Questions for Form B

  1. Some librarians dislike the phrase electronic library, considering it inappropriate to refer to what we discuss. They feel it demeans real libraries, which are pleasant physical places, where meetings can occur, where humans help each other find information, where valuable historical and cultural artifacts are brought together (illuminated manuscripts, old books, maps, vinyl records, ...), and where people can work with these resources. Describe a vision of a future electronic library that is likely to make a librarian happy with this expression. Use a list of at least 5 bullets, rather than prose, with one important added-value (provided by such a library) covered by each bullet.

  2. ACM is concerned with electronic databases (D), products (P), and services (S). For each of the following give the letter (i.e., D, P, or S) that best characterizes it.
    1. hypertext of July 1988 CACM
    2. Dialog file of Computing Reviews entries
    3. online network access to browse through and order articles
    4. CD-ROM with the most common ACM articles for undergraduate students
    5. support for editors and reviewers to speed up publishing
    6. collection of SGML marked-up documents for searching

  3. Legally and ethically speaking, should income from ACM's Hypertext on Hypertext from the July 1988 CACM provide recompense to the authors who submitted papers that appeared in that special issue? What principles and laws apply? How?

  4. Do you believe that as multimedia PCs and workstations become the norm, that people will re-publish many works, with the main change being to turn them into multimedia versions? Who should profit from these efforts?

  5. Why do you think that getting responses from netlib takes so long? Explain at least two plausible reasons for the delays.


fox@cs.vt.edu
Tue Aug 30 03:44:54 EDT 1994