No.14
October,1996
Korea is expected to rapidly develop its national scholarly information network. The Korean Ministry of Education has allocated a budget in fiscal 1996 for setting up a national network for university research and education, which involves the Seoul National University, Korea Research Foundation, and many other institutions among the university community in Korea.
Visit of Ms. VIPA Goysookho, Mahidol University
The Library and Information Center, Mahidol University, is the main medical library of Thailand, and its origin goes back to 1925 when Siriraj Hospital established a library. In 1943, the medical university was founded, and it was reformed as the current Mahidol University consisting of three campuses (with 13 faculties, 5 laboratories, 2,100 lecturers, 14,000 staffs and 12,000 students).
The medical library serves as the university's central library, and 63 regular staffs, 9 persons in charge of AV equipment, 2 information specialists, 54 administrative staffs, 24 administrative assistants, 2 chauffeurs and about 40 temporary employees are employed in all the libraries. The NATIS project center of Thailand is located at the library, and it is the main national center of Thailand working on the SEAMIC project and the HELLIS project that is promoted by WHO, as well as serving as the Thai representative of ASTINFO.
Ms. VIPA Goysookho, Director of the Library Information Center, visited Japan on a mission from Mahidol University. Taking this opportunity, she and Mr. Chatchi Rojanavitit, a former engineering attach of the Thai embassy in Tokyo, visited NACSIS on June 26, 1996.
After greetings and discussion with Dr. Inose, Director of NACSIS, the visitors watched demonstrations of various services offered by NACSIS. They were especially, they were interested in the electronic library, and were been to collect information about the international line maintained between NACSIS and NECTEC of Thailand and about the "Asian Information Survey" including Thailand being promoted by us with assistance from the International Exchange Fund.
Dr. Y. T. Chien as a visiting scientist to NACSIS
Dr. Y. T. Chien of the National Science Foundation, U.S.A., stayed in Japan for 3 weeks from March 28 to April 20, 19965 as a JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) fellow for priority-area research in Japan. He is currently the Division Director of Information, Robotics and Intelligent Systems at NSF, and NACSIS was the host institution for his stay in Japan. His aim here was to investigate the status of Japanese NII (National Information Infrastructure) and latest technologies in the area of digital libraries research.
Dr. Chien is responsible as a program officer at NSF for the coordination of the NSF/ARPA/NASA initiatives in digital libraries, which includes the Informadia Project at Carnegie Mellon University, the Alexandria Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and so on.
He paid a one-day visit to NACSIS on April 1st. After watching the demonstration of NACSIS activities and hearing a presentation on research studies including the NACSIS electronic library project and full-text databases, Dr. Chien gave a presentation on the NSF initiatives on digital libraries. His presentation was informative for the NACSIS staff to learn how US researchers are working on digital library initiatives and the relationship between universities and NSF.
Subsequently, Dr. Chien visited the University of Library and Information Science and the Electro-Technical Laboratory of MITI in the Tsukuba area, then moved to the Kansai area, where he visited Kyoto University, ATR laboratory, and Nara Institute of Science and Technology.
During his stay in Japan, he gave 6 formal lectures and visited 13 institutions. NACSIS thanks JSPS for supporting Dr. Chien's visit.
Visit of Dr. Peter Ingwersen, Royal School of Librarianship
Dr. Peter Ingwersen, who is the head professor of the Department of Information Retrieval Theory, the Royal School of Librarianship of Denmark, visited NACSIS in the afternoon of April 30, 1996 while on a visit to Japan at the invitation of Keio University.
Dr. Ingwersen is a world-wide authority on cognitive approach for information retrieval, has proposed many types of retrieval methods, data structure, text analysis and user interfaces and advocates the "cognitive point of view" which combines various elements on both the system and the user side of information interaction process. The cognitive point of view has attracted much attention recently, particularly in the design of full-text databases and multimedia retrieval systems. He has received several international academic awards for his works on models for the design and evaluation of flexible information retrieval systems.
After discussion with Dr. Inoue, Deputy Director General of NACSIS, Dr. Ingwersen watched demonstrations related to information retrieval Research performed by faculty of the Research and Development Department and exchanged opinions. Dr. Ingwersen showed interests in the role of NACSIS in Japan and the variety of its activities.
Visit of Mr. Tian Guoxing from the Chinese Academy of Social Science
Mr. Tian Guoxing (Chief), Mr. Zhang Zhiyin (Vice Chief) and Mr. Ru Yimin (Chief of Information Processing Room) of the Information Research Center, Chinese Academy of Social Science, visited NACSIS with other associates including interpreters on April 12, 1996.
The Information Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Science plans to build a structure in China similar to that of NACSIS. The visitors watched demonstrations of the electronic library, NACSIS-IR, NACSIS-CAT and NACSIS-ILL and discussed the storage and offering of academic information with our lecturers.