Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Michael Ney's Cyberculture/Cyberculture/REPORT - Network Services 92 Co

Text File | 1994-09-02 | 18KB | 373 lines

Topic 321       REPORT - Network Services 92 Conf.
peg:visionary   cyberculture zone        6:04 PM  Mar  3, 1994


 Moderator Comment: Found this file buried amongst the overload...
                    It's quite dated now but still has many relevant
                    discussion points. Hope you find it interesting!

 (368 lines) 12 May 1993
 From: BITNET list server at CUNYVM (1.7f) <[e-mail]>
 Subject: File: "BZR06 00"

 SCHOLAR Item BZR06 00

 Report on the Network Services Conference

 By Hans Deckers ([e-mail])

The Pisa Conference on Network Services brought some leading lights
from North American information networking: Peter Deutsch, creator of
"Archie," 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 whom were left
fascinated, but also shaking their heads and groaning. It seems that
the greatest amount of work so far done to help users on the networks
leaves much still to be done, both in Europe and elsewhere.

The conference, sponsored by EARN (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.

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 University),

"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, speaking at his accustomed
rate, described as "56k with no flowcontrol," delivered a fascinating
and funny talk 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. "No one 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 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 On-line 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 alphabets
(diacritic and non-diacritic), non-Latin alphabets (Cyrillic, Greek),
diacritical scripts (Arabic, Hebrew), and syllabaries (kana Japanese),
as well as ideographic modes of expression (Chinese). One might just
make all these users 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 accommodate UNICODE, and that
conforming commercial products will begin to appear next year.

The French libraries and ILL

Christine Deschamps delivered an elegant overview 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 Program Committee members, 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 University

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,

4) accounting went to and not always through a central bottleneck.

Their new model, she said, presents a "scalable method of delivery"
because 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 by building campus coalitions, sharing
   solutions, using 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

Thomas 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" and 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 Johanssen'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.)

A Comprehensive Approach at Columbia Law

Willem Scholten presented Project Janus, Columbia University law
library's effort to avoid microforms, bring the library to the user
(Manhattan presents critical space problems), and adapt to changing
patterns of information distribution. The project involves
participation by Thinking Machines Corp., the university's main and
health sciences libraries, the law library, and the United Nations
library human rights collection. One critical goal was preservation of
the law library's unique and rapidly-deteriorating collections of
documents from the Nuremberg trials (375,000 double-sided pages) and
Rosenberg trial (250,000 double-sided pages).

Their solution uses a special "XWAIS," a highly-customized version of
the publicly-available WAIS tool, digitization with ocr, optical and
magnetic tape, and Z39.50 and ISO's SR/1, two Sun Sparc workstation
networks. a Xerox Docutech 7000 scanner and ocr system, and a CM2-32K
Thinking Machines parallel processing supercomputer": all the latest
stuff.

Many hands have been in on the project: the law school publishes 13
legal periodicals, for example, and the goal of getting such
publishing costs back in-house is being approached through SGML and
e-publishing on the system. The reference desk is interested in
information which has time value and takes too long to get into print:
the system loaded the North American Free Trade Agreement recently and
at last count was getting 200250 "hits" per day on that resource, and
similar figures have been recorded for on-line versions of the
Maastricht Treaty and the papers of the Rio Conference on the
Environment. One other library dream, of loading full text direct from
commercial publishers, also is at least under discussion with Simon &
Schuster: user licences for the library, based on a flat fee with
royalties for downloading.

Closing: John "Matrix" Quarterman - the Global view

John Quarterman began his conference-closing keynote address with the
warning that he would not make predictions - "my crystal ball's kinda
cloudy", he said - and then proceeded to make them. He has put
together a wonderfully interesting series of maps, all using data
taken from various domain-name registries and servers, showing where
all the network use is taking place in the world (surprising activity
patterns in Iceland, Australia, Moscow, Hong Kong), and suggesting a
continuing rate of usage growth so phenomenal as to be catastrophic
for both the networks and librarians.

It seems still that only Quarterman, despite his good influence
exerted since the 1988 publication of his book, "The Matrix", has the
breadth of vision, and the patience, to look at all the world's
information networks - Internet, EARN, BITNET, etc. - as a whole.

Conclusions 1: the impending invasion of the commercial market

The real problem, lurking behind most of the conference talk, is what
to do about the impending invasion of the commercial market. The
commercial publishers are all poised, we heard again and again, to
plunge into the little world of academic networking. Quarterman showed
us a fascinating map, on which the portion of the world network use
devoted to "purely academic" activity, which represented ALL network
use a short time ago, now is small and is shrinking rapidly: "academic
use" will become an insignificant part of networking as a whole,
shortly, he asserted.

Conclusions 2: "the academic model will not scale"

The problem, then, acknowledged again and again by U.S. and non-U.S.
attendees, is that "the academic model will not scale": as network use
grows, the tools and structures and carefully-developed "standards" -
think of MARC,SGML, ftp, telnet, opac user interfaces, even ASCII -
will not satisfy a non-academic,international, user public. This
despairing conclusion left several librarian-users in the audience
feeling a ittle abandoned. "Information overload." then, inevitably,
was debated: several people felt that a bad network situation in this
respect is about to get much, much, worse.

Conclusions 3: "the academic model had BETTER scale"

Some braver souls, though, insisted that private industry will need
some standards as well, if not necessarily for easily sharing
information easily for altruistic reasons, as the academic world
wants, then at least for ensuring the compatibility of its own
hardware, software, and services with a particular marketing
structure: IBM products and services talking to each other, Siemens'
doing the same, all the components of a local or wide area network
able to communicate among themselves, serving fulltext newspapers to
northern California, Shakespeare to the entire Ivy League, and
Montaigne (or Simenon) to Touraine. Private industry will have to
start somewhere in all this, and that beginning may well be made with
at least some of the elaborate tools and standards which have been
assembled by the careful academic community today. Such, at least, is
the hope.

Conclusions 4: the Atlantic is a very wide pond

It was very interesting for this American to note the fundamental
difference between the U.S. and the European approaches on the
standards point. Much good work on standards is being done on both
sides of the Atlantic. But the intense preoccupation with standards
and consensus-building in general is markedly different in Europe than
it is in the U.S. Great levels of bureaucracy, much tedious
negotiation, and great levels of frustration are all devoted to
accomplishing the smallest point of agreement in Europe, ruled
constantly by the conviction that without some sort of "top-down"
agreement, no "bottom-up" effort will succeed. Not that bureaucracy
and haggling don't take place in the American context; but there seems
to be more in Europe, and it's much more intense, and deemed to be
much more necessary.

Law students everywhere learn that Anglo-American law may be built
piecemeal, upon the "Common Law", and upon individual cases, while
Continental law is a seamless web of "codes", which are thought to
cover all conceivable instances. In a major difference from the US
approach. there is this same longing for "codification" in European
networking standards work: piecemeal, such as has characterized the
evolution of the Internet, will not do in Europe; before they can
proceed rather than after, they need "top-down" codes and standards.
Program Committee chairman, Dennis Jennings mused about this,
pointedly, to the several U.S. attendees and speakers: "You must
remember that you are one gigantic, country, while we are by
comparison a very large, but still very disunited, collection of very
small countries." It is interesting to consider whether the U.S. or
the European "consensus-model" will more readily "scale up" to the
rapidly-evolving world information Matrix.

"Information Overload"

"Network Services '92", then, came to the conclusion that it may well
become impossible to service the networks during the next few years:
too many, too much, understood and aided by too few. The glass which
appears half empty, however, also is half full. There will be many
more users and many more things to do. Dennis Jennings also pointed
out that the evolution of the telephone was aided by a paradigm shift:
fears early in this century that there never would be enough telephone
operators were answered by the users becoming the operators
themselves. Just so, Jennings insists, a paradigm shift will occur in
networked information. The bottlenecks which exist today - of costs
and hardware capacities and user training and clumsy interfaces - may
be resolved ultimately by similar shifts: "transparent" interfaces,
"invisible" technologies, "paperless" libraries, "hypertext"
organization and access - it's hard to tell what from here, but
something.

A Role for Librarians -- the librarian's glass may be half full

One final optimistic note sounded by the conference left the
librarians in the audience feeling smug. Already, no one can FIND
anything on the "nets", and it seems that this problem is not going
away: it seems, in fact, that the entry of the commercial market is
about to make the "navigating" problem much, much worse. Navigating
through information resources is what librarians do: it's what we've
done for centuries. It is nice to feel needed: it's reassuring to
discover how badly we're going to be needed by the information network
users in Europe and elsewhere during the next few years.

End Item BZR06 00