I N   B R I E F

January/February 2012

OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe)

Contributed by:
Najla Rettberg
Scientific Coordinator, OpenAIREplus
Göttingen State and University Library
Göttingen, Germany
Najla.rettberg@sub.uni-goettingen.de

OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) supports researchers within the Seventh Framework Programme to disseminate and provide the widest possible access to their research output. OpenAIRE is a 3-year European Commission (EC) funded project, launched in 2010, with 41 participating partners from all European Union member states, extending to Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Turkey.

The OpenAIRE service is based on the self-archiving of peer-reviewed articles, where authors deposit a copy of their peer-reviewed manuscript into an Open Access repository (either at their institution or a subject repository), at the time of publication. For researchers who don't have access to an appropriate repository, OpenAIRE, in collaboration with the CERN library services, has set up an additional repository hosting "homeless" OA publications. Furthermore, taking into account the recent spread and the importance of Open Access Journals in scholarly communication, OpenAIRE has extended its infrastructure to include OA journals, while the Commission includes a budget in FP7 projects to cover the costs of publishing in them.

In parallel to the ongoing service, a continuation project, OpenAIREplus, has just started that will last until mid-2014. OpenAIREplus moves beyond the realm of FP7 and includes the wider Open Access repository infrastructure built by the DRIVER projects, and extends to accredited data repositories. Its main objective is to facilitate the cross-linking of research publications to associated data and funding schemes, contributing to the Open Linked Data initiatives. Exploiting the existing infrastructure, it will be possible to link from a scientific publication in the OpenAIRE/DRIVER systems to further information such as a dataset or grant information, in essence creating a richer, value added publication, i.e., an "enhanced publication". With the collaboration of three scientific domain communities, EBI for molecular biology data, DANS for social science and BADC for climate data, innovative underlying technical structures will be deployed to support the management of and inter-linking between associated scientific data. Metadata from these Open Access datasets will be harvested, enriched and stored, as is currently done for publications. End user services for enhanced publication visualization, creation and curation will be offered through the portal.

The OpenAIRE portal provides free access to FP7 publications, offers depositing services, and various types of statistics used to measure the impact of the research funds. A Helpdesk supports researchers with Open Access issues, such as self-archiving and copyright issues, data providers for joining the OpenAIRE infrastructure, and policy makers for implementing or fine tuning the Open Access policies. The project has also set up a proactive network of liaison offices in each European member state, working to promote the concept of Open Access and answering to the needs of researchers.

OpenAIRE/OpenAIREplus has established a cooperative framework to support future Open Access activities in Europe, and beyond. It also works to contribute to international Open Access common standards, data issues, and interoperability. Further information about the projects can be found at the portal, http://www.openaire.eu.

UNESCO endorses the IFLA Manifesto for Digital Libraries

Contributed by:
Marcia Lei Zeng
Professor, School of Library and Information Science
Kent State University
Kent, Ohio, USA
mzheng@kent.edu

UNESCO has endorsed the IFLA Manifesto for Digital Libraries [1] at its General Conference 2011. The Manifesto provides principles to assist libraries in undertaking sustainable and interoperable digitisation activities to bridge the digital divide – a key factor in achieving the Millennium Development Goals [2] of the United Nations. Digital libraries are essential for access to information, and for preserving national heritage.

The Manifesto was initiated by former IFLA President Claudia Lux (2007-2009). Prior to UNESCO's endorsement, it was approved by the IFLA Governing Board in 2010 and by the UNESCO intergovernmental programme Information for All (IFAP) in February 2011.

The endorsement enables IFLA members to work with UNESCO Member States within the context of national e-strategies aimed at increasing access to information and development.

READ: http://www.ifla.org/en/news/unesco-endorses-the-ifla-manifesto-for-digital-libraries

References
[1] IFLA Manifesto for Digital Libraries. (2010). Available at: http://www.ifla.org/publications/ifla-manifesto-for-digital-libraries
[2] Millennium Development Goals. (2010). Available at: http://www.undp.org/mdg/index.shtml

Can culture on the Web change peoples lives?

Contributed by:
Simon Tanner
Director of Digital Consultancy (KDCS)
Department of Digital Humanities
King's College London
London, United Kingdom
simon.tanner@kcl.ac.uk

The top twenty most popular museums in the world are visited over ten times more via the Web than in person. This kind of impact is taken for granted as an implied benefit of digital access, but what does it actually mean — are mere visitor numbers enough of a measure of value and worth? And are people's lives and life opportunities going to be changed by their access to digital collections from museums, libraries and archives? New research at King's College London, funded by the Arcadia Fund, is exploring the way that digital resources change people's lives and how we can measure and learn from those life changing experiences.

We are exploring the changes to people's lives as the digital moves into an ever more personal dimension. Consider the opportunities offered by a walk through a cathedral where your smartphone or tablet accompanies you with tours, maps, images, 3D reconstructions, videos of famous ceremonies, and local history resources. The richness of this experience is delivering education, enlightenment and entertainment opportunities all where you are and when you want it. But investment in such rich experiences is often stifled by a sense that they can only be valuable if millions will download, view and possibly pay for digital content. Other impacts, for instance in the realm of educational, economic, social or cultural engagement, are difficult to measure at present. This research seeks to develop new and innovative methods for quantifying the quality of experience and the life-changing impacts that digital resources in the cultural/educational sector can achieve.

The team from the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London is led by Simon Tanner with Marilyn Deegan. This new Arcadia-funded research into the impact of digital resources asks a fresh set of questions previously unanswered in the cultural sector: how have lives or life opportunities been changed? The team will report full results, freely on the Web, in May 2012 with interim updates along the way at http://www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html. Their previous research, Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship: the values and benefits of digitised resources, provides a foundation upon which they are building new methods of measuring impact. That research looked back over the ~£100 million spent in the UK over the last 15 years on digitisation and identifies the benefits and value achieved (available at: http://www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/inspiring.html).

In Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship, Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of The British Library stated: "to support Digital Britain we need to deliver a critical mass of digital content. Access... ought to be the right of every citizen, every household, every child, every school and public library, universities and business. That's a vision worth delivering on". Our research will provide the means to measure whether such visions are successful in inspiring people and offering new opportunities in their lives.

Principle Investigator, Simon Tanner says "measuring the impact of digital collections has traditionally been difficult for cultural and educational organisations to do. To move beyond asking merely how many people are coming to a Web site to answering the bigger questions of "why" and "what changed" is challenging. My research will help them use the fresh approaches needed to understand impact in terms of people's lives. We are pulling in many methods used in health, social and climate change impact assessment to provide robust methods that can be used by any cultural organisation with Web collections to get closer to their audience and understand their needs better."

I N   T H E   N E W S

January/February 2012

Europeana reaches 20 million items

January 6, 2012 — "Europeana's 20 millionth digital artifact, Caravaggio's painting of David with the Head of Goliath, has just been contributed by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The dataset was made available via Kulturpool, the Austrian aggregator. Kulturpool, developed and operated by uma and based on the uma Melvil® semantic web engine, is a portal for aggregated semantic search with Web 2.0 elements. uma Melvil, the innovation leader in semantic web technology, which helped to frame the foundation of Kulturpool when it launched in 2008, aggregates the metadata for Europeana."

"'Providing a huge amount of diverse cultural heritage data is key for Europeana's success,' said Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana. 'Kulturpool as the national cross-domain aggregator for Austria plays an important part by leveraging its technology to sustainably support the growth of Europeana.'"

"Kulturpool – initiated and funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture (BMUKK), and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Research (BMWF) – enables the site's visitors to call up vast collections of art work, documents and other photographed or scanned items. Kulturpool acts as an Austrian cross-domain aggregator for digital cultural heritage to Europeana and makes Austrian cultural heritage accessible on a pan-European level."

For more information, please see the full press release.

1812 Almanac is Milestone for North Carolina Digitization Program

January 6, 2012 — "The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has marked the 10,000^th book from its collections to be digitized with the Scribe, a high-speed scanner developed by the Internet Archive. The milestone volume was Thomas Henderson's 1812 North Carolina Almanack."

"The 200-year-old almanac provides a glimpse into the daily lives of North Carolinians past, with practical information such as astronomical guides and court dates, along with dubious advice, such as instructions for reviving a dead drowning victim."

"According to Jenn Riley, head of the Carolina Digital Library and Archive, the Scribe program has significantly expanded digital library operations at UNC. 'Now the Library can put content from our collections online on a scale that far exceeds what we could do in the past,' she said...."

"...The Library operates an additional Scribe machine as part of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, housed in the North Carolina Collection. The Center offers free or low-cost digitization and online hosting services to cultural heritage institutions across the state."

For more information, please see the full press release.

IMLS Director Susan Hildreth Welcomes Robert Horton, New IMLS Associate Deputy Director for Library Services

January 4, 2012 — "Statement of IMLS Director Susan Hildreth:"

"I am pleased to announce the appointment of Robert Horton as IMLS Associate Deputy Director for Library Services. Bob has most recently served as state archivist and director of the library, publications, and collections division at the Minnesota Historical Society. In his new position at IMLS, he is responsible for the management of the discretionary grant programs in the Office of Library Services."

"Bob studied and taught history at Brown, Ohio State, Indiana University, and Yale, then started his archival career at the State Archives of Indiana. Among other activities, he was on the advisory boards of the College of St. Catherine's Library and Information School and the Legacy Tobacco Document Library at the University of California San Francisco and chaired the Center for Legislative Archives' Descriptive Practices Working Group."

"Bob has worked most closely with digital content and electronic records projects, directing the Minnesota Historical Society's National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program initiative. He also worked with legislative digital content and its preservation; the immigrant oral history online project, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services; the National Newspaper Digitization Program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the digitization of Swedish language newspapers, in collaboration with the National Library of Sweden...."

For more information, please see the full press release.

IMLS and Partners Award $4.8 Million for "Digging Into Data" Projects

January 3, 2012 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services and seven global partners today awarded approximately $4.8 million to international research teams investigating how computational techniques may be applied to "big data" — the massive multisource datasets made possible by modern technology."

"Fourteen teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States were named the winners of the second Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists, and librarians from leading universities worldwide."

"The sponsoring research funders include the Arts & Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom), the Economic & Social Research Council (United Kingdom), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (United States), the Joint Information Systems Committee (United Kingdom), the National Endowment for the Humanities (United States), the National Science Foundation (United States), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Netherlands), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Canada)."

"Total project funding is approximately $4.8 million (U.S.) dollars. IMLS's contribution of $474,855 supports American researchers from three of the fourteen teams: the University of Washington, the University of California at Berkeley, and Drexel University. Co-funders are supporting the international partners involved in these projects."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Geospatial Format Descriptions Added to LC Format Sustainability Site

December 30, 2011 announcement from William Lazorchack, Library of Congress — "The Library of Congress Office of Strategic Initiatives announces the availability of 35 descriptions of digital geospatial formats and two brief accompanying essays. This information is a new segment of the Library's Format Sustainability Web site. This site provides information about digital content formats, emphasizing the aspects and features that are relevant for preservation planning. At this writing, the site provides information about 260 digital formats and subformats in the seven categories of still image, sound, textual, moving image, Web archive, datasets, and geospatial. Many additional formats remain to be described."

"Starting with materials developed by the National Geospatial Digital Archive, Nancy Hoebelheinrich (Knowledge Motifs LLC) and Natalie Munn (Content Innovations LLC) developed this new compilation of geospatial information during 2010 and 2011. The menu for the geospatial format descriptions is here. The status is noted in each document: some are 'full,' some 'partial,' and some 'preliminary.' Meanwhile, the two brief essays are here:

• http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/gis_quality.shtml and
• http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/content/gis_intro.shtml."

"Comments and suggestions are welcome: http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/contact_format.shtml."

KEEP released new version of Emulation Framework (EF)

December 22, 2011 announcement from Jeffrey van der Hoeven, National Library of the Netherlands — "The European project KEEP has just released a new version of the Emulation Framework (version 1.1.0). The software is open source (Apache v2 license) and free to use for any organisation or individual. The software allows you to access old computer files and programs using emulation without the need to go through difficult installations and configurations."

"With a growing legacy of digital files and computer programs, you might be faced with a challenge to retain access to your digital information. Current computers are not capable of executing old programs anymore and file formats most likely need to be converted before they can be used. But how was it actually?"

"Emulation is a technique that allows you to recreate the old computer platform again. Rendering your document or program on that platform offers you the 'look-and-feel' as how it used to be. But setting up an emulated environment is difficult."

"The Emulation Framework (EF) is targeted to bridge the gap between technique and usability of emulation by automating many steps for you. The EF comes with a basic set of 7 open source emulators and support for at least 25 file formats that can be viewed via emulation. The set of supported emulators and software can be extended to your needs."

For more information, please contact Jeffrey van der Hoeven, Jeffrey.vanderHoeven@KB.NL.

Culture on the Go: CIBER report says mobile browsing will transform the web

December 20, 2011 — "A new report, Culture on the Go, from UK web-watchers CIBER Research, shows how access to information is changing as people search for, read and use information on the move. A growing proportion of web browsing happens on smartphones like the new Mac iPhone 4S and tablets like the iPad, and no longer on PCs and laptops in homes and offices. This shift will have a radical impact on the design and functionality of websites, and will inevitably reflect back to the desktop screen itself."

"Professor David Nicholas of CIBER said, 'We are seeing a transformation of behaviour. We know that the mobile device will soon be the dominant platform for searching the Web and yet right now we know virtually nothing about how people seek, read and use information via these devices. The CIBER group are cyberspace voyeurs – we've analysed tens of thousands of visits and are making sense of these digital footprints to give us an understanding of behaviour in the virtual space.'"

"The CIBER group has developed a bespoke deep log analysis technique for monitoring behaviours online. The group conducted their research for Europeana, Europe's cultural heritage portal, to look at how it should be developing its information services for the Google Generation."

"The report sets out to show how people search the Web via mobile devices and compares this with use of the same platform by PC and laptop users. The data was collected for visitors to Europeana.eu using deep log analysis and data mining techniques during 2010 - 2011. The main findings were that visits from users on the go are very different in the aggregate to those from fixed platforms. Visits are typically shorter, less interactive, and less content is viewed per visit. The variation between different mobile devices is huge, with information seeking on smartphones substantially different from that associated with PCs and laptops, whereas from iPads the behaviour tends more towards PC-based browsing...."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Europeana's first user-generated exhibition online

December 15, 2011 — "Europeana launches its first user-generated virtual exhibition 'Wiki Loves Art Nouveau'. Divided into four themes, the exhibition features photographs of Art Nouveau monuments that were taken by people across Europe for the Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest."

"The contest was organised by the Wikimedia Foundation in over 15 European countries in September 2011. Europeana was an official partner and sponsored the competition's Art Nouveau category."

"From 2,700 entries, the Europeana team shortlisted 343 finalists based on quality and composition. Users then voted for their favourites on Flickr, after which the fifty most popular photographs were assembled into a new virtual exhibition."

For more information, please see the full press release.

More than 200 Billion Online Videos Viewed Globally in October

YouTube Delivers 2 of Every 5 Videos Viewed Worldwide
comScore Releases Inaugural Report on Global Online Video Viewing Habits

December 14, 2011 — "comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released inaugural data on worldwide online video viewing from the comScore Video Metrix service. The report found that nearly 1.2 billion people age 15 and older watched 201.4 billion videos online globally during October 2011. Google Sites, driven by YouTube.com, ranked as the top video destination with nearly 88.3 billion videos viewed on the property worldwide during the month."

"'As global broadband connectivity continues to rise, online video viewing has taken off in a big way and has become a fully integrated component of the digital content experience,' said Dan Piech, comScore product manager for video. 'With the introduction of comScore's global measurement of online video viewing, multinational media brands and advertisers can now gain a more comprehensive understanding of how online video reaches audiences around the world.'"

For more information, please see the full press release.

NISO and Open Archives Initiative Receive Grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to Create Resource Synchronization Standard

New Standard Will Improve Availability and Timeliness of Repository Content

December 14, 2011 — "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Open Archives Initiative have been awarded a $222,000 grant for a joint project to develop a new open standard on the real-time synchronization of Web resources. Increasingly, large-scale digital collections are available from multiple hosting locations, are cached at multiple servers, and leveraged by several services. This proliferation of replicated copies of works or data on the Internet has created an increasingly challenging problem of keeping the repositories' holdings and the services that leverage them up-to-date and accurate. As we move from a Web of documents to a Web of data, synchronization becomes even more important: decisions made based on unsynchronized or incoherent scientific or economic data can have serious deleterious impact."

"'This proposal is an outgrowth of the issues exposed in the context of the Memento project that developed a protocol for uniformly accessing time-stamped resource versions on the Web,' explains Michael L. Nelson, Associate Professor, Old Dominion University, and a principal investigator on the Memento project. 'We have assembled a stellar core team to devise the standard from the Sloan grant. It includes people that have worked on a variety of information interoperability efforts such as Memento; the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), a protocol for describing aggregations of Web resources; Open Annotation, a resource-centric annotation framework; and the DSNotify change detection framework for Linked Data'..."

"...'We expect this new standard will save a tremendous amount of time, effort, and resources by repository managers through the automation of the replication and updating process,' states Todd Carpenter, NISO Managing Director. 'The end result will be to increase the general availability of content in Web repositories and alleviate the variety of problems created by out-dated, inaccurate, superseded content that exists on the Internet today.'"

For more information, please see the full press release.

Deanna Marcum Named Managing Director, Ithaka S+R

December 8, 2011 — "ITHAKA is pleased to announce that Dr. Deanna Marcum has accepted the position of Managing Director, Ithaka S+R, effective January 1, 2012. Deanna will lead this growing not-for-profit service, which provides research and strategic consulting services that help transform scholarship and teaching."

"Dr. Marcum brings a background of extraordinary accomplishment to her new role. She joins Ithaka S+R from the Library of Congress, where she was the Associate Librarian for Library Services. Previously, she served as the President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Dean of the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science. As a testament to her extraordinary leadership and distinguished career, the American Libraries Association (ALA) awarded her the Melvil Dewey Medal, its highest honor, this past June."

"Dr. Marcum has provided invaluable leadership that has helped to encourage change during dynamic and challenging times. In 1997, she led the important process to merge the Council on Library Resources and the Commission on Preservation and Access to form CLIR. While at CLIR, she formed a joint task force of libraries and publishers to develop effective ways for working together on a range of important issues. In collaboration with EDUCAUSE and Emory University, she developed the Frye Leadership Institute to help mid-career librarians and IT specialists broaden their understanding of higher education issues."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Indiana University receives grant to create software system for video and audio collections

December 7, 2011 announcement from Shawn Conner, Indiana University — "The Indiana University Libraries, in partnership with Northwestern University Library, recently received a $947,963 grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to create a freely available open source software system to enable academic libraries and archives to easily provide online access to their video and audio collections."

"This project, known as Variations on Video, will be based in IU's Digital Library Program and continues a planning project supported by a previous IMLS grant to IU. It builds on IU's past success in developing the open source Variations digital music library system, now in use at over 20 colleges and universities beyond IU, and on Northwestern's long history of expertise in video digitization and delivery."

"Participants from several additional institutions will collaborate and advise on the project, including Stanford University, University of Virginia, New York University, Harvard University, University of Connecticut, University of Miami, University of York (U.K.), WGBH/Boston, University of California Berkeley, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Representatives from the Hydra Project and Opencast Matterhorn, two higher education open source initiatives focused on digital library and media content management, will also participate."

For more information, please contact Shawn Conner, shconner@indiana.edu.

Ten Institutions Receive Nation's Highest Honor for Museum and Library Service

December 6, 2011 — "IMLS Director Susan Hildreth on Monday presented the National Medal for Museum and Library Service to five libraries and five museums at a ceremony on Capitol Hill. Journalist and author Cokie Roberts gave the keynote address at the ceremony. The National Medal is the highest honor conferred on museums and libraries for service to the community."

"'These inspiring institutions make it possible for individuals from diverse backgrounds to follow their passions and make meaningful contributions to their communities,' said Hildreth. 'Our winners are preserving endangered manuscripts from around the world, providing internet access to the residents of a small remote town, training African immigrants to be child care providers while at the same time helping to preserve their native cultures, helping teens and young adults discover career paths, and much more. The recipients of the National Medal for Museum and Library Service have wonderful stories to tell that demonstrate how libraries and museums build strong communities and transform lives.'"

"The 2011 winners of the National Medal for Museum and Library Service are:

• Alachua County Library District, Gainesville, FL
• Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, OH
• EdVenture Children's Museum, Columbia, SC
• Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA
• Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Collegeville, MN
• Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Richmond, VA
• Madison Children's Museum, Madison, WI
• San Jose Public Library, San Jose, CA
• Weippe Public Library & Discovery Center, Weippe, ID"

For more information, please see the full press release.

Oxford University Press launches Oxford Journal of Law and Religion

December 2, 2011 — "Oxford University Press (OUP) is pleased to announce the launch of a new title in 2012: Oxford Journal of Law and Religion (OJLR). The new journal is introduced to the Oxford Journals Collection in response to the recent proliferation of research and writing on the interaction of law and religion cutting across many disciplines."

"The journal aims to redefine the interdependence of law, humanities, and social sciences within the widening parameters of the study of law and religion, whilst seeking to make the distinctive area of law and religion more comprehensible from both a legal and a religious viewpoint. It will capture the complex dynamics of law and religion from different legal as well as religious research perspectives worldwide...."

"...All OJLR content will be freely available online in 2012. For more information about the journal, including print subscriptions, article submission guidelines, and how to register for free content-alerting services, please visit: http://www.ojlr.oxfordjournals.org."

For more information, please see the full press release.

IMLS Releases New Five Year Strategic Plan

December 2, 2011 — "IMLS Director Susan Hildreth released the agency's new strategic plan for FY 2012 - FY 2016. The plan envisions a democratic society where communities and individuals thrive with broad public access to knowledge, cultural heritage and lifelong learning. The new plan identifies the mission of IMLS to inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, learning, and cultural and civic engagement by providing leadership through research, policy development and grant-making."

"The planning process, launched in June 2011, with the National Museum and Library Services Board, engaged a wide range of stakeholders including more than 1,400 participants in an online forum. It provides a roadmap to implement the Museum and Library Services Act which recognizes that U.S. libraries and museums are powerful national assets with capacity that must be developed and fully used to enhance economic development and lifelong learning."

"The strategic plan establishes a clear framework for performance improvement that emphasizes evidence-based program development and evaluation and includes identifying and sharing best practices; aligning grant-making to best practices and research results; networking to build capacity; and assessing progress."

"To read more about the IMLS Strategic Plan see http://www.imls.gov/plan."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Open Data – a business model perspective

'If cultural heritage organisation do not expose data in ways that digital natives want to use it, they risk becoming irrelevant to the next generation.'

December 1, 2011 — "Today Europeana publishes its second White Paper, 'The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: a Business Model perspective on Open Metadata'. The paper is the result of a roundtable that brought together leading figures in the cultural heritage sector. The experts examined the opportunities and risks associated with open licensing of their massive datasets, which comprise the record of all publications and cultural artefacts in Europe."

"The White Paper documents their findings and is published to meet a growing need among libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual collections for a new business model that weighs the current digital opportunities against traditional concerns about ownership and control. It makes specific recommendations to be addressed and concludes that 'the benefits of open data sharing and open distribution...outweigh the risks.'"

"Interest in open data is growing among policy makers, application and software developers and innovative thinkers in the Linked Open Data/ Semantic Web movement. The European Commission's Digital Agenda for Europe 2020 identifies opening up public data sources for re-use as a key action in support of the digital single market, and proposes adapting the EU's Public Sector Information Directive which governs the use of data. The Commission's position is that data created by the public sector should be freely available as raw material for innovative re-use. To do so stimulates the digital economy and thereby creates jobs and provides social and economic benefit."

"The White Paper features case studies of organisations that are in the vanguard of open data. They include Yale University, the German National Library, Cambridge University and the British Museum. Many other data providers are following in their footsteps: in signing Europeana's new Data Exchange Agreement, contributors to Europeana's dataset of 20 million items commit to an open licence in order to provide the raw material for innovation in the sector."

For more information, please see the full press release.

METRO's Collaborative Digitization Grantees Announced for 2012

November 30, 2011 — "METRO is pleased to announce that nine member institutions in the metropolitan New York region have been awarded grant funding to support a range of digitization projects designed to expand access to important collections of historical and rare materials. Recipients of the 2011/2012 Digital Metro New York (DMNY) grants, totaling over $78,000, were announced today by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO)."

"Libraries, archives, and other research organizations selected to receive METRO digitization grants this year include the American Jewish Historical Society, The Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary, the Center for Jewish History, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Frick Art Reference Library, Brooklyn Museum, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the New York Botanical Garden. Awardees were chosen based on a rigorous application and review process designed to identify initiatives that would have the strongest impact on research and access to vital materials from important collections in the New York area."

"'This year's digitization grant recipients truly represent the diversity of METRO's membership, and I am confident that their collaborative projects will enhance the growing collection of online resources in our area,' said Jason Kucsma, METRO's Executive Director...."

"...Since 2005, METRO's DMNY program has distributed over $530,000 to help fund 37 projects at more than 49 METRO member institutions. Managed by METRO, Digital Metro New York supports the implementation of digitization projects among METRO member libraries and archives. METRO lends vital additional support for digitization projects through specialized education and training programs and opportunities for 'digitally ready' libraries to share expertise and best-practice digitization strategies."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Kent State faculty receive $219,000+ federal grant to improve access to digital resources

November 28, 2011 announcement from Flo Cunningham, Public Relations Director, Kent State University — "Two faculty members in the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) at Kent State University, Professor Marcia Lei Zeng, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor Karen Gracy, Ph.D., have received a National Leadership Grant in the amount of $219,386 from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The funds will be used to help improve access to digital resources within and beyond the library world through what is known as 'Linked Open Data (LOD).'"

"'With Linked Data technologies, libraries can efficiently reach a much wider range and more diverse data universe, and more effectively provide services to their users. Libraries can enhance their existing digital collections and services with linked data technologies and LOD resources without significantly increasing the library's workload or requiring them to reengineer their existing bibliographic databases and websites,' Zeng said."

"Zeng and Gracy's project will develop effective strategies and prototype tools to help libraries and museums connect to the unfamiliar data and metadata resources in the LOD world. In particular, their research will address the question of how libraries can benefit from resources that have been made available in the Linked Open Data (LOD) universe."

"'In this project, Dr. Zeng and I will be aligning metadata terms from different and diverse namespaces, which means that we will be analyzing semantic relationships among many different metadata schemas to identify areas of overlap and degrees of similarity,' Gracy explained. 'Our primary goal for this study will be the development and testing of a tool, the Metadata Vocabulary Junction, that will help librarians and archivists understand unfamiliar metadata schemas and discover new data sources. These librarians will then be able to help users discover and use the rich information found in the Linked Open Data universe by following the paths that we will be creating through the M-V Junction.'"

"The resulting resource thus will encourage all libraries, regardless of their size and technical status, to tap into the riches of Linked Open Data."

For more information, please see contact Flo Cunningham, fcunning@kent.edu.

Library Visits at Historic High

November 18, 2011 — "The ways in which Americans use libraries changed significantly in the decade ending in 2009 as libraries adapted to meet the evolving needs of their users. These changes are keeping libraries relevant, vibrant places as evidenced by a 24.4% increase in visits per capita in the last ten years, with total visits increasing by nearly 40%. In 2009 (the most recent data available) libraries were visited a record-breaking 1.59 billion times, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services' (IMLS) report on the FY2009 Public Library Survey (PLS), a census of public libraries in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories conducted annually by IMLS."

"The Institute's analysis of the data showed that per capita visits and circulation rose in the century's first decade. The number of public libraries increased during that period but not enough to keep pace with the rise in population. Library staffing remained stable, though the percentage of public libraries with degreed and accredited librarians increased."

"The report also found that the nature and composition of collections in U.S. public libraries is changing, indicating that library collections are becoming more varied. Although the volume of print materials decreased over the 10 years studied, collections overall continued to grow because of increases in the number of audio, video, and electronic book materials."

"The role of public libraries in providing Internet resources to the public also continued to increase. According to the report, the availability of Internet-ready computer terminals in public libraries doubled over the course of the decade."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Announcing open source version of DAITSS preservation repository software

November 17, 2011 — "The Florida Center for Library Automation is pleased to announce that DAITSS (Dark Archive in the Sunshine State) software is available under a GPL v 3 license."

"DAITSS is a digital preservation repository application developed by the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA) with some support from the IMLS. DAITSS is used by the Florida Digital Archive, a long-term preservation repository service provided by FCLA for the use of the libraries of the eleven publicly-funded universities in Florida. Although DAITSS first went into production in 2005, it was recently re-architected and rewritten to improve ease of implementation and maintenance, scalability, and extensibility."

"DAITSS provides automated support for the functions of Submission, Ingest, Archival Storage, Access, Withdrawal, and Repository Management. It is architected as a set of RESTful Web Services and micro-services but enforces strict controls to ensure the integrity and authenticity of archived content. It implements active preservation strategies based on format-specific processing including, where necessary, normalization and forward migration. It is particularly well suited for materials in text, document, image, audio and video formats."

"DAITSS was written for a multi-user environment and supports consortial as well as institutional preservation repositories."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Access to research library resources expands with OLE release from Kuali collaboration

November 16, 2011 — "Kuali Foundation has announced the release of Kuali OLE 0.3, a milestone in open-source software development that addresses the functional needs of higher education research libraries for managing information resources. Kuali Open Library Environment is a robust, enterprise-wide, easy-to-use system for selecting, acquiring and describing library information resources that link with enterprise business processes and value-added external resources...."

"...Kuali OLE Release 0.3 is the result of collaboration of multiple higher education research libraries and commercial affiliates including Indiana University, Duke University, Lehigh University, North Carolina State University, University of Chicago, University of Florida, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania and HTC Global Services. Kuali OLE 0.3 has received generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."

"All software and materials delivered by the Kuali Foundation are available under the Educational Community License and can be adopted by colleges and universities without licensing fees...."

"...For more information on Kuali OLE 0.3, or to download version 0.3, go to Kuali OLE or take a "test drive" at Test Drive Kuali OLE."

For more information, please see the full press release.

CrossRef Assigns 50 Millionth DOI

November 15, 2011 — "The number of CrossRef Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) assigned to scholarly documents has surpassed 50 million, in time for CrossRef's twelfth annual meeting today. The 50 millionth DOI has been identified as http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/lsoc.1985.2030, a 1985 linguistics article from the journal Langage et Société, made available by the Persée Program, which has participated in CrossRef since 2007."

"Viviane Boulétreau of the Persée Program, said, 'Although this article was published many years ago, it has only recently has been assigned a DOI as part of our ongoing project to digitize older scholarly material. Our participation in CrossRef promotes the linking of our content to the international community of scientific resources and improves its visibility and citability for our audience of readers.'"

For more information, please see the full press release.

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