From: anders@dit.lth.se (Anders Ardo)
Subject: WAIS as the Hub of an Elecetronic Library Service. Abstract
Organization: Department of Computer Engineering, Lund University
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 12:27:25 GMT

FYI. Here is the abstract of a presentation I will make at the
15th International Essen Symposium in Essen, Germany.

I welcome comments on our plans and I would like to hear of similar projects.

==============================================================
Wide-Area Information Server (WAIS) as the Hub of an
Electronic Library Service at Lund University

Anders Ardo, Traugott Koch

ABSTRACT

Electronic information sources is badly utilized by researchers and
students at Lund University (and in Sweden) today while the world wide
development of these new types of resources is rapidly growing. The
physical prerequisites in the form of computer networks and local
personal computers with sufficiently large storage capacities is
readily available and the number of electronically information sources
is rapidly growing.

The main electronic services provided by the Lund University Library
today is a mixture of local and national OPACS and CD-ROM based
databases with no integration at all (no common user interface, no
common search language, different access methods, etc)

While the Internet has a lot of possibilities and resources there is a
need to make these services known to researchers and students as well
as providing user friendly tools to utilize Internet. One solution is
to provide ``Network Information Retrieval and Publication Systems''
(e.g.  WAIS, WWW, Internet Gopher, etc) for common use. We have
decided to use WAIS which is based on a standard protocol for
networked search and retrieval (Z39.50) and has also easy to use tools
for indexing and publishing information databases together with good
user interfaces available on a lot of different platforms.

The electronic library service at Lund has three main objectives:

* Acting as an intelligent gateway to electronic information
   resources on Internet.
* Building a local information server which collects and organizes
   electronic documents.
* Making user friendly tools available as well as education and support
   for users  of the electronic information sources.

The intelligent gateway will among other things integrate ftp and
telnet with WAIS user interface so pointers in databases can be
automatically used to retrieve other documents or connect to specific
Internet services.

We have also started to collect information sources within three
different areas (computer science, internet use and environmental
studies). Within each area there are several different types of
sources, e.g. the environment area has bibliographic information
(books and periodicals), journal content pages, a local directory
database on environmental related research projects and an archive of
articles from relevant electronic conferences. A seed-bank database is
planed in collaboration with the Nordic Gene Bank.

The popularity of WAIS is steadily growing and there are several
hundred available sources toady. However improvements needs to be done
with the possiblities to select sources (better/automatic indexing of
databases and documents, utilizing the hypertext possibilities of
World Wide Web to build a source selection tool) and in the search and
relevance-ranking algorithms.

Anders Ardo
Dept. of Computer Engineering
Lund University
P.O. Box 118
S-221 00 Lund, Sweden
Tel: +46 - 46 107522  Fax: +46 - 46 104714
Email: anders@dit.lth.se

Traugott Koch
Lund University Library, UB2
P.O. Box 3
S-221 00 Lund, Sweden
Tel: +46 - 46 109233   Fax: +46 - 46 110019
Email: Traugott.Koch@UB2.lu.se