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National Library News |
by Nancy Brodie,
Information Resource Management
Virtuoso is a Canadian, non-profit on-line scholarly publishing group which is committed to improving access and dissemination of scholarly communication on the Internet. Members include several university presses, the NRC Research Press, the University of New Brunswick Electronic Text Centre, the Canadian Association of Learned Journals, Industry Canada/SchoolNet, as well as a scholarly society and a scholarly electronic journal association. The National Library joined the group in January 1999.
Three Virtuoso members, the University of Toronto Press, Wilfrid Laurier University Press and Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, have received funding from Industry Canada’s SchoolNet program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to create a model electronic-publishing process based on the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Six journals will go on-line as a result of the project: University of Toronto Law Journal, University of Toronto Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Communication, Studies in Religion, Criminologie, and Circuit. The National Library recognizes that the use of open non-proprietary standards and the creation of structured documents by publishers are key to our ability to preserve the Canadian digital heritage. The Library strongly endorses this project.
The UNB Electronic Text Centre is doing research on metadata to support a search process for locating and retrieving electronic-journal articles across multiple publishers. UNB sees the Dublin Core metadata scheme and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as key components of its metadata approach. UNB also organized the well-received workshop, A Canadian Travelling Roadshow: Metadata for Internet Resources, which was held in April 1999. The National Library sponsored a two-day metadata seminar in Ottawa during the same period. Building awareness and training are important aspects of the metadata agenda for both libraries and publishers.
For more information on Virtuoso see the group’s Web site at <http://www.unb.ca/virtuoso>.