Dean B. Krafft

Dean B. Krafft, Cornell University

Senior Research Associate and

Director of Computing Facilities

Computer Science Department

324 Upson Hall

Cornell University

Ithaca, NY 14853-7501

Phone: 607-255-9214

Fax: 607-255-4428

Email: dean@cs.cornell.edu

Web: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/hom e/dean

I am the principal investigator at Cornell for the Networked Computer Science Technical Reports (NCSTRL-pronounced "Ancestral") project. The NCSTRL project is an international consortium with three primary goals:

1. It is a production computer science technical reports library. Over eighty-five computer science departments and research centers worldwide cooperate in the NCSTRL collection. NCSTRL is used by thousands of researchers from around the world to search for, browse, read, and download the technical reports from these institutions.

2. NCSTRL is a foundation for the testing and demonstration of current digital library research. The CDLRG is cooperating with a number of other departments and research centers who wish to use the NCSTRL collection in this manner.

3. NCSTRL is a laboratory for exploration of and experimentation with many of the non-technical issues concerning distributed digital libraries. These include intellectual property issues and concerns about collection integrity and service integrity.

Our research efforts are currently focusing on four areas:

What is the service structure of a distributed digital library and what is the interaction between these services?
How are intellectual property rights protected in a digital library environment? In particular, what is the language for expressing the terms and conditions for access to digital objects and how are these terms and conditions associated with the objects?
How can the digital library architecture accommodate the diverse forms of descriptive metadata that should be associated with objects?
What are the methods for efficient and reliable distributed search?

The system is available over the Internet at https://www.ncstrl.org

In my role as Director of Computing Facilities, I have spent the last eighteen months guiding and supporting the department's transition of research, teaching, and administrative computing to Intel Architecture machines running Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. This change has raised a wide range of issues in security, network management and configuration, systems management and software distribution, software development tools, and benchmarking and evaluation. It has also challenged all our research groups to focus on a more component-based, object-oriented approach to research software development.