November 10, 1994: Vol26n10: Grant to help UB expand digital library

By LISA WILEY
News Bureau Staff
The University at Buffalo has been awarded $640,000 as part of a $4
million grant to the National Center for Geographic Information and
Analysis (NCGIA) to develop a distributed digital library system with
comprehensive services for images and spatially referenced
information.
	The "Alexandria Project," named after the first library in
Egypt, will allow users from across the country to electronically
access collections of digitized maps, images and pictures. For
example, school children may find maps of Amelia Earhart's last flight
to print out for a project report; a business executive may obtain a
map of parking availability in a certain area of town, or a scientist
may retrieve satellite images of weather maps.
	The $4 million grant is one of six, four-year awards totaling
$24 million being given to universities to enhance efforts to digitize
materials in university libraries so they can be accessible on
computer networks. The goal of the project, funded by the National
Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
and the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of
Defense, is to pioneer new methods of collecting, storing, organizing
and retrieving information on computer networks.
	The grants represent the federal government's largest
commitment to date to aiding the construction of the "virtual
libraries" that are expected to be popular services on the information
highway of the future.
	UB's Alexandria Project, which began in early September,
involves the other two members of the NCGIA consortium -- the
University of California at Santa Barbara, the lead institution, and
the University of Maine -- as well as several library and industrial
partners.
he project's chief product will be a dis-
	tributed database that will allow users from across the
country to view and retrieve items that were previously difficult to
access, according to Barbara Buttenfield, UB associate professor of
geography and the UB team's project director. The goal of the
project's fourth year is to put the Alexandria database on the
Internet, she says.
	The Buffalo team will evaluate and fine-tune a design for the
graphical user interface that will facilitate library access. This
interface, which is easy to learn, will support simple access to each
of the library services, with browsing functions and textual and
visual query.
	From a user's viewpoint, this interface is the most crucial
part of Alexandria's four components. The other three are an
electronic catalogue -- the core of the library -- that will allow the
system to search for requests from users; an ingest component, which
permits librarians and systems managers to incorporate new items into
the library collection, and a storage component for large collections
of spatially indexed items.
	The team at Santa Barbara will build and place on-line a
prototype system using software developed for geographical information
systems. UB's interface will be based on this prototype. This digital
library test system will have components at Santa Barbara, UB, the
Library of Congress, the U.S. Geological Survey and the St. Louis
Public Library.
	Industrial partners working with the NCGIA consortium include
Digital Equipment Corp., Environmental Systems Research Institute,
Conquest Corp. and Xerox Corp.