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A letter from David A. Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is presented. Patterson reflects on his original campaign statement after two years as ACM president. Details related to Patterson's term in office are analyzed. Among the endeavors discussed in the letter are ACM's Digital Library, the establishment of the IT professions board, the ACM's association with the Computer Science Teachers Association and an increased focuses on the impact of outsourcing in the software industry.

This article presents views of various executives related to the computer industry, on the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Kevin M. Schofield, general manager at Microsoft Research, states that ACM is now embarking on its second 50 years of existence, and is facing the imperative of remaking itself for the 21st century. It has begun this process by embracing the move to put its information assets online through the Digital Library. ACM needs to decide whether it is primarily a membership-based professional society or a public advocacy organization. David S. Wise, professor at the Computer Science Department of the Indiana University, remarked that ACM serves primarily as a publishing cooperative. Colleagues world-wide seek ACM list for its excellent collection of journal and conference productions in print, on line, and in person. But, as a scientific and educational organization, ACM also serves laypeople and governments internationally, representing what information technology is and what it can be. Both as a society and as a publisher with a large database, ACM is uniquely positioned to restrain international intellectual property law via local policy groups.

In this article, the president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) describes the organization's mission and the benefits and services available to its members. According to the author, the ACM seeks to redefine and advance computing as a profession and science and to foster innovation. Member benefits include a subscription to the journal "Communications of the ACM," access to online resources, and local chapters and conferences.

Lists of the top ten downloads from ACM's Digital Library for October 2006 are presented. The charts discuss the top ten most popular papers from ACM's refereed journals and conference proceedings, most popular courses at the ACM Professional Development Center, and the most popular magazine and "Computing Surveys" articles.

Reports on electronic libraries. Benefits; Delivery of information; Availability of services and resources; Cost effectiveness; Challenges in creation and development; Comments from Gretchen Reed, director of Information services; Thomas B. Flemming, library director; Others.

The article discusses a 2012 update of the Computing Classification System (CSS) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) completed by computing specialists including the New York University professor Zvi Kedem. Topics include the ACM Digital Library, indexing, topical tag clouds, and the availability of CSS in the Simple Knowledge Organization System format.

When Computers in Libraries editor Kathy Dempsey offered me the job of writing the Building Digital Libraries column, I had two immediate concerns. First, I'm a Web administrator and developer, but not a programmer. Second, I'm more interested in how people stumble around with new technology platforms than I am in new products. Attendees of the Internet Librarian and Internet Librarian International conferences have often heard me talk about "strategic thinking," whether the subject of my presentation was portals, hosting digital collections, or multi-disciplinary searching. When l joined the law offices of Epstein, Becket, Stromberg and Green in San Francisco, l discovered that the firm had not been charging its clients for online searching.The Institute of Industrial Relations Library needed to define high-quality content, and no one else was going to do it, so we did it ourselves. We could point to labor resources on the Internet; we could tell people how to find literature by topic, type, and location; and we could start publishing the faculty's research online. In fall 2002, a Google search on the string "labor research" listed our Center for Labor Research and Education first, and we were named an Internet Scout Site for library content.

The article reports that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS) had been relaunched, as a venue for publishing computer science research meetings that were not formally sponsored by ACM. These conference proceedings are to be distributed through the ACM digital library.

The article presents an analysis of the most popular journal stories that were searched online by readers. The percentage of readers that come from "referring" websites such as Slashdot and Reddit are examined. How these referring sites represent an online version of word-of-mouth publicity and the value of the "share" button on the right-hand column of every article is discussed.

The article discusses the Digital Library of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). When the Digital Library was launched in 1998, the article states, it contained full text for all articles published from 1991 forward, as well as metadata for articles published beginning in 1985. Other topics include affordable pricing for individuals accessing the library, the visibility and importance of "The Guide of Computing Literature," and the decision to make metadata for ACM's digital collection freely available.

Examines virtual libraries in Canada's Northwest Territories. Investment by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to provide six communities with digital libraries; State of the education system and the lack of public libraries; Details of the Gates' project and its impact on the communities: Challenge of working with cultures without a tradition of reading.

Focuses on digital library projects. Explanation of digital library research projects; How production digital library projects meet user needs with existing technologies; Examples of librarian-computer scientist projects; What librarians and computer scientists can learn from each other.

Provides information on Bartleby.com, an online library. Advantages of Bartleby.com; Increase in number of people using the site; How the online library emerged.

Discusses the availability of audioclasts from particular sessions of the August 2002 Digital Reference Research Symposium of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). How the participants came from libraries, digital libraries, and the computer science field; Consideration of the opening comments made by R. David Lankes.

Concentrates on digital librarianship. Digital librarianship as a subset of traditional librarianship; Three components of digital librarianship including Digital collections, digital finding tools and the need for librarians to be able to create digital resources; The assertion that digital librarianship will become more important in the future.

Discusses the type of skills that one should possess when creating and managing digital library collections and services. The importance of being familiar with the typical manipulations required to edit an image and save it in different formats; Why digital librarians should know their way around one or two programming languages; Knowledge of web technology.

Sowiport is the information portal for the social sciences that contains over 8 million literature references, research projects and full texts from 18 databases, including six English-language databases from ProQuest/CSA. Since its foundation seven years ago, Sowiport has been re-launched on the basis of the popular discovery framework VuFind. In this article we present how heterogeneous databases from different data providers can be integrated to provide the user one point of access to social science information. Further we describe several value-added services that assist the user at different stages of the information seeking process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on an international workshop related to the library and information science that was held on February 20-21, 2006 at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Alternative metrics of impact based on usage data, interoperable and standardized usage statistics, and open access citation information were the three topics of the workshop. The development of a suitable digital library infrastructure was also a point of focus in the discussion.

The article reports that California Digital Library has developed and implemented strategies to modify its digital collection. The digital collection has been designed to make digital materials available to non-university audiences in an usable and attractive format. The article offers a Calisphere Themed Collection Project that has been designed to create a modest number of online collection called "themed collections." This collection is an easy-to-use and has a flexible set of digital primary resources.

This article describes the current technical approach for digital object validation used by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the Library of Congress (LC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the digitization of historical newspapers. The article also describes the scheme for distributing validation across the participating institutions that will be creating and submitting digital objects to NDNP. The approaches and schemes are now being tested for the first development phase of NDNP, but if successful, they could be generalized to other similar projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers news briefs related to digitalization of the library materials. Nancy Davenport, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources, has declared his resignation from her post. Loriene Roy, professor at the University of Texas at Austin's school of Information, has been appointed the president of the American Library Association. A new scientific library for strife-torn Iraq has been built by D.J. Patil, scientist, and a small group of colleagues of the University of Maryland, Maryland.

The article reports that a project has been launched by Leiden University of Netherlands to improve and extend digital access to its special collections. The development of collection-level descriptions is an important goal of the project. According to the data structure offered by Encoded Archival Description, the collection guides have been encoded in XML. The archival institutions and libraries have widely adopted this standard worldwide.

The article presents information on a conference based on digital library. It also presents information on the early bird registration discounts for the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries that was ended on May 15, 2006. At the conference, the central attractions were information retrieval, electronic publishing, distance education and data mining. The conference was a boon for the researchers who were related to digital library research. These conferences offer a wider view for scientific researches.

The article presents information on structured annotation metadata that offers a mechanism for digital libraries. Additional information about library resources is offered by these digital libraries. Annotations can be used to convey, capture and organize information that might be lost in the ephemera of emails. The professional judgment of third parties can be codified by annotations by marking resources to take an advocacy position on controversial issues. Annotations can be served to create new information resources.

This section introduces articles and topics discussed in the February 2005 issue of Computers in Libraries.

Discusses digital libraries. Background on open standards for digital libraries; Advantages offered by digital libraries; Implications of digital library software.

The federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), in partnership with nonprofit, industry, academic, and other government organizations, has announced a plan to build a digital library freely available for children worldwide. The library will consist of 10,000 children's books drawn from 100 cultures. The International Children's Digital Library, developed by the Internet Archive and the University of Maryland, is part of a larger research project to develop new technology to serve young readers.

Reviews Sun Microsystems' white paper, 'Digital Library Technology Trends,' which examines both the state of digitization and its future promise. Download information; Features of the paper, written by Art Pasquinelli.

Discusses how OverDrive Inc. announced the launch of Digital Library Reserve, an application service for libraries to develop and manage a circulating collection of electronic books, magazines, newspapers, journals, audiobooks, and other downloadable media. How the Digital Library Reserve consists of a series of Web services for the library to establish and manage its digital media collection; Relationship between OverDrive and Adobe Systems; Advantages of library support and lending models.