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The Web Imagined in 1934 Using Index Cards, Telegraphs, and Other Analog Tools

In 1934, Belgian Paul Otlet wrote a book in which he envisioned a worldwide "mechanical, collective brain" that would store and make accessible the world's knowledge. By that time, he had created with co-visionary Henri La Fontaine a "database" of over 12 million index cards and was responding to over 1,500 queries a year. Unfortunately, the project's sponsor, the Belgian government, withdrew support, the Nazis invaded, they displaced the project to make way for a Third Reich art exhibit, and Otlet died in relative obscurity in 1944.

World Information Society Report 2007: Beyond WSIS

The International Telecommunication Union has released the World Information Society Report 2007: Beyond WSIS.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

Developing countries (most notably, India and China) are gaining on OECD countries in terms of fixed line penetration, mobile cellular subscriber penetration, Internet usage and broadband penetration. Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are also catching up with developing countries in terms of mobile phones, Internet usage and broadband. However, LDCs are actually being left behind in fixed lines, where there is a widening gap between developing countries and LDCs. This may later have a negative impact on the take-up of broadband in LDCs. . . .

The digital divide is also narrowing in terms of Internet usage. In 1997, the nearly three-quarters of the world’s population living in low-income and lower-middle income economies accounted for just 5 per cent of the world’s Internet users (see Figure 2). By 2005, they accounted for just over 30 per cent of all Internet users. . . .

In terms of broadband subscribers, high-income economies account for nearly three-quarters of total broadband subscribers worldwide (see Figure 1). Lower-middle income economies accounted for 20 per cent (with China alone accounting for 87 per cent of these or some 15 per cent of the global total). Low-income countries accounted for less than 1 per cent of total global broadband subscribers, with India and Vietnam accounting for virtually all of these.

2005 and 2006 were a period of startling growth in Internet in many countries, thanks to the boost from broadband. The United States remains the largest Internet market in terms of the number of Internet subscribers, but China is gaining fast and, if current growth rates continue, China could overtake the United States in terms of total Internet subscribers within two years. . . .

In developed countries, growth rates in Internet subscriptions tend to be lower, but many subscribers are exchanging their narrowband dial-up connection for a higher speed broadband connection. One example is the substitution of broadband for dial-up in the United Kingdom (see Figure 4). In the United States, some 60 per cent of all Internet connections are now broadband, while in Japan and Spain, efforts by operators to encourage consumers towards broadband have resulted in three-quarters of Internet subscribers now using broadband. In the Republic of Korea and Canada, virtually all Internet subscribers already enjoy broadband access to faster, advanced services such as video, teleconferencing, multi-player gaming and triple play.

Crazy Bosses

Queen of Hearts

Let’s hope that you never have a crazy boss. But—take my word for it—they’re out there. If you feel that you’ve gone down the rabbit hole and are faced each day with a cross between the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts, then, if you can’t just quit, you might want to pick up a copy of Stanley Bing’s Crazy Bosses.

You’ll meet a variety of crazy bosses, including the disaster hunter, the narcissist, the paranoid, the wimp, and, my personal favorite, the bully.

Bing offers humorous, but sage, advice for how to deal with these crazies.

Remembering Mosiac, the Web Browser That Changed Everything

If you have never had to use a standalone FTP client, a standalone Telnet client, a Gopher client, or a standalone USENET client, it might be hard to imagine what the Internet was like before Mosiac, the Web browser that put the World-Wide Web on the map and transformed the Internet (and the world). Go dig up a copy of The Internet for Everyone: A Guide for Users and Providers out of your library’s stacks, dust it off, and marvel at how far we have come since 1993. You’ll also meet Archie, Veronica, and WAIS, the Googles of their day.

Another way to travel back in time is to read PC Magazine‘s 1994 review of the NCSA Mosaic for Windows, and, if you really want a history lesson, download Mosaic from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (yes, it’s still available). Also take a look at the NCSA’s About NCSA Mosaic page.

To finish off your journey to the Internet’s Paleolithic age, check out the Timeline of Web Browsers and Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v8.2.

Of course, if you do remember these seemingly ancient technologies, you can easily imagine how primitive today’s hot technologies, such as Web 2.0, will seem in 14 years, and you may wonder whether future generations will remember them clearly or as a minor footnote in technological history.

That’s All Folks (for This Year)

This year’s been a total bummer. Hopefully 2007 will be better.

Blogging resumes the week of 1/8/07.

JSTOR to Offer Purchase of Articles by Individuals

Using a new purchase service, individuals will be able to purchase JSTOR articles for modest fees (currently $5.00 to $14.00) from publishers that participate in this service. JSTOR describes the service as follows:

An extension of JSTOR’s efforts to better serve scholars is a new article purchase service. This service is an opt-in program for JSTOR participating publishers and will enable them to sell single articles for immediate download. Researchers following direct links to articles will be presented with an option to purchase an article from the publisher if the publisher chooses to participate in this program and if the specific content requested is available through the program. The purchase option will only be presented if the user does not have access to the article. Prior to completing an article purchase users are prompted to first check the availability of the article through a local library or an institutional affiliation with JSTOR.

INASP Journals to Be Included in CrossRef

International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) has announced that its journals will be included in the CrossRef linking service.

In an INASP press release, Pippa Smart, INASP’s Head of Publishing Initiatives, said:

For journals that are largely invisible to most of the scientific community the importance of linking cannot be overstressed. We are therefore delighted to be working with CrossRef to promote discovery of journals published in the less developed countries. We believe that an integrated discovery mechanism which includes journals from all parts of the world is vital to global research—not only benefiting the editors and publishers with whom we work.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (12/18/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: The Complete Copyright Liability Handbook for Librarians and Educators, "Copyright Concerns in Online Education: What Students Need to Know," Digital Archiving: From Fragmentation to Collaboration, "Fixing Fair Use," "Mass Digitization of Books," MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, "Open Access: Why Should We Have It?," "Predictions for 2007," "Readers’ Attitudes to Self-Archiving in the UK," "The Rejection of D-Space: Selecting Theses Database Software at the University of Calgary Archives," "Taming the Digital Beast," and Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice.

The SEPW URL has changed. Use:

http://sepw.digital-scholarship.org/

or http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepw/sepw.htm

There is a mirror site at:

http://www.digital-scholarship.com/sepb/sepw/sepw.htm

The RSS feed is unaffected.

For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans Flashback posting.

Under the Hood of PLoS ONE: The Open Source TOPAZ E-Publishing System

PLoS is building its innovative PLoS ONE e-journal, which will incorporate both traditional and open peer review, using the open source TOPAZ software. (For a detailed description of the PLoS ONE peer review process, check out "ONE for All: The Next Step for PLoS.")

What is TOPAZ? It’s Web site doesn’t provide specifics, but "PLoS ONE—Technical Background" by Richard Cave does:

The core of TOPAZ is a digital information repository called Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture). Fedora is an Open Source content management application that supports the creation and management of digital objects. The digital objects contain metadata to express internal and external relationships in the repository, like articles in a journal or the text, images and video of an article. This relationship metadata can also be search using a semantic web query languages. Fedora is jointly developed by Cornell Universityâ€™s computer science department and the University of Virginia Libraries.

The metastore Kowari will be used with Fedora to support Resource Description Framework (RDF) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework metadata within the repository.

The PLoS ONE web interface will be built with AJAX. Client-side APIs will create the community features (e.g. annotations, discussion threads, ratings, etc.) for the website. As more new features are available on the TOPAZ architecture, we will launch them on PLoS ONE.

There was a TOPAZ Wiki at PLoS. It’s gone, but it’s pages are still cached by Google. The Wiki suggests that TOPAZ is likely to support Atom/RSS feeds, full-text search, and OAI-PMH among other possible features.

For information about other open source e-journal publishing systems, see "Open Source Software for Publishing E-Journals."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (11/6/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Building an Information Infrastructure in the UK," "Considering a Marketing and Communications Approach for an Institutional Repository," "Creative Commons Licences in Higher and Further Education: Do We Care?," "Examining the Claims of Google Scholar as a Serious Information Source," "Fedora and the Preservation of University Records Project," "The Mandates of October," "The Need to Archive Blog Content," "No-Fee Open-Access Journals," "Risk Assessment and Copyright in Digital Libraries," and To Stand the Test of Time: Long-Term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (10/23/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Copyright Jungle," "Disruptive Beneficence: The Google Print Program and the Future of Libraries," "DLF-Aquifer Asset Actions Experiment: Demonstrating Value of Actionable URLs," "Ideas on Creating a Consumer Market for Scholarly Journals," "An Interoperable Fabric for Scholarly Value Chains," IWAW’ 06: Proceeding of the 6th International Web Archiving Workshop, "Moving into the Digital Age: A Conceptual Model for a Publications Repository," "The Publishing Imperative: The Pervasive Influence of Publication Metrics," and "Strategies and Frameworks for Institutional Repositories and the New Support Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications."

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (9/25/06)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, newsletters, technical reports, and white papers. Especially interesting are: "Books without Boundaries: A Brief Tour of the System-Wide Print Book Collection"; The Complete Copyright Liability Handbook for Librarians and Educators; Digital Preservation; "Effect of E-Printing on Citation Rates in Astronomy and Physics"; Evaluating DRM: Building a Marketplace for the Convergent World; "Integration and Collaboration within Recently Established Australian Scholarly Publishing Initiatives"; "Nine Questions for Hybrid Journal Programs"; "Open Access Perspective Part I: Pioneer Journals: The Arc of Enthusiasm, Five Years Later"; "Open Access Perspective, Part II: Pioneer OA Journals: Preliminary Additions from DOAJ"; "Publishing Cooperatives: An Alternative for Non-Profit Publishers"; "Repository Librarian and the Next Crusade: The Search for a Common Standard for Digital Repository Metadata"; and Technical Evaluation of Selected Open Source Repository Solutions