "scalable
method of delivery": they decided to, 1) leverage the technology -- use
their own computer and network technology to develop and disseminate
user tools, 2) leverage the human resources -- they build campus
coalitions, shared solutions, use e-mail and other techniques to
sustain campus contacts, and "eliminate redundancies"
(dangerous-sounding term, I think, for cutting out duplications). Most
of all though, at Cornell, they are trying to change the attitudes and
expectations of the users: "we want to make independence easier than
dependence," said Lambert, "we teach the users problem diagnosis and
resolution along with traditional user skills...we will be there, but
we want them to rely on themselves more than they rely on us."

Costs -- an idea whose time is about to arrive

     T. Johannsen, originally of Dresden and now of just-north-of-
Tokyo, made a fascinating presentation of "SoftPages", his "distributed
database for fileserver contents" (e.g. Archie, WAIS), which has a
built-in module for computing usage "cost", in terms of "economic
distance" -- using speed, tariff, traffic and priority parameters.
Johannsen's presentation struck a chord in the conference: everyone is
getting a new awareness of usage costs, as the "academic test-bed"
history of the networks recedes and the "commercial" age dawns, and you
could see many minds in the audience quickly considering the logistics
of building in similar "costing" modules to other tools, following
Johannsen's suggestion.  (The NREN legislation in the US calls for
precisely this sort of new approach: "The Network shall...have
accounting mechanisms which allow users or groups of users to be
charged for their usage of copyrighted materials..." High Performance
Computing Act of 1991.  t.1,s.102,c,6.)

in Part 2: Preservation and a comprehensive approach at Columbia
Law, Quarterman, and, "Conclusions?".

Jack Kessler

kessler@well.sf.ca.us
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU