SCTA Minutes for March 15, 1995

The meeting began at 7:25 with 67 attendees with Michael Masterson 
emceeing. 

Michael brought up Senate Bill 314 which would hold ISPs responsible for 
illegal content transmitted through their network. Dale Taylor has 
brought some information from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation.) 
Please send a form letter to our senator, Barbara Boxer. 

Last year the FPI Digital Telephony Bill passed, which forces providers 
to provide taps to the FBI for spying. "This crap sometimes passes so 
take it seriously!!"

The executive director of the SB Chamber of Commerce has proposed a 
conference for Nov 16 called Communications 2000, a Futurists Conference. 
Any correspondence to them would be good. Michael suggested to the 
Chamber that SCTA take this on, but they want to do it. With proper 
suggestions, it is likely they will listen. Send e-mail on this to 
michaelm@silcom.com. 

Dave Oster, our de-facto treasurer was out of town, Nancy Oster made the 
report on current SCTA funds. Dave,
has discovered that his not-so-mathematical wife had made an addition 
error, corrected the previous balance to $151.44. Donations at the 
January meeting came to $95.17. Eric Andresen was reimbursed for the 
$161.63 that he paid in rental for the projection equipment for the 
meeting. That brought the balance to $84.98. 

Nancy also made the announcement that the Steering Committee is open to 
anyone who wishes to participate. To participate in the online discussion 
of upcoming meetings, subscribe to the scta-org-list. Face-to-face 
steering committee meetings will be announced on that list as well.

The steering committee for SCTA is open to anyone. Just join the list! 
The info for all lists is at: scta-list@silcom.com. 

Jan Ballard anounced an economic development cooperative. This will be 
discussed on sbed-l@ucsb.edu. Contact Jan for info on joining (jwb@rain.org)

Alexandria Library Project--Featured Presentation 

Terry Smith presented
Larry Carver assisted- director of map and imaging lab. 

The digital library has been going on for 4 or 5 months. Terry will talk 
about it and Larry will show video. Ron Dolen will talk about what they 
will be doing on the Web.

There was a call for proposal from NSF to set up metacenter regional 
alliances. 5 supercomputing centers in the US. There is interest in 
setting up more of these. At UCSB, there is a desire to work with the 
community, too. Anyone interested in getting involved, please get in 
touch. 

Jill Charboneau mentioned that there is tremendous potential here in 
Santa Barbara. It will take a collaborative effort between UCSB and the 
community.
---------------
Final Announcements
-------------------
April 17- Mind/supermind Spiritual aspects as it relates to humanity 
Communication as the spiritual connection to technology. At the Lobero. 
Bruce Francis of the Seybrook institute. Adult Ed schedule Sund April2 
(it's in there) 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------
Presentation notes.
[OK, here's where I only was able to get things as fast as I could 
type-ja] 

Digital Library Initiative

What is a digital library?
Current Libraries
Accessible collections of items-
a knowledge base for society
only limited types of material easily accessible only limited facilities 
for processing materials 

Redefining what a library can be
Increse accessiblity to all items
Make greater range of materials accessible Increase ability ot process items


The NSF Digital Library Initiative
The six digital library site and their projects: Carnegie Mellon
video movies w/ soundtracks-content addressing Illinois
continuing dev of computer tools.
Michigan
General purpose engineering lib
Stanford
protocols, info bus
UCB
EIRs
UCSB
Digitized maps, spatial integration


Interactions between the projects
Santa Barbara hosting meeting in November 

Basics
Goal
Create a Distributed Library for Spatially indexed info Approach
Rapid Prototype
6 month Development Cycle
42 Month Building/Testing/Deploying
GIS technology
main Test Bed
6 Month design Cycle
42 month Development Cycle
General Technology
Fully Distributed>>>>

Query Examples
Scientist
find datasets of specif geologic information witha given eaccuracy and 
help me predict wher the next earthquake will ocur. Business Person
find ma-based information showing income distribution by urban area, and 
ehlp me decide the best location formynew business School Child
Find a book with a picture of Amelia Earhart as a girl and a map of her 
last Flight
Government Official
Find the housing development in my district that was inundated in the 
last 50-year flood.

NSF views the grant as seed money to be used with professional partners 

UCSB
Library - Map and imagery Lab (MIL)
National Center of Geographic Info and Analysis (NCGIA) Computer Sciendce 
Depoartm (CS)
Center for Coputaion Modeling and Sys
Laboratory for Paralled Computation
Electrical ^ Computer Engineering
Center for Image Procesin R3esearch
[2 others I missed-ja]

Project - Alexandria Digital Library
Computer Science, ECE , Geo, map & Imagery Library, NCGIA, Buffalo, 
Engineers, Many Others

Organization Structure
Director- Associate Director- Board of Advisors- Design Review Panel - 
Executive Commitee

Many issues including legal/ economic, parallel processing, info systems, 
image procesing, Lib interface, etc.

Partnerss- DEC, etc.

Arch & Developmental Approach
Focus on acces to library items and processing of items Architecture
Graphical user interface
Agents/assistants
components
Evolutionary approach
Rapic Prototype
Initial version of testbed as "Web Presence" at various sites 

GUI entry- Personal profile supported- work area/status- (Electronic?) 
assistant can help them navigate.
Guts- Storage (terabyte stores),
Catalog- much more sophisticated than what we have now (content 
dependent-thumbnail of library contents) Checkin/checkout
Ingest-adding items & extracting metadata, automating entry 

Digital Assistant-(interactive)
Browsing works differently. Ability to "re-shelve" books for later 
browsing. 

You can build your own personal library- cut/paste 

-Important to have interoperablity w/ other libraries.- 

Storage medium - there is talk of some innovative tape mechanism 

----

"Tend your own garden" philosophy for content. C-M has fee for use 
software. In-place service centers may be needed to disseminate info. 
Constraints- Alexandria Digital Libarry
Build it in 6 months
Use (almost all off-the -shelf tech
>>

2 kinds of Queries
What's Here?
Where's This?
OKto toggle between these modes during single query 

Query Results

Logical Architecture
Library User Interface
Analysis tools<--ArcView 2.0c (map queries) Tcl/tk
Sybase, etc.
Physical Architecture

Holdings: Data
Multiple sources
native digital
scanned analog (paper & film)
Multiple representations
Concentrate on Southern California
Load data into Unix files

Holdings

Holdings:Metadata

Holdings: Specific
Functional Accomplishments
Geographically search library holdings
Item-level search
Visual Feedabck


Programmatic accomplishments
Benchmark current spatial data technology Help refine testbed specs
Start loading data

NEXT MEETING IS WEDNESDAY APRIL 19, 1995 AT THE GRC MEETING ROOM 


Joe Alvarez --> jalvarez@silcom.com ["finger" for PGP, URL, VISACard #, etc.]