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I N B R I E F
May/June 2012
Table of Contents
SPRUCE Project Tackles Digital Preservation Challenges with Hands On Events
Contributed by:
Paul Wheatley
SPRUCE Project Manager
University of Leeds
Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
p.r.wheatley (at) leeds.ac.uk
The SPRUCE Project (Sustainable Preservation Using Community Engagement) held its first digital preservation Mashup event in Glasgow on the 16th - 18th April 2012. The event brought together both technical developers and digital preservation practitioners to tackle a variety of practical digital stewardship challenges.
SPRUCE is a JISC funded initiative that's aiming to support grass roots digital preservation activities within UK academic and memory institutions. The project is building a supportive, community based approach to assist practitioners in managing their digital collections. It is also capturing evidence to build a strong business case for digital preservation that will help them resource their activities effectively.
The Project builds on the success of the AQuA Project, which developed an event format aimed at supporting those in the front line of digital collection management. For a SPRUCE Mashup, practitioners are asked to bring along samples of their digital collections. After assessing their preservation challenges, they are teamed up with developers. The teams work closely throughout the 3 days to capture requirements, build solutions by re-purposing existing code, and evaluate their effectiveness in meeting the practitioner's needs. The events provide an opportunity for participants to share knowledge about the challenges they have and the tools and approaches they use. They also provide a way of breaking down some of the barriers between the technical and none-technical roles that make up the digital preservation community and begin to bridge the language and communication gap that typically exists between the two groups.
SPRUCE Glasgow Mashup participants worked on a variety of challenges, including:
- Identifying and appraising digital collections using Apache Tika
- Automatically extracting email attachments from .msg mailbox files
- Emulating an obsolete Win 95 resource
- Managing and cross checking files during management or digitisation processes
- Automatically identifying two different sources of corruption in image files
- Extracting content for preservation from Facebook into Mediawiki
- Validating the integrity of digital content across different platforms
They also worked through a four step process for beginning to build a digital preservation business case. This culminated in an exercise to write and deliver an elevator pitch, or lightning talk, in which they made their case for more funding to those holding the purse strings.
SPRUCE will be running further events across the UK throughout the rest of this and next year. More information can be found on the SPRUCE wiki.
The TIMBUS Project - Timeless Business Processes and Services
Contributed by:
Angela Dappert
Digital Preservation Coalition
United Kingdom
angela [at] dpconline.org
The EU co-funded TIMBUS project addresses the challenge of digital preservation of business processes and services to ensure their long-term continued access. TIMBUS builds on feasibility and cost-benefit analysis in order to analyse and recommend which aspects of a business process should be preserved and how to preserve them. It delivers methodologies and tools to capture and formalise business processes on both technical and organisational levels. This includes their underlying software and hardware infrastructures and dependencies on third-party services and information. TIMBUS aligns digital preservation with well-established methods for enterprise risk management (ERM) and business continuity management (BCM).
TIMBUS breaks business process preservation down into three functions:
- Planning performs risk analysis and determines the requirements for preserving the relevant business processes.
- Preservation preserves the business processes.
- Redeployment reactivates and reruns the business processes.
TIMBUS products are validated in three scenarios: engineering services & systems, civil engineering infrastructures and eScience & mathematical simulations.
The commercial imperative for business process preservation comes from several pressures. Heavily regulated industries, such as pharmaceuticals and aircraft manufacture, must fully document processes so that they can be audited, reproduced, or diagnosed. Long-lived companies must manage services across multiple changes in technical environments. Organisations that use escrow services to mitigate risk must be confident that all of the needed information is demonstrably included in the escrow agreement and services. Organisations undergoing major staff changes must ensure that they retain the knowledge needed to operate or re-instate production processes. In addition to publications and data, academics need the software and process information to assess the validity of the data and the derived scientific claims. The same provenance information that can provide a key in regulated industries can also support credit assignment in academia. All industries benefit from analysis of processes that may lead to their continuous improvement. Memory institutions need to document the provenance of their digital collections as they undergo format-shifts to prove the authenticity or quality of their process products. Continuous improvement of digital processes and prove of authenticity of the collections are the key motivators for process preservation for memory institutions.
TIMBUS is executed by a consortium of industry, research and SME partners from across Europe. This involvement of industry in a digital preservation project is a sign that awareness of the need for preserving digital objects over the long-term is spreading from the traditional champions in memory institutions and heavily regulated private sectors to the general private sector. Services developed in industrial institutions will feed back to the processes in memory institutions.
See http://timbusproject.net for more information.
Network of Museums, Libraries and Public Cultural Institutions in the EU-funded MeLa Project
Contributed by:
Perla Innocenti
Research Fellow and Leader of MeLa RF03
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
How can museums define new innovative practices, spaces and policies that reflect the challenges of the contemporary processes of globalization, mobility and migration? This question is being addressed by European Museums in an age of migrations - MeLa* is a 4-years research project funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme, Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities Program (FP7). MeLa* is coordinated by Politecnico di Milano and includes nine European partners from Denmark, France, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom: five universities (Politecnico di Milano, L'Orientale - University of Naples, University of Glasgow, Newcastle University, Royal College of Arts), two museums (Musée de l'Homme, Department "Homme, nature, société" and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona), one national research council (CNR - Istituto di Tecnologie Industriali ed Automazione) and one small enterprise (Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design). MeLa* aims to help museums become agents of European citizenship-building, by drawing on common heritage as a cardinal bonding factor.
There are six Research Fields in this project, and one of them – RF03 Network of Museums, Libraries and Public Cultural Institutions http://wp3.mela-project.eu/, led by the University of Glasgow – is devoted to investigating, identifying and proposing innovative coordination strategies between European museums, libraries & other public cultural institutions around the themes of European cultural and scientific heritage, migration and integration, and ICT. Recent activities of Research Field 03 include:
A forthcoming international conference on these research themes will be organised in Glasgow in December 2012, with a call for papers published in http://wp3.mela-project.eu/.
For more information on MeLa*, please see http://www.mela-project.eu/.
Orphan Works and Mass Digitization: Obstacles and Opportunities
Contributed by:
David R. Hansen
Digital Library Fellow
Berkeley Digital Library Copyright Project
UC Berkeley School of Law
Berkeley, California, USA
dhansen [at] law.berkeley.edu
On April 12-13, over 200 librarians, lawyers, industry representatives and national and international digital library leaders convened in Berkeley, CA for the conference "Orphan Works and Mass Digitization: Obstacles and Opportunities", to address the problem of orphan works (copyrighted works whose owners cannot be located when permission is needed) and related challenges that inhibit mass digitization and widespread digital access. As explained in a follow-up piece by Professor Pamela Samuelson (one of the conference organizers) these problems, confronted so visibly by the Google Books Search project, continue to trouble initiatives like the Digital Public Library of America, which aims to make access more universal.
Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) began the first session by talking how "universal access to knowledge is achievable in the near future; in our lifetimes." He, along with other media and text archivists, illustrated what universal access might look like if they and others like them could preserve and then free the contents of their collections. Beyond reviving basic reading access, panelists illustrated how mass digitized works can also yield new lessons about how works, genres, and even entire literary eras relate to each other. Home videos, letters, websites, and historical notes (along with films and books) were among the catalog of cultural treasures whose reuse and online access is currently hampered by complex copyright rules and plausible ownership concerns. But, while copyright law prevents comprehensive online access, the legal impediments are not insurmountable. These and other users are already digitizing and reusing orphan works and, so far, have received few legitimate complaints. A key takeaway is that any new solution should take pains to preserve access solutions that are already working.
Maria Pallante, Register of Copyrights and the keynote speaker, identified common ground: All agree that limiting access to true orphans does nothing to further the goals of the copyright system. Pallante expressed renewed interest and optimism about orphan works legislation, along with related efforts to refresh library and archive privileges and to investigate solutions that would enable mass digitization.
Not many, however, were optimistic that Congress could (or should) address the issue any time soon. Instead, many looked to the future by favoring approaches that require only small or no changes to current law.
Jennifer Urban (Berkeley Law) outlined a powerful fair use argument for digitization and access of orphan works by research libraries. Other speakers proposed additional legal approaches that would reduce potential monetary remedies available against users of supposed orphan works, especially where those users made publicly available the work's copyright status information (a later session explained the importance of rights information systems, such as registries, to help users identify the copyright status of works). Solving the rights information problem is critical to ensure that works of locatable owners are not swept unknowingly along with true orphan works.
For the broader problem of mass digitization — the benefits of which include the ability to text-mine and conduct meta-analysis of a broad literary and scientific corpus — scalable solutions must be considered. Stef van Gompel (Univ. Amsterdam Law) discussed (among other solutions) the European study of extended collective licensing, which may be amenable to mass digitization because it can apply to a large number of works at once. In the U.S., however, the existing doctrine of fair use is thought sufficient for at least some uses of mass digitized works, such as non-expressive text-mining.
The conference was an output of the Berkeley Digital Library Copyright Project, a project that aims to investigate the copyright obstacles faced by libraries and other like-minded organizations in their efforts to realize the full potential of present and future digital library initiatives. The project issued three white papers that review the current status of the orphan works problem.
Report on the 14th Asia-Pacific Web Conference
Contributed by:
Quan Z. Sheng
University of Adelaide
qsheng [at] cs.adelaide.edu.au
Yanchun Zhang
Victoria University
yanchun.zhang [at] vu.edu.au
The Asia-Pacific Web Conference (APWeb) is a leading international conference on research, development and applications of web technologies, database systems, information management and software engineering, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region. The 14th APWeb 2012 was held in Kunming, China, April 11-13, 2012. The conference offered an excellent forum for academics and practitioners to discuss cutting edge research in the World Wide Web.
The continuing growth in Internet functionality and broadband access has enabled a new wave of innovations that is transforming the way people and organizations interact, communicate, and collaborate. Asia-Pacific Web (APWeb) conferences cover contemporary topics in the fields of Web management and World Wide Web related research and applications, such as advanced application of databases, cloud computing, content management, data mining and knowledge discovery, distributed and parallel processing, grid computing, Internet of Things, semantic Web and Web ontology, security, privacy and trust, sensor networks, service-oriented computing, Web community analysis, Web mining and social networks.
APWeb 2012 built on the tradition of 13 successful previous editions of the conference and aimed to present original contributions related to all fields of World Wide Web related research, development, and applications. APWeb 2012 was held at Yunnan Dianchi Garden Hotel, which is located on the banks of the picturesque Dianchi Lake and just neighboring the well-known Yunnan Nationalities Village. The main conference took place on 12 and 13 April 2012, with four pre-conference workshops on 11 April 2012. The whole conference was well attended by more than 160 delegates.
APWeb 2012 was sponsored by a number of institutes, including Hebei University of Engineering, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, National Science Foundation of China, Kunming University of Technology, Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Science, and Victoria University.
APWeb 2012 had a high quality program. A total of 167 paper submissions were received, which represents an increase of over 60% when compared to APWeb 2011. The paper submissions, from 17 countries and regions, were reviewed carefully by members of the Program Committee, comprised 104 experts from 20 countries. Based on the reviews, 39 submissions were selected as full papers, yielding an acceptance rate of 23%. In addition, 34 submissions were selected as short papers. The selected papers covered a wide variety of important topics related to the World Wide Web. The top four topics are data mining and knowledge discovery, workflow and e-services, social networks, and cloud computing, indicating that these are the hot topics among researchers in the Asia-Pacific region. It is unsurprising since there are many world-leading researchers in these areas in the region.
The program also featured keynote presentations from three eminent researchers. Patrick McDaniel, Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Internet Technology and Professor of Pennsylvania State University, USA, opened the program on 12 April with a keynote address entitled, "Scalable Integrity-Guaranteed AJAX". Professor McDaniel believes that existing Web services provide little protection against compromised servers, which leaves users to blindly trust that the system is functioning correctly without being able to verify this trust. He reports some of his recent work on providing document integrity in AJAX-style interactive Web systems. Two additional keynote addresses were presented on 13 April. Dr. Min Wang, Director of HP Labs China, offered some insights into developing context-aware Web applications for high quality and well-personalized user experiences on the Web, and Dr. Haixun Wang, Manager of the Database Group of Microsoft Research Asia, discussed the challenges in managing and mining large graphs, which are significant for many real-life applications, such as Facebook.
The 15th Asia-Pacific Web Conference (APWeb 2013) will be held in Sydney, Australia, April 4-6, 2013, hosted by the University of New South Wales. Interested readers can get more information about this event from http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~apweb2013/.
Report on the Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference (ER&L 2012)
Contributed by:
Bonnie Tijerina
Assistant Director for Collections Services at Claremont Colleges Library
President, Electronic Resources & Libraries, LLC
Claremont, California, USA
bonnie_tijerina [at] cuc.claremont.edu
"Good ideas..." "Great sessions..." "Learned something new..." Trying to glean a complete summary of the ER&L 2012 Conference is not an easy task this year. You may have heard the buzz in early April, when several hundred e-resources and digital services librarians and information professionals converged on Austin, TX for the Electronic Resources and Libraries Conference (ER&L). As the largest and most heavily tweeted and blogged conference yet, the 7th annual ER&L provided librarians an opportunity to provide updates, best practices, lessons learned and emerging technologies in our field.
Hosted for the third consecutive year by the UT Austin libraries and held at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center, ER&L offered attendees three keynote sessions, one each day. The Monday opening keynote entitled, Between physical and digital: understanding cross-channel experiences presented by Information Architecture Institute president Andrea Resmini challenged the group with "an engaging and thought-provoking" opportunity that comes with the challenge of implementing pervasive design in physical libraries and digital spaces. On Tuesday, New ARL Best Practices in Fair Use were presented by the "informative and engaging" Brandon Butler, offering tactical and practical guidance to e-resources librarians. And, on Wednesday, an informal discussion on leadership and libraries engaged all attendees to consider their roles and leadership they bring to them.
ER&L was augmented by programming from librarian and vendors alike: a spirited Ohio librarians meet-up, a lively Heath Sciences librarian meet-up, a CORAL User Group meeting, a TERMS (Techniques for electronic resource management) discussions, as well as events hosted by the Ex Libris Group, Ebsco, Swets and Proquest. The conference was made affordable with early registration for 3 days under $300 including breakfast and snacks, and the swag was plentiful due to the generosity of our sponsors and host UT Austin.
With attendee survey data in and revealing so much excellent feedback, it is difficult to identify a few of the most excellent sessions. Here are some highlights in the words of our attendees, quoted throughout this article and below:
- In a scholarly communication session entitled, Nurture vs. Nature, the presenter discussed the current state of publishing alternatives and attendees gained insights in how to respond to publishers and administrators concerning issues regarding licensing and open access publishing.
- Attendees gained new insights, into a "multi-prong approach to copyright education" on campus filled with "practical ideas I can use" and "very, very good tactical tips" in Designing a Copyright Outreach Program for Your Campus.
- In Opportunities in data curation: Integrating the library into the research process, presenters sought to increase awareness of the federal policies encouraging greater access to federally-funded data. Attendees were able to identify new roles and activities for librarians in data curation after this session.
- In a demand-driven acquisition (DDA) session entitled, Just-in-Time versus Just-in-Case: How demand-driven acquisition can impact collections and scholarly publishing, ER&L attendees this "great presentation and discussion" with a better understanding of how DDA will impact their collections and scholarly publishing in general. Helpful tips and careful considerations were also shared about how and when to implement DDA in their libraries.
- Serving up a near half-day feast of insights, the ERMS buffet panels offered librarians and vendors seats at the same table to discuss challenges and advances made by several major ERM systems. Attendees left this "terrific" panel with "ERM envy," describing the session as having a "good variety of institution sizes and implementation types."
- Cited as a "treasure trove of good ideas that can be applied in most electronic resources units, Electronic resources and workflow analysis and process improvement covered "what worked, what did not work and those duties that slipped through the cracks" with "honesty and a great sense of humor."
ER&L 2013 demonstrates a commitment to focused practical, tactical and strategic work by digital services professionals. An archive of over 30 sessions of content is available for purchase at http://www.electroniclibrarian.org/conference-info/online-conference. Mark your calendar for March 17-20, 2013 for ER&L 2013 and visit our website at http://www.electroniclibrarian.org or twitter feed @ERandL for updates and the full 2013 timeline of events.
Report on the Distance Education Association of New Zealand (DEANZ) 2012 Conference
Contributed by:
Mark Nichols
Executive Director, Faculty
Open Polytechnic | Kuratini Tuwhera
The Distance Education Association of New Zealand (DEANZ) 2012 conference was held 11 to 13 April in Wellington, and featured an exciting programme for leaders and practitioners involved in open, flexible and distance learning. Held over three days, the biannual DEANZ conference was an opportunity for people in the education industry to meet with local and international thought leaders and learn new ideas. Keynote and invited speakers included Dr. Diana Oblinger (President and CEO of EDUCAUSE), Professor Paul Bacsich, Professor Kwok-Wing Lai, and Dr. Caroline Seelig. The conference also featured a panel discussing Open Education Resources, a panel of institutional leaders (Mike Hollings, CE Te Kura; Hon Steve Maharey, VC Massey University; Dr. Caroline Seelig, CE Open Polytechnic) and over 40 parallel presentations and workshops. Closing remarks were made by Dr. Peter Coolbear, CE Ako Aotearoa.
The 2012 conference theme was 'Shift Happens' with three themes of resilience, relevance and reform:
- Resilience: dealing with uncertainty and coping with changes you can and cannot influence.
- Relevance: providing education that is relevant to the context and culture of the learner
- Reform: moving to better futures for all, through recognising political, social, economic and personal drivers.
Various presentations from the event are available from the conference Web page, and peer-reviewed papers published in the Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning can be found at http://journals.akoaotearoa.ac.nz/index.php/JOFDL/issue/current.
I N T H E N E W S
May/June 2012
IMLS and Chinese Ministry of Culture Renew Cultural Exchange Agreement
May 8, 2012 — "A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Institute of Museum and Library Services and China's Ministry of Culture has been renewed to extend until 2014. The MOU promotes professional exchanges that enhance museum, library, archival, and information services with the U.S. and China."
"The MOU extension was one of a number of initiatives announced by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the third annual U.S.-China Consultation on People-to-People Exchange (CPE). The CPE aims to enhance and strengthen ties between the citizens of the United States and China in the areas of education, science and technology, sports, culture, and women's issues."
For more information, please see the full press release.
Cornell Legal Information Institute releases online code of federal regulations
May 7, 2012 — "The nation's most comprehensive set of laws, the Code of Federal
Regulations (CFR), contains rules that impact nearly all areas of American
business, and a new electronic edition offers users an easier path to finding
and understanding the regulations with which they need to comply."
"This new online edition of the CFR is the result of an unprecedented two-year
collaboration between the Government Printing Office (GPO), the Legal
Information Institute at Cornell University Law School (LII), and the Cornell
Law Library...."
"...The CFR is extremely complex, and yet citizens are expected to adhere to all of
its regulations. The results of this partnership ensure that the latest
information is always available, easier to use and understand, and entirely free
of charge."
For more information, please see the full press release.
New university librarian to lead digital transformation
May 3, 2012 — "MacKenzie Smith, an academic research library leader specializing in information technology and digital knowledge management, has been chosen to lead the University Library at the University of California, Davis."
"She will officially assume her new post as university librarian on June 1."
"Smith, who was chosen through a national search, will lead the library's integration of digital resources and information technology to serve the academic community into the future. The library is ranked by the Association of Research Libraries as one of the top 75 research libraries in North America."
For more information, please see the full press release.
CrossRef Announces FundRef Pilot to Standardize Funding Source Information for Scholarly Publications
May 2, 2012 — "CrossRef has announced FundRef, a pilot collaboration between scholarly publishers and funding agencies that will standardize the names of research funders and add grant numbers attributed in journal articles or other scholarly documents. The collaboration would allow researchers, publishers, and funding agencies to track the published research that results from specific funding bodies."
"The international FundRef pilot participants include seven publishers (American Institute of Physics, American Psychological Association, Elsevier, IEEE, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, and Wiley) and four funding organizations (US Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information [DOE/OSTI]; US National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA]; US National Science Foundation [NSF]; and Wellcome Trust)...."
"...The participants in the pilot project plan to create a proof of concept system that will demonstrate the workflow for how funding agency names and grant and award numbers will be standardized and linked to publications. The proof of concept should be available by October 2012."
For more information, please see the full press release.
National Archives Releases 2011 Records Management Self-Assessment Report
May 1, 2012 — "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announces the release of the 2011 Records Management Self-Assessment Report."
"In May 2011, NARA issued the mandatory annual records management self-assessment (RMSA) to Federal agencies. The goal of the self-assessments is to determine whether Federal agencies are compliant with statutory and regulatory records management requirements...."
"...Agencies can use RMSA data to chart their own programs. NARA uses the annual RMSA as a tool to monitor and oversee Federal records management programs. The work reflected in this report was accomplished prior to the issuance of the Presidential Memorandum on Managing Government Records (11/28/11), which requires each agency to designate a senior official to supervise an evaluation of the agency's records management program. Data from the RMSAs and agency submissions in response to the Presidential Memorandum, will give NARA a Government-wide base of information from which to develop the Records Management Directive."
"The report may be downloaded from NARA's website."
For more information, please see the full press release.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Becomes an ISO Standard
May 1, 2012 — "ISO 26324 Information and documentation — Digital object identifier system is published by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization."
"ISO 26324 Information and documentation — Digital object identifier system was published by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, on May 1, 2012. The DOI System was approved as an International Standard through ISO in November 2010, but publication was held back awaiting revision by ISO of its generic Registration Authority agreement. ISO 26324 is the instrument through which the DOI System, developed by the International DOI Foundation (IDF) from 1998, was adopted as an international standard, and IDF is the ISO 26324 Registration Authority."
"ISO 26324 specifies the syntax, description and resolution functional components of the digital object identifier system, and the general principles for the creation, registration and administration of DOI names. The ISO standard complements, and is compatible with, the existing US National Standard ANSI/NISO Z39.84, Syntax for the Digital Object Identifier (2000, 2005, 2010), through expansion to cover a detailed extensible metadata schema and discussion of the guarantees provided re persistence and interoperability."
For more information, please see the full ISO press release.
CrossMark™ Update Identification Service Launches to Alert Readers to Changes in Scholarly Content
April 27, 2012 — "CrossRef today launched the CrossMark update identification service. The CrossMark system will alert researchers to important changes that may occur to published scholarly content and will highlight important publication record information. The CrossMark service has been piloted by several CrossRef member publishers for the past year."
"'Finding updates and corrections for scholarly documents can be a frustrating business for researchers, especially in an environment where content is available from so many channels,' said CrossRef Executive Director Ed Pentz. 'Scholarly publishers routinely note changes to their content, but how this is done varies from publisher to publisher, which can make them difficult to locate. Before CrossMark, researchers had no way to tell if any changes had occurred to a PDF that they had downloaded months earlier. Now by simply clicking a single, recognizable logo, any reader can have access to this important information.'..."
"...The cost of the CrossMark system will be borne by the CrossRef participating publishers, with the result that the status and publication record information will be openly available to readers, libraries and any organization that might find the data useful."
For more information, please see the full press release.
IU selected as partner in new data curation fellowship program
April 25, 2012 — "Researchers are currently creating and using scientific data at unprecedented levels, underscoring the need for curators, or caretakers, to ensure that this massive amount of vital information is being maintained for important research today – and tomorrow."
"To help meet this need, Indiana University (IU), through a joint effort between its Data to Insight Center and the IU Libraries, has been selected as a partner institution in the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)/Digital Library Federation (DLF) Data Curation Fellowship Program. The program is made possible by a $679,827 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation."
"This joint effort by the Data to Insight Center and the IU Libraries takes advantage of a natural partnership and draws on synergies between the two organizations."
For more information, please see the full press release.
Millions of Harvard Library Catalog Records Publicly Available: Harvard Library Releases Nearly 100% of Its Records
April 24, 2012 — "The Harvard Library announced it is making more than 12 million catalog records from Harvard's 73 libraries publicly available."
"The records contain bibliographic information about books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more. The Harvard Library is making these records available in accordance with its Open Metadata Policy and under a Creative Commons 0 (CC0) public domain license. In addition, the Harvard Library announced its open distribution of metadata from its Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) scholarly article repository under a similar CC0 license...."
"...The catalog records are available for bulk download from Harvard, and are available for programmatic access by software applications via API's at the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The records are in the standard MARC21 format."
For more information, please see the full press release.
LOCKSS Program Receives Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant: Funding to ensure long-term preservation of dynamic Web 2.0 content
April 18, 2012 — "The LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Program at Stanford University has been awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The two-year grant accelerates work on new ways to gather and preserve the kinds of dynamic and diverse digital content that 21st century scholarship demands."
"The Mellon Foundation grant will enable LOCKSS to develop new techniques for collecting dynamic digital content from modern publishing platforms, and ensuring its long-term preservation. Incorporating these techniques into future versions of the award winning, open-source LOCKSS digital preservation software will benefit the entire academic community."
For more information, please see the full press release.
The latest on e-books, digital content, digital literacy in libraries at ALA Annual Conference
April 18, 2012 — "Sparking innovation around e-books and digital content in libraries, a wide range of transformative conversations, programs, preconferences, discussion groups, high-profile speakers and updates from ALA leadership about their ongoing e-book dialog with publishers will mark the 2012 ALA Annual Conference."
"Sessions of high interest in this area include the following, with further information available in the Preliminary Program for the Conference, accessible at http://www.alaannual.org/."
For more information, please see the full press release.
New Multimedia Tools Help Museums, Libraries Support 21st Century Skills
April 13, 2012 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has revamped the web page for its Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills initiative. Museums and libraries visiting the page will now be able to access practitioner videos, a PowerPoint presentation, an updated resource list, and a toolkit that will help them organize 21st century skills workshops in their communities. These new resources join IMLS's 2009 report and self assessment tool already in wide use."
"The 21st Century Skills initiative is intended to assist museums and libraries as they leverage their resources to help individuals of all ages acquire such critical skills as critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, communication, and collaboration. Combining strengths in traditional and digital learning, libraries and museums are well positioned to build the skills Americans need today...."
"...The Making the Learning Connection Community Workshop Toolkit is based on a series of community workshops conducted by IMLS between June 2010 and May 2011. This toolkit is designed to assist museum and library leaders in planning and executing 21st century skills workshops in their own communities. It outlines the planning process, provides timelines, sample exercises and agendas, and brief descriptions of the 2010-11 IMLS workshops. Museum and library staff can also use a new 21st Century Skills PowerPoint and an extended bibliography in their presentations and planning."
For more information, please see the full press release.
OSTI's ScienceCinema one of six new initiatives in DOE Open Government Plan 2.0
April 12, 2012 — "The U.S. Department of Energy Open Government Plan 2.0, released April 9, features OSTI's ScienceCinema as one of six new DOE initiatives for making the federal government more transparent, participatory and collaborative. ScienceCinema allows users to quickly find videos produced by the DOE National Laboratories and other DOE research facilities, as well as CERN. In addition to highlighting the ScienceCinema initiative, the OpenGov Plan provides a progress report which covers OSTI products and services including Green Energy Portal, ScienceEducation.gov, Science Accelerator, the OSTI data sets initiatives, the National Library of Energy, Multilingual WorldwideScience.org, and Science.gov."
World Bank Announces Open Access Policy for Research and Knowledge, Launches Open Knowledge Repository
April 10, 2012 — "The World Bank today announced that it will
implement a new Open Access policy for its research outputs and knowledge
products, effective July 1, 2012. The new policy builds on recent efforts
to increase access to information at the World Bank and to make its
research as widely available as possible. As the first phase of this
policy, the Bank launched today a new Open Knowledge Repository and adopted
a set of Creative Commons copyright licenses."
"The new Open Access policy, which will be rolled out in phases in the
coming year, formalizes the Bank's practice of making research and
knowledge freely available online. Now anybody is free to use, re-use and
redistribute most of the Bank's knowledge products and research outputs for
commercial or non-commercial purposes."
"The policy will also apply to Bank research published with third party
publishers including the institution's two journals — World Bank Research
Observer (WBRO) and World Bank Economic Review (WBER) — which are published
by Oxford University Press, but in accordance with the terms of third party
publisher agreements. The Bank will respect publishing embargoes, but
expects the amount of time it takes for externally published Bank content
to be included in its institutional repository to diminish over time."
For more information, please see the full press release.
Chronopolis Earns High Marks as 'Trustworthy Digital Repository' in CRL TRAC Audit
April 9, 2012 — "The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has certified Chronopolis, a large-scale data preservation network, as a 'trustworthy digital repository' that meets accepted best practices in the management of digital repositories. Chronopolis is led by the UC San Diego Libraries and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, with partners at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Maryland's Institute for Advanced Computer Studies."
"The primary metrics used by CRL in its assessment are those included in the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) checklist developed by a joint task force of the Research Libraries Group and the National Archives and Records Administration in 2003, to define criteria for evaluating digital repositories. The TRAC criteria — which include organizational infrastructure; digital object management; and technologies, technical infrastructure, and security — represent current best practices and thinking about the organizational and technological needs of trustworthy digital repositories."
For more information, please see the full press release.
University of Illinois to Host National Archives Conference for Fraternities and Sororities June 21 - 23, 2012
April 6, 2012 — "The Archives' Student Life and Culture Archival Program at the University of Illinois will sponsor and host to its second National Archives Conference for Fraternities and Sororities on June 21-23, 2012, on its Urbana-Champaign campus. Building on the success of the 2010 conference, this event will bring together experts on archival management, planning, preservation, and outreach with an emphasis on fraternity and sorority records."
"One purpose of the conference is to provide archival training and support to headquarters staff members who are charged with their organization's archives. Speakers will include Josh Harris, University of Illinois audio-visual librarian, and Angela Waarala, digital collections project manager; Noraleen Young, archivist at Kappa Alpha Theta and archival consultant for Past to Present; and Michele Christian, associate professor and records analyst in Iowa State University's Special Collections Department. Featured speaker Diana Turk, a professor from New York University, has written extensively on fraternity and sorority life and will discuss the importance of these groups and their records to the study of education and campus history."
For more information, please see the full press release.
Nature Publishing Group releases linked data platform
April 4, 2012 — "Nature Publishing Group (NPG) today is pleased to join the linked data community by opening up access to its publication data via a linked data platform. NPG's Linked Data Platform is available at http://data.nature.com."
"The platform includes more than 20 million Resource Description Framework (RDF) statements, including primary metadata for more than 450,000 articles published by NPG since 1869. In this first release, the datasets include basic citation information (title, author, publication date, etc) as well as NPG specific ontologies. These datasets are being released under an open metadata license, Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which permits maximal use/re-use of this data."
"NPG's platform allows for easy querying, exploration and extraction of data and relationships about articles, contributors, publications, and subjects. Users can run web-standard SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) queries to obtain and manipulate data stored as RDF. The platform uses standard vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF, PRISM, BIBO and OWL, and the data is integrated with existing public datasets including CrossRef and PubMed."
For more information, please see the full press release.
Open Access to Dutch research stagnating
April 2, 2012 — "Open Access to higher education research results
is not increasing. This is shown by the Dutch Research Repositories
Monitor 2011, a study commissioned by SURF. Although the
Berlin Declaration on Open Access has
been signed by all the Dutch universities, the Association of
Universities of Applied Sciences (HBO-raad), the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), and the Netherlands Organisation
for Scientific Research (NWO), it has not been put to action in the form
of specific objectives. There are only a few universities at which the
percentage of Open Access publications exceeds 20%. In the Knowledge
Bank for Universities of Applied Sciences, which provides access to
the knowledge products of these institutions, the number of openly
accessible publications and graduation projects is lagging behind the
number of graduates and lectoraten (knowledge networks). The study
compares the situation of the university repositories in 2007 and 2011.
This is the first time such a study has been carried out for the
universities of applied sciences."
"The report makes recommendations for the higher education and research sector to increase the accessibility of Dutch research: formulate joint policy and make it easy for authors to deposit their publications. Collective work arrangements regarding the national infrastructure must also be maintained and updated. The report offers a means for determining, in collaboration with the parties concerned, how these recommendations should be implemented and by whom."
For more information, please see the full press release.
Final Version of Emulation Framework Released
March 22, 2012 — "The European project KEEP has released the final version of the Emulation Framework (EF). This software allows you to access old computer files and programs using emulation without the need to go through difficult installations and configurations. The software is released under the Apache v2 license and is free to be used by any organisation or individual."
"If you or your organisation are faced with a challenge to retain access to digital information over time, the Emulation Framework might become handy. Current computers are not capable of executing old programs anymore and old file formats most likely need to be converted before they can be used."
"With emulation you can recreate the old computer platform again and run your program as it used to run on a real machine. It offers you almost the same 'look-and-feel' as in the old days."
"The Emulation Framework 2.0 software and documentation is available on Source Forge at: http://emuframework.sf.net
Note : the EF only comes with open source emulators and free software. Extending this set is possible using the graphical wizards of the EF but it requires the original software and license provided by you."
For more information, please see the full press release.
Building Digital Communities: New Resource to Help Communities Bridge the Digital Divide
March 21, 2012 — "There are still 100 million Americans who do not have a broadband connection to the Internet. This sobering statistic has profound implications for economic success, educational achievement, and civic life. Communities face difficult challenges in their efforts to provide digital opportunity for all their residents."
"The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), together with the University of Washington and the International City/County Management Association, has consulted with hundreds of community members and experts over the past 18 months to identify action steps and a framework for building digital communities."
"With the release of Building Digital Communities: A Framework for Action and its companion primer Building Digital Communities: Getting Started, communities have a new resource to help set a vision for the future. These resources raise awareness about the access and adoption that are essential to digital communities and identify goals related to availability, affordability, design for inclusion, public access, relevance, digital literacy, and consumer safety. They also provide strategic areas where communities may wish to focus their digital inclusion efforts, such areas as economic and workforce development, education, and civic engagement, as well as concrete sample strategies for organizations and individuals to use in achieving a community's goals."
For more information, please see the full press release.
NISO 2012 Educational Programs Run the Gamut from Metadata to Embracing the Clouds
March 21, 2012 — "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) continues its robust
offering of educational programs in 2012 with 14 webinars, three forums, 10
teleconferences, and a series of four joint webinars with the Dublin Core
Metadata Initiative (DCMI). Webinar program topics cover a wide variety of
standards and technology areas of interest to the library, publishing, and
scholarly information communities including: metadata, e-books, linked data,
usage statistics, discovery innovations, metrics for scholarship, e-resource
platforms, and library cloud implementations. For the third year, NISO and
the DCMI will hold a series of joint webinars, with 2012's focus on various
aspects of linked data including library cataloging metadata, webpage
microdata, scientific research data, and RDFa. NISO's in-person forums will
address managing and citing research data and the e-book renaissance, in
addition to the 6th annual joint forum with the Book Industry Study Group
(BISG) on The Changing Standards Landscape, held in conjunction with the ALA
Annual Conference in Anaheim. Rounding out the 2012 program are free open
teleconferences providing updates on NISO standards development and offering
the community an opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback."
"Package deals are available for multiple event registrants. Subscribers to
the entire NISO webinar series get 14 for the price of seven and registrants
for four webinars can attend three more for free. For the joint NISO/DCMI
webinars, a subscription to all four is available for a 25% discount-equal
to one free webinar. NISO members and students get discounted rates to all
the educational events. DCMI members can attend the joint webinars at NISO
member rates. Webinar registration is by site for one computer so
organizations can have multiple attendees view the webinar using a single
registration fee. Webinar registrants also get access to the recorded
version for a year, allowing even more people to benefit from a single
registration."
"The complete listing of 2012 programs with descriptions and registration
information is available on the NISO website at:
http://www.niso.org/news/events/2012/. Registration to past webinar events
is available and will be filled with access to the recorded version."
For more information, please see the full press release.
Announcing DM2E: Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana
March 19, 2012 — "The European Commission (EC) is to fund the development of Linked Data tools that will enable more libraries and archives to provide digital content to Europeana – Europe's largest cultural heritage portal. Funding has also been allocated for the development of tools that will enable innovative re-use of Europeana data in teaching and research contexts."
"The software to be developed will allow for the contextualisation and linking of vast cultural heritage data sets drawn from some of Europe's most prominent memory institutions. This will in turn allow scholars, students and the wider public to interact with with cultural objects and their associated metadata in innovative ways."
"The project will be led by Professor Stefan Gradmann from Humboldt University with community and dissemination work to be led by the Open Knowledge Foundation. The technical development will be based on an exemplary set of digitised content provided by some of Europe's leading cultural heritage institutions such as Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Deutsches Textarchiv and �sterreichische Nationalbibliothek."
"In line with the recent Europeana Data Exchange Agreement, all contributing institutions have agreed to make their metadata available under the Creative Commons Public Domain License (CC-0) which will make it easier to reuse in diverse contexts."
For more information, please see the full press release.
G. Sayeed Choudhury named recipient of 2012 Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology
March 19, 2012 — "G. Sayeed Choudhury has been named recipient of the 2012 Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology. The award, co-sponsored by OCLC and the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), is given for research relevant to the development of information technologies, especially work which shows promise of having a positive and substantive impact on any aspect(s) of the publication, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information, or the processes by which information and data is manipulated and managed."
"Mr. Choudhury was selected by the award jury for his leadership in the field of data curation through the National Science Foundation supported Data Conservancy project, which expands the capabilities of research libraries in serving researchers and the institutions of which they are a part, and for his ongoing impact on the field of librarianship in applying the principles of librarianship to the curation and preservation of digital data."
"Mr. Shoudhury is the Associate Dean for Research Data Management and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of Operations for the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) based at Johns Hopkins. In addition, he is a member of the National Academies Board on Research Data and Information (BRDI), the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) Council, the DuraSpace Board and a Senior Presidential Fellow with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). He has served as principal investigator for projects funded through the National Science Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Microsoft Research. He is the Principal Investigator for the Data Conservancy, one of the awards through NSF's DataNet program."
For more information, please see the full press release.
New Home for the Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews Database
March 16, 2012 — "The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library has added a multimedia archive of Judeo-Spanish ballads and other oral literature to its digital humanities collection. The Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews database is the largest online collection of Sephardic and Hispanic folk literature in the world, and is now available to anyone with access to the Internet."
"The unique collection of oral folk literature was developed over four decades through the collective efforts of University of California colleagues Samuel Armistead and Joseph Silverman, and the ethnomusicologist Israel J. Katz. From 1998 to 2003, Professor Armistead, the custodian of the collection and one of the world's foremost scholars of medieval Spanish literature, worked with Bruce Rosenstock, associate professor in the Department of Religion at Illinois, to digitize, transcribe, and create a website for nearly 2,500 fully-edited transcription files with associated audio files through a multi-year, half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation Digital Library Initiative."
"...The software development and hosting of the digital library is provided by the University Library, and this resource is sustained as part of the Library's Scholarly Commons services. The Scholarly Commons serves the emerging needs of faculty, researchers, and graduate students at Illinois pursuing in-depth research and scholarly initiative...."
For more information, please see the full press release.
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