"The truth is out there". The Web makes it easy for people to put information online, but does little to help you find it. You can browse or surf, but searching is harder. The best currently available solution is to index the entire Web (as in Excite, Lycos, Google, etc) but this approach can't keep up with the volume and velocity of change of the web, nor can it provide searches plural tailored to individual web site or end user. This is because such searches are executed on central servers that are isolated from the servers holding the actual content you want. An alternative solution is to make search part of the Web protocol itself. An IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) working group is working on this solution by designing DASL, an extension to HTTP for searching and locating. With DASL, a client may send a search query to a server and receive a list of the URLs that match the query. This talk will describe the design of the DASL protocol, present examples of how it could be used, and tell you how you can influence the design, which is still underway.

For further information, see the DASL web site: <http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/dasl/>

Although commercial publication of web material without permission is illegal, what about linking to sites that may contain illicitly reproduced material? Does Fair Use play into this scenario? And, inevitably, how will the provisions of the newly passed Digital Millennium Copyright Act affect our use of online materials?

From Edupage, 27 September 1998:
CAN LINKING MAKE YOU LIABLE?

"If your Web site links to a site that links to a third site and the third site contains illegal reproductions of copyrighted material, can you be sued for damages? So far, the answer is no, because Los Angeles Federal District Court Judge Manuel A. Real dismissed one of the defendants from a case brought by Hollywood glamour photographer Gary Bernstein, charging that such linking is illegal. After the judge's ruling, Bernstein withdrew his lawsuit, but legal experts say the issue will come up for court review another day. Law professor Mark Lemley says that "the consequences of holding an end user liable for copyright infringement would be disturbing for the Net... It might deter surfing. It might also give some unscrupulous groups the power to suppress speech or critics."

(New York Times  25 Sep 98)            

The ARL Internet 2 Committee will stimulate a discussion with participants regarding how libraries will be involved in the evolution of Internet2 as a new high performance network environment. Questions will be posed and explored such as:

• What is the content we will need in the I2 world?

• What beyond text do libraries and their users need to access in this environment? How do we envision images, data, video, multi-media integration in such an environment?

• What are libraries doing or should they do to partner with the IT efforts on their campuses?

• What applications will be critical for use of these resources?

By deploying a Citrix Winframe Terminal Server, IUPUI has developed a service that allows patrons of our library to access CD-ROMs and a variety of applications via the Internet. Initially laptop users in the building could access the system, followed by access to users throughout the campus and via the dial-in modem pools. Soon we will offer unlimited access across the Internet after user authentication. This is probably the only way currently available to allow full access to CD-ROM database searches and application usage via the Internet without making substantial changes to a desktop device. The accessing system can be Windows, Mac, DOS, or Unix based, on a platform that can be much less powerful than the platform actually needed to run the application. The program has been successful and has also been a technical challenge.

As part of its WWW-based Information Gateway, the University of Washington Libraries has developed a Digital Registry. The Digital Registry is a data store containing metadata for licensed electronic resources purchased by the Libraries and for other electronic resources selected by Libraries' subject selectors. Records are maintained in the Libraries INNOPAC system and exported to the Registry, using USMARC as a record transfer syntax. In its current production implementation, the Registry is searchable directly by the end user and is used to drive HTML writers that generate subject pages from multiple classification schemes and from customized resource lists. Additionally, Registry data is used in the "My Gateway" customized profiles that users can create. A prototype extension of the Registry that includes additional data elements to facilitate linking to local holdings information and to full text is under development.

This project briefing will cover the design rationale and initial implementation of the Digital Registry and our experience with database-generated HTML pages. We will also present an overview of the prototype extensions and the experimental linking architecture they are designed to support.