The community digital library has emerged as a recent evolution in the development of digital libraries. A community digital library is distinct through having a community of potential users define and guide the development of the library. In this article, we present how the geoscience community has worked to develop The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) in the light of recent work in the area of meta-design, the design of the design process. The development of DLESE is described utilizing a conceptual framework developed from the analysis of a variety of open source projects.

It is proposed in this article that scholarly journals from the science periphery can (and should) be assessed by their scientific communicability. The objective is to review the literature comprehensively and critically in order to suggest a simple method for reliable "stratification" of journals from the most to least appropriate for public funding support and for inclusion in international databases. The emphasis is on the neglected (Francis Narin's) principle of evaluation indeterminacy and on (Michael Moravcsik's) a strategy to bridge the communication gap between the mainstream and peripheral science communities.

As applications become more pervasive, pressing, and diverse, several well-known information retrieval (IR) problems have become even more urgent. Information overload, a result of the ease of information creation and transmission via the Internet and WWW, has become more troublesome (e.g., even stockbrokers and elementary school students, heavily exposed to various WWW search engines, are versed in such IR terminology as recall and precision). Significant variations in database formats and structures, the richness of information media (text, audio, and video), and an abundance of multilingual information content also have created severe information interoperability problems -- structural interoperability, media interoperability, and multilingual interoperability.

Advances in Internet technologies have made it seemingly possible and easy to create digital collections, repositories and libraries. However, supporting diverse information uses that facilitate interaction beyond searching and browsing is in the early stages. Interactive digital libraries, or interactional digital libraries as we prefer to call them, are still evolving. This special issue tries to bring together work that is being done to incorporate interactivity in digital libraries.

Discusses persistent links or PURLs as a tool for linking.

This article reviews the state of education in digital libraries and curriculum planning documents from professional associations in two areas: Library and Information Science; and Computing. It examines suggestions for integration and interdisciplinarity in education for digital libraries curricula using definitions of a discipline, interdisciplinarity, and the transdisciplinary structure of a university in order to discover how such integration may be successfully accomplished. A plan to use learning communities and develop an interdisciplinary curriculum for Knowledge Organization is briefly discussed.

A review of Bowker's 2006 book published by MIT Press.

Objectives: To carry out a usability evaluation of the recently launched South London and Maudsley NHS Trust library website. Methods: A variety of standard methodologies were employed; content and design evaluation of selected comparable sites; focus groups; a questionnaire survey of library and Web development staff; heuristic evaluation; observation testing; card sorting/cluster analysis, and label intuitiveness/category membership testing. All participants were staff of or providers of services to the trust. Demographic information was recorded for each participant. Results: Test participants' overall responses to the site were enthusiastic and favourable, indicating the scope and and content of the site to be broadly appropriate to the user group. Testers made numerous suggestions for new content. Usability problems were discovered in two main areas: in the organisation of the site, and in the terminology used to refer to information services and sources. Based on test results, proposals for a revised menu structure, improved accessibility, and changes to the terminology used within the site are presented. Conclusion: Usability evaluation methods, appropriately scaled, can be advantageously applied to NHS library web sites by an individual web editor working alone.

Despite a variety of problems, electronic publishing on BITNET, Internet, and other networks is experiencing vigorous growth as scholars experiment with FTP archives, list servers, WAIS servers, and other technological tools in order to reinvent scholarly publishing. This bibliography presents selected sources, in both paper and electronic form, that are useful in understanding network-based electronic publishing. A limited number of sources that deal with broader electronic publishing topics, such as intellectual property rights, multimedia systems, standards, and virtual libraries, are also included; however, this bibliography does not provide an in-depth treatment of the large and diverse body of literature that deals with electronic publishing as a whole. In order to focus on recent developments, it does not cover sources published prior to 1989 (most sources are from 1990 to the present).

Open source methodologies used in software are interrogated and then compared to the methods used in farmersâ rights groups. The use of open source methods in other contexts illustrates increasing interest in grassroots democratic movements participating in the continuing process of balance between public and private interests. These efforts provide a possible alternate framework for policy decisions concerning intellectual property.