Description: This painting's background is predominately white and has many vertical wavy parallel multi-colored lines.

Description: This article offers comment by the author on the Patagonian Archipelago as the Final Frontier, as written about in a book by Matthew B. Martinic titled, 'Patagonia Archipelago. The Final Frontier.

Description: This article discusses the development of The Portal to Texas History. Abstract: Purpose: To help information professionals learn about issues and considerations in portal building. Design/methodology/approach: The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries' Portal to Texas History provides long-term storage and access to digital copies of important original materials illuminating Texas' past. This article describes the development of the Portal technology and content - presenting objectives, processes, and future plans - and defines the larger goal of facilitating collaboration among resource-holding institutions. Findings: Practical aspects of creating and populating the Portal include development of specifications and standards, construction of an application framework, selection of content, production of metadata, and refinement of user interfaces. Planned future enhancements to the Portal will augment sustainability and provide added value for users. The Portal project may also serve as a catalyst for wider collaborative efforts in digitization. Originality/Value: The Portal to Texas History project's experiences described in this article will inform other stakeholders seeking to develop innovative uses of Portal technologies.

Description: This paper discusses an extensible approach to interoperability testing. Assessing interoperability in the networked information services and applications environment presents difficult challenges due in part to the multi-level and multi-faceted aspects of interoperability. Recent research to establish an interoperability testbed in the context of Z39.50 protocol clients and servers and online catalog applications identified threats to interoperability and defined a question space for interoperability testing. This paper reports on follow-up research to develop an alternative approach for interoperability testing in the context of networked information retrieval that uses specially designed diagnostic records. These records, referred to as radioactive records, enable interoperability assessment at the protocol and semantic levels. This approach appears to offer an extensible method for interoperability testing for other metadata and protocol application environments. The resulting interoperability testbed incorporates additional components to exploit automatic processes for interoperability testing and assessment, thus improving the efficiency of interoperability testing.

Description: This document serves as an interim report on the Z39.50 interoperability testbed, Phase 2 of the Z-Interop Project. This report covers the period of July 1, 2004 through December 31, 2004. This document highlights activities and accomplishments to communicate to IMLS progress on the project since the interim report on July 1, 2004.