------------------------------------------------------------ Newsbriefs ------------------------------------------------------------ Project Muse receives $400,000 Mellon grant Project Muse, the university's effort to provide worldwide networked access to the entire journal catalog of the Johns Hopkins University Press, took a step closer to its goal last week. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made a $400,000 grant to the project as seed money to move the project beyond the pilot stage to the beginning of the production stage. "We got this project off the ground through donated time and resources," said Todd Kelley, the project's co-manager and the library's coordinator for electronic information and instruction. Project Muse is designed to create an easy-to-use electronic-journal environment that includes searching and multimedia features, such as hypertext links to tables of contents, endnotes, illustrations, voice and textual annotations and on-demand printouts of articles. Of added interest to users is that journals will be available approximately six weeks prior to print publication. "This is the direction journal publishing is going," said Susan Lewis, co-manager of the project and on-line projects manager at the Press. "I think this project will be the one other universities and scholarly presses emulate." To gain access to the Project Muse prototype, Mosaic clients enter URL:http://muse.mse.jhu.edu. VT100 clients can access Muse through gopher, at jhuniverse.jhu.edu, select #3 ("Search JHUniverse Menu Titles") and then enter "project muse." Library users asked to 'test-drive' systems Users of the Eisenhower Library will have an opportunity this week to "test-drive" two new computer library catalog systems being considered for future installation. Library staff are in the process of evaluating the two systems, one of which will eventually replace the Eisenhower's Janus system now in use. "We are asking students, faculty and staff to spend about 45 minutes with us performing various search and inquiry functions and then filling out a questionnaire rating their experience," said Virginia Massey-Burzio, head of resource services at the Eisenhower Library. The results of the user survey will be used in selecting the new system. Blind tests of the two systems will be conducted in the electronic classroom on A-Level of Eisenhower Library Wednesday, Nov. 16, from 2 to 5 p.m.; Thursday, Nov. 17, from 2 to 5 and 6 to 9 p.m.; Friday, Nov. 18, from 9 a.m. to noon; and Saturday, Nov. 19, from 9 a.m. to noon. Everyone is welcome to participate in the tests. For more information call 516-8335. Faulty telescope causes delay of MSX launch Launch of the Midcourse Space Experiment, scheduled for Friday, Nov. 18, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, has been delayed due to problems with the satellite's infrared telescope. MSX is a Ballistic Missile Defense Organization project developed at the Applied Physics Laboratory. APL also built several primary MSX instruments and will operate the satellite from its Laurel campus. The telescope, known as SPIRIT III, was built by Utah State University. BMDO officials said the SPIRIT III will be returned to Utah for repair. A new launch date for MSX has not been determined. 'Irish Times' editor to lecture Nov. 23 Novelist John Banville, literary editor of the Irish Times in Dublin, will lecture on 20th-century Irish literature on Wednesday, Nov. 23, at 7 p.m. in Shaffer Hall on the Homewood campus. Banville's most recent novel, Ghosts, was published in 1993. In 1989 he received the Guinness Peat Aviation Award for The Book of Evidence, and in 1981 he won the Guardian Fiction Prize for Kepler. His first book, Long Lankin, was published in 1970. The lecture is part of the School of Continuing Studies' Odyssey program titled "The Irish: At Home and Abroad," coordinated in cooperation with the Irish Embassy in Washington, D.C. Cost for the lecture is $15; reservations are not required. For more information call 516-4842.