In addition, significant effort has been put toward collaboration with reference publishers. Similar to McGraw Hill's Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, our multimedia Americana implementation represents a unique publication not commercially available. Librarians with subject expertise in the testbed domain have evaluated hundreds of web resources and identified, described, and registered over 200 collections of relevant resources within the Conspectus. Current attention is focused on numeric and spatial data, with the University Library supporting licenses of resources such as Michigan land use and school district data, world mapping information, and city GIS data. Solicitations with new publishers continue, with Cambridge University Press having recently provided verbal confirmation of their intent to contribute.
Negotiations are also underway with several other scholarly and curricular publishers.
In fact, processing speed is now almost twice as fast as it was during the first demonstration in November 1995. We also separated most of the interoperability agent code from the Z39.50 Agent code. This gave us the opportunity to use most of the interoperability code for a separate FTL Agent. Because of the need to have agents for linking various specific subject vocabularies, e.g., NASA Thesaurus and Sears Subject Headings, we created one Thesaurus Agent to accommodate many different vocabularies. Since digital-library users are likely to enter terms that are more specific than BSO terms, the UMDL needs to link their terminology with the more general BSO terms that encompasses their topics of interest.