D-Lib Magazine In Brief and In the News

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July/August 2013
Table of Contents

OpenStax College

Contributed by:
Richard G. Baraniuk
Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Founder and Director, Connexions and OpenStax College
Rice University
Houston, Texas, USA

OpenStax is a nonprofit initiative of Rice University to make college more affordable by publishing free, high-quality electronic textbooks for the nation's most heavily attended college courses. Generous support by major foundations allows OpenStax to offer peer-reviewed, full-color textbooks free online to any student.

OpenStax launched in 2012 with the goal of offering free textbooks for 25 of the nation's most-attended college courses. OpenStax's growing catalog includes introductory texts for physics, sociology, biology for both majors and nonmajors, and anatomy. Six more subjects – algebra, chemistry, economics, U.S. history, psychology and statistics – will be added in 2014.

What does it do?

OpenStax provides its books via Rice's open-education platform, Connexions. In addition to OpenStax's textbooks, Connexions' online library holds more than 20,000 pieces of free educational content.

To ensure that its books are every bit as good as publisher titles that cost hundreds of dollars, OpenStax pays as much as $1 million to develop each of its books. OpenStax hires the same content developers that are used by major publishers, and OpenStax's books are peer-reviewed by hundreds of faculty reviewers.

OpenStax is able to offer its books for free thanks to generous support from its philanthropic partners, who underwrite the costs of producing the books in order to make college more affordable for everyone. Our philanthropic partners include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Twenty Million Minds Foundation and the Maxfield Foundation

OpenStax also partners with for-profit companies that provide online homework, assessment and other fee-based products and services that make OpenStax books more valuable for both instructors and students.

How does it impact us?

Free textbooks help students pay for college, and free books help institutions control costs by partially or fully offsetting increases in tuition and fees. That's never been more important, because according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 66 percent of college undergraduates receive some type of financial aid each year, and more of that aid than ever is being spent on textbooks. According to the state website http://www.CaliforniaColleges.edu, the average community college student in California this year will spend an estimated $1,675 for books and supplies compared to just $1,104 for tuition.

If OpenStax reaches its goal of capturing 10 percent of the market for its first 25 books, it will save college students an estimated $750 million within five years.

For more information, visit http://openstaxcollege.org.

NISO Initiates Project to Encode E-Resource License Templates in ONIX-PL

Contributed by:
Cynthia Hodgson
Technical Editor / Consultant
National Information Standards Organization
chodgson [at] niso.org
and
Selden Lamoureux
Electronic Resources Librarian
SDLinforms
selden.lamoureux [at] gmail.com

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has launched a new project, supported with a $44,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to encode a collection of template licenses for e-resources into the ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) format for deposit into the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebase for free distribution to the library, publishing, and library systems community. The deposited encodings—to be made available under a Creative Commons Public Domain (CC-0) license—will allow libraries that license electronic content to import the template licenses into their own electronic resource management systems for further local customization and implementation. The project will also fund some publicly available training resources that will inform community members on how to use those encodings for their own purposes.

ONIX-PL is elegant but very complex, since it's designed to describe the nuances of licenses, but the use of the ONIX-PL standard has suffered from a "Catch-22" situation. Publishers and librarians have little incentive to invest the time and effort to become proficient at ONIX-PL encoding until there is a demonstrated benefit from systems that utilize the encodings. Systems developers have not prioritized implementation of ONIX-PL formatted licenses in ERM systems because there was no source of encoded licenses to import. The creation and availability of these template licenses will encourage the use and adoption of the ONIX-PL standard, which, in turn, will lead to greater ease and efficiencies in managing e-resources.

NISO has contracted with Selden Lamoureux to obtain the template licenses, encode them in ONIX-PL format, and deposit the files in the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebases. JISC Collections, a division of the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) that manages electronic content acquisitions for member institutions of higher learning in the UK, provided $10,000 in funding support for the project to provide the ONIX-PL Editing software and training in the encoding format for Lamoureux.

JISC Collections has already encoded all of the licenses for their subscribed content and deposited them in their KnowledgeBase Plus (KB+) database, but these encodings are for JISC negotiated licenses and restricted to JISC members' usage. The NISO encodings, which are templated licenses, will be added to KB+ and be publicly available to a much wider audience. The codings will also be deposited in the Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb), an element of the larger Kuali OLE initiative to provide open source management systems to the library and academic communities.

Publishers contacted to date have been responding positively and licenses have been obtained from Elsevier, Springer, Nature, Duke University Press, and DeGruyter, with more publishers committed to contribute. Encoding of the received licenses is already underway. As template encodings are completed, they will be reviewed by the contributing publishers prior to finalization. Some license encodings may be deposited by late September.

To ensure the use of these encodings and ongoing sustainability of the project, NISO will be producing at least four recorded 60-to-90-minute video training sessions. The training will show librarians how to export a template license from GOKb+, import it into an ERM system, and customize the template to match an organization's specific license terms. Some training will also be directed towards publishers, explaining how to encode using ONIX-PL and deposit those encodings into GOKb and KB+. Thus publishers will be able to update their own template licenses as needed. The training materials will be available from the NISO website under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY).

Publishers who are interested in contributing license templates for encoding should contact Selden Lamoureux.

Maker Lab @ Chicago Public Library

Contributed by:
Ruth Lednicer
Director of Marketing & Communications
Chicago Public Library
Chicago, Illinois, USA

The Chicago Public Library launched the first free Maker Space in Chicago on July 8 at the downtown Harold Washington Library Center. As we've discussed this new space, I've often been asked: how does a Maker Space fit within the role of a library? Easy – the mission of public libraries has always been about learning, about offering free and equal access to the latest ideas and information. For decades those ideas and information came in books and other printed materials, so that is the medium in which libraries worked. Today, the ways in which people access new ideas has grown exponentially, so libraries are working to be sure we are keeping up and offering the information the public needs and in the format they want.

The theme of this year's annual American Library Association conference was 'Transforming Our Libraries, Ourselves.' Libraries all over the globe are discussing ways to be sure they are offering patrons access to the knowledge needed to be active and involved citizens. This knowledge includes understanding the technology used in today's world and workplace; technology such as digital manufacturing.

The Institute of Museum and LIbrary Services (IMLS) understands this need and chose the Chicago Public Library as recipient of a $249,000 grant to test the idea of a Maker Space in the library. The six month experiment takes place in the Library's Innovation Lab – a space designed to rapidly try out new ideas and see if they resonate with library patrons.

The Chicago Public Library reached out to the maker community, Inventables, the Museum of Science and Industry and others for advice on creating the Maker Lab, using their experiences as a guide. The result is a bright and welcoming space, with whiteboard paint on the walls and room for both workshops and open lab hours. With the help of librarians and partners from maker organizations, the public can learn to use the various software used to design the items they want to fabricate and send them to a variety of machines for completion. This space is designed as a "first touch," a place in which people can have a chance to see and use technology with which they are unfamiliar, learning from mentors and sharing ideas and designs.

Machines available for use in the space are: Three MakerBot Replicator 2s, Two Cameo vinyl cutters, Two Full Spectrum Laser cutters (both plugged into an air filter to prevent toxic fumes from circulating in the lab space) and a Shapeoko CNC milling machine. These offer patrons an opportunity to create a wide variety of projects, from simple jewelry to complicated gear parts.

We are looking forward to seeing what the public learns – and what we learn through this space.

4C - Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

Contributed by:
Sarah Norris
Senior Project Officer
Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)
(The DPC contributes to WP2 'Engagement' of the 4C Project)
Innovation Centre, York University Science Park
Heslington, YORK YO10 5DG, United Kingdom
sarah [at] dpconline.org

Seven European countries joined together in February this year to launch the European Commission (EC) funded 4C Project. Designed to help public and private organisations invest more effectively in digital curation and preservation, the project aims to sustain the long-term value of all types of digital information.

Neil Grindley, Project Co-ordinator from Jisc, UK, explains: "It can be difficult to make a convincing case for investment in digital curation for two reasons. Firstly the costs of curation are hard to predict and secondly the short term benefits are hard to define because curation implicitly addresses long-term challenges." 4C will address both concerns, providing practical guidance and resources to help practitioners persuade executives to invest in new services.

4C is an 'open and social' project, and rather than waiting for polished results, partners are blogging and sharing findings as they go. The team hopes that this will encourage engagement and debate, increasing the likelihood that findings and guidance are useful.

Already after six months, 4C can tick off some major milestones. The project has undertaken a baseline study of its potential stakeholder groups and existing initiatives, and has just concluded an initial consultation designed to investigate the wide ranging needs of the practitioner community.

Sabine Schrimpf, involved in the project's 'Engagement' work package on behalf of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Germany, says: "We want to engage with many different kinds of organisations and to set up partnerships and have discussions with everyone who would like to get involved in the development of these tools."

Still to come, 4C is running a workshop at iPRES 2013 and is inviting attendees to join in (http://ipres2013.ist.utl.pt/registration.html), as well as organising more focus groups and outreach events over the next two years. Activities will culminate in a conference and Roadmap document to share results at the end of the process.

For more information about 4C, visit the project website and follow the blog: http://4cproject.eu/.

I N T H E N E W S

Scientists Need Your Eyes and Ears

July 10, 2013 blog posting by Christopher Hook and Jessica Robertson, USGS — "In an ever-changing environment, it would be ideal if the U.S Geological Survey had a presence in every corner of the nation. While we may not be able to cover every inch of the landscape, we can greatly enhance our scope with your help."

"The USGS has a variety of citizen science efforts where you can report what's happening in your own backyard. We want to know if you felt an earthquake, saw a landslide, have a new building going up nearby, or have flowers blooming earlier than normal. If you live in Alaska, we want you to tell us if you experience a volcanic ash fall and even collect a sample...."

"...The valuable role of crowd-sourcing data is outlined in a recent report by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, authored in collaboration with the USGS. The report also highlights success stories from TED, 'Did You Feel It?' (DYFI?) and related USGS activities. For example, although there was an exceedingly swift international aid response to the massive 2008 earthquake in Wenchuan, China, the first reports of the event outside of the impacted area came from citizens, and information spread through the use of social networking tools such as Twitter. Similarly, approximately 148,000 individuals used DYFI? to describe their experience of a magnitude 5.8 earthquake that occurred in Virginia on Aug. 23, 2011. Because large-magnitude earthquakes are fairly rare along the East Coast, there were only a handful of seismometers installed nearby to record the event. Thus, much of the preliminary data regarding this earthquake came from the DYFI? system...."

"...The interconnectedness of contemporary society is staggering. Currently, there are more than 2 billion internet users worldwide. As USGS citizen science proves, social media is no longer limited to just 'liking' a picture. Through innovation and taking advantage of the opportunities available, the USGS has been able to work with millions of citizen scientists across the globe to discover more about our world than ever before."

For more information please see the full blog posting.

Carnegie Mellon Libraries Create Digital Archive of Jewish News in Pittsburgh Since 1895

July 8, 2013 — "Carnegie Mellon University Libraries have completed the Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project, a digital archive documenting daily life in the Pittsburgh Jewish community from 1895 to the present. The full text archive providing an unparalleled look back into more than a century of life in Pittsburgh is fully searchable, free and open to the public at http://ptfs.library.cmu.edu/pjn."

"Three weekly newspapers and a weekly newsletter are archived: the "'Jewish Criterion' (1895-1962), 'The American Jewish Outlook' (1934-1962), 'The Jewish Chronicle' (1962-present), and the Y-JCC newsletter series published by the Young Men and Women's Hebrew Association, the Y-IKC, and the Jewish Community Center (1926-1976)."

"The successful six-year project was proposed by CMU Trustee Anne Molloy, executive director of the Posner Fine Arts Foundation and librarian at Rodef Shalom Synagogue. Molloy proposed a collaboration to digitize the historic Pittsburgh Jewish publications housed in the Rodef Shalom Library & Archive, the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Senator John Heinz History Center and The Jewish Chronicle office files. The collections – in paper and on microfilm – were heavily used and deteriorating."

For more information please see the full press release.

International Journal on Digital Libraries Call for Papers: Special Issue on Digital Scholarship

July 7, 2013 announcement from Stephen Griffin, University of Pittsburgh — "Digital scholarship, or "cyberscholarship" – that based on data and computation – is radically reshaping knowledge discovery, creation, analysis, presentation and dissemination in many topical areas. Scientists are using vast amounts of data to explore galaxies, measure stresses on earth systems, create genetic profiles of living things and study the changing behaviors and mores of societies and individuals in a an increasing populated and fragile physical world steeped in networked digital technologies. Similarly, humanists are using new types of information objects, methodologies and tools to transform and expand their scholarly endeavors. Examples include the creation and use of digital representations of material culture by historians, introducing spatial and temporal indexed data into the study of literature and information visualizations to communicate the outcomes of traditional humanistic inquiry."

"The enabling environment for digital scholarship is a rapidly expanding global digital ecology composed of large and diverse datasets; richly annotated, globally linked and accessible to all using open source tools. Accompanying technology changes have been trends within scholarly communities toward rich informal dialogues, cross-disciplinary collaborations and equable sharing of research findings."

"Data-centered approaches to inquiry have now become a staple of research and scholarship in almost every disciplinary domain. Accompanying this have been cultural shifts in the scholarly community that challenge long-standing assumptions that underpin the structure of academic institutions and beg new models of scholarly communication. Network-centric models of scientific communication that capture a comprehensive record of scholarly workflows are now seen by many as a necessary condition for accurate and complete reporting of scholarly work."

"Much of the seminal work in developing the information environments and resources that support digital scholarship can be linked directly to digital libraries research – past and present. Pioneering digital libraries research illuminated essential core information architectures and environments and inspired a generation of researchers to look beyond the confines of their own discipline and often partner with others to pursue interdisciplinary projects – many of which captured national attention and captivated the general public with their brilliance."

"This special issue will solicit high quality papers that demonstrate exceptional achievements in digital scholarship, including but not limited to:

scholarly work that demonstrates innovation in the creation and use of complex information objects and tools to advance domain scholarship
domain research that exemplifies creative and innovative data-intensive research in the formal, natural, social sciences and the humanities and arts
new applications, tools and services that expand the scope and means for interdisciplinary digital scholarship
data repositories and infrastructure projects of exceptional quality and value that illustrate how community-based efforts can serve global constituencies
models for leveraging and expanding web-based infrastructure for scholars
document models that support multiple information types, update, annotation, executable objects, linkages, rapid integration and staged release of document components
scholarly communication environments that capture a comprehensive record of scholarly workflows and artifacts and provide new means of presentation, dissemination and reuse of digital assets"

For more information. including submission details, please see the full Call for papers.

ALA Annual Conference focuses on transforming libraries, engaging communities

July 3, 2013 — "As libraries reinvent themselves by meeting the challenges posed by emerging technologies, they look for creative ways to engage their communities. These issues and more were examined at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition, held June 27 - July 2 in Chicago."

"Overall attendance was 26,362, including 15,918 attendees and 6,125 exhibitors."

"The weekend kicked off with a series of preconferences, including the American Association of School Librarians' disaster recovery workshop funded by the Dollar General Literacy Foundation. Attendees evaluated their school library program's disaster preparedness and built a plan to cover any identified gaps...."

"...Two Saturday sessions further explored the theme of libraries engaging communities. ALA President Maureen Sullivan and Rich Harwood, president and founder of The Harwood Institute led a panel, the Promise of Libraries Transforming Communities, updating members on one of Sullivan's key initiatives during her term. Sullivan said, 'The role and contribution of libraries in ensuring informed and engaged communities is critical to our society and the future of our democracy. Now is the time for librarians to assume this important leadership role.'..."

"...Technology was at the forefront of the Washington Update Session, which featured former Obama special assistant Susan Crawford, who focused on a broad range of information policy, including Internet law and communications law. Attendees learned about a new website, http://www.libegov.org, that can help librarians more easily serve the e-government needs of their communities. Crawford pointed out the need to expand broadband access and speed in the United States. She cited a statistic indicating that 41 percent of libraries have said their bandwidth is inadequate but added that the percent is actually much higher. 'High speed Internet access is our new general purpose communications network, our replacement for the telephone, and it needs to be treated that way,' she said."

For more information please see the full press release.

Scientists Undertake Effort to Launch Video Data-Sharing Library for Developmental Science

July 2, 2013 — "In the largest open-source video-data sharing project of its kind, behavioral researchers, digital library scientists, and computer scientists are undertaking the creation of Databrary, a web-based video-data library sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH)."

"To capture the richness of behavioral development and to understand its complexity, developmental scientists analyze behavior using video-recorded data – on average, 12 hours of video per week. Databrary aims to encourage widespread data sharing in the developmental and behavioral sciences where video is commonly employed, but rarely shared."

"Databrary will enable researchers to store and openly share videos and related information about the studies. Researchers and clinicians can use Databrary to browse, download, and re-analyze video data. The goal is to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and make more efficient use of public investments in scientific research...."

"...Video data sharing marks a ground-breaking approach to 'big data' efforts in scientific behavioral research...."

"...Databrary will be the first large-scale, open data-sharing system that enables behavioral scientists to share and re-use research video files. The project is part of a series of 'big data' and data science initiatives underway at NYU. NYU's Division of Libraries and Information Technology Services are providing infrastructure and curation support in a close partnership with the project."

For more information please see the full press release.

IMLS and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to Partner with Libraries

July 1, 2013 — "During the annual meeting of the American Library Association, The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), together with representatives from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), met with library representatives on Sunday, June 30, to hear more about what librarians can do to get ready to respond to patron requests for assistance in navigating new health insurance options in the Health Insurance Marketplace."

"The Marketplace website, HealthCare.gov will be the primary tool for delivering information to Americans about their health coverage options. As prominent providers of Internet access and digital literacy training for people who lack Internet connections at home, libraries can anticipate intensified demand for computer services. IMLS and CMS will work cooperatively to make sure that libraries are aware of and able to connect patrons with information resources and community partners who are trained enrollment assistors."

"IMLS has also awarded $286,104 to OCLC to support the effort through its flagship public library program WebJunction.org. The goal is to assure that librarians have the information and connections with local experts needed to connect their patrons to information about the Health Insurance Marketplace when open enrollment begins October 1, 2013. OCLC will work closely with ZeroDivide, a social impact organization that helps underserved communities realize the transformative power of technology to improve health outcomes, to implement the program"

For more information please see the full press release.

Bridging the gap between academia and Wikipedia

June 27, 2013 — "Jisc and Wikimedia UK are collaborating on a project to bring the academic world and Wikipedia closer together. This will create opportunities for researchers, educators, and the general public to contribute to the world's freely available knowledge."

"Jisc is supporting this initiative so that the widest possible audience will benefit from the world-leading projects that it supports. These include open educational resources, online repositories of research, and collections such as the 19th century newspapers archive and Manuscripts Online, which holds British written and early printed materials from 1000 to 1500AD."

"Wikimedia UK is the national charity supporting Wikipedia and its sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikiversity. It works with professionals in universities, museums, libraries, and other institutions to improve the knowledge that those projects make freely available. It is investing in this project to involve more of these experts in improving Wikimedia projects for everyone's benefit. This project is part of the charity's wider commitment to higher education, shown through efforts such as their annual EduWiki conference and participation in the global Wikipedia Education Program. The charity recently appointed its first education co-ordinator in order to gain greater focus on higher education."

For more information please see the full press release.

Wikipedia and Europeana edit-a-thons focus on the First World War

June 27, 2013 — "On Saturday 29 June, volunteers around Europe and Australia [met] to remember and write about the First World War in edit-a-thons and online events that aim to improve the coverage of the war on the world's largest encyclopedia, Wikipedia."

"An edit-a-thon is an event at which people come together to write new or expand existing Wikipedia articles in a language of their choice. The events are organised by the Wikimedia movement together with Europeana (Europe's digital library and archive), local museums and other partners...."

"...The First World War started at the end of July 1914 and so next year we will remember the 100th anniversary of this world-shaking event. At times like these, the sixth largest website in the world, Wikipedia, always experiences a spike in visitors for the articles on the topic at hand. The edit-a-thons being held this weekend will be very valuable in improving the quality of First World War articles."

For more information please see the full press release.

NISO Launches New Project to Develop Recommended Practices for Exchanging Serial Content

Interested participants from libraries, publishers, content aggregators, and repositories are encouraged to contact NISO

June 26, 2013 — "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) voting members have approved a new project to develop recommended practices for Packaging and Exchanging Serial Content. Many different organizations-libraries, archives, indexing services, content aggregators, publishers, and content creators-need to exchange and work with digital files that make up serial content. Generally, the files are aggregated in some type of "package" that can vary significantly in format and structure and contain anywhere from several files for a single article to over a million files for a full journal title backfile. This new NISO initiative will develop a recommended practice defining the rules to be used to create a package of serial content, allowing both the exchange of content and the automation of processes to receive and manage this content."

"'The Library of Congress routinely collects digital materials for our national collection through copyright mandatory deposit,' states Leslie Johnston, Chief of Repository Development at the Library of Congress and one of the project proposers. 'In our proof of concept phase for delivery of e-serials, we accepted all publisher-submitted metadata and content file types and, as expected, we saw significant variance in file and directory naming, part identification, file format combinations, and the accompanying manifest (which was often missing). To efficiently receive and process e-serials on an ongoing basis and scale the processes to manage expected future volumes, we need a standardized protocol for how these e-serials will be provided.'"

"Participation in the new NISO initiative is encouraged from libraries, publishers, content aggregators, and repositories. Individuals interested in participating on this working group should contact Nettie Lagace (nlagace [at] niso.org)."

For more information please see the full press release.

Call for Nominations: 2014 National Medal for Museum and Library Service

June 26, 2013 — "This year marks the 20th anniversary of the National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the nation's highest honor for exemplary service by these institutions. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is now accepting nominations for the 2014 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Museums and libraries that would like to be considered for the National Medal should complete the nomination form by October 15, 2013."

"The National Medal honors museums and libraries that make extraordinary civic, educational, economic, environmental, and social contributions. Public or private nonprofit museums, including art, history, science and technology, children's, and natural history museums; historic houses, nature centers, zoos, and botanical gardens; and all types of nonprofit libraries, including public, school, academic, research, and archival, are eligible to receive this honor. The winners are honored at a National Medal award ceremony held in Washington, D.C."

"For more information and to access the nomination form, please go to http://www.imls.gov/applicants/detail.aspx?GrantId=13. A complete application will include a five-page, single-spaced narrative; financial statements for the past two fiscal years; and up to three letters of support. These nominating materials are reviewed by members of the National Museum and Library Services Board, a presidentially appointed policy advisory board of IMLS. Based on their recommendations, the IMLS Director selects the final winners."

For more information please see the full press release.

Library of Congress Transitions to Online-Only Cataloging Publications

June 21, 2013 — "The Library of Congress (LC) announces a transition to online-only publication of its cataloging documentation. As titles that are in production are released, LC will cease printing new editions of its subject headings and classification schedules, and other cataloging publications. LC will instead provide free downloadable PDFs of these titles. For users desiring enhanced functionality, LC's two web-based subscription services, Cataloger's Desktop and Classification Web, will continue as products from the Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS)."

"In 2012, LC conducted an extensive study on the impact and opportunities of changes in the bibliographic framework and the technological environment on the future distribution of its cataloging data and products. LC's transition from print to online-only for cataloging documentation is a response to a steadily declining customer base for print and the availability of alternatives made possible by advances in technology. This shift will enable the Library to achieve a more sustainable financial model and better serve its mission in the years ahead."

"Beginning July 1, 2013, print publications that are currently sold through CDS will become available as free, downloadable PDFs through LC's Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate website at http://www.loc.gov/aba/. Because all of the content cannot be made available simultaneously, the retrospective titles will be phased in as PDFs."

For more information please see the full announcement.

ASERL and WRLC Create Scholars Trust

Vast Archive and Enhanced Delivery Serves Libraries in Southeast & Mid-Atlantic States

June 21, 2013 — "The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) and the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC) have signed an agreement to create "Scholars Trust." The Trust will combine the contents of their respective shared print journal collections under a single retention and access agreement. As a result, the combined title list exceeds 8,000 journal titles and more than 300,000 volumes, making Scholars Trust one of the largest shared print journal repositories in the United States. In conjunction with the formation of Scholars Trust, WRLC and ASERL libraries have agreed to extend reciprocal priority Inter-Library Loan (ILL) services across the group...."

"...The Scholars Trust agreement requires the archived materials to be held until at least December 31, 2035, possibly longer. The materials archived by WRLC are housed in a central facility in suburban Maryland. The materials being archived by ASERL members are held at various locations across the Southeast. A large majority of the print archive contents is readily available online from many sources, so the need to access the archived items is expected to be quite low."

"'Today's library users expect access to content anytime and anywhere,' noted John Burger, ASERL's Executive Director. 'The libraries in ASERL and WRLC are continually expanding ways to deliver content to users quickly and easily. Scholars Trust is a fail-safe means of providing content when a researcher needs an original printed journal – an 'artifact,' if you will – should the digital surrogate be somehow insufficient for their needs, or not be available.'"

For more information please see the full press release.

NISO to Develop Standards and Recommended Practices for Altmetrics

Grant from Sloan Foundation will fund community-informed effort to standardize collection and use of alternative metrics measuring research impact

June 20, 2013 — "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces a new two-phase project to study, propose, and develop community-based standards or recommended practices in the field of alternative metrics. Assessment of scholarship is a critical component of the research process, impacting everything from which projects get funded to who gains promotion and tenure to which publications gain prominence. Since Eugene Garfield's pioneering work in the 1960s, much of the work on research assessment has been based upon citations, a valuable measure but one that has failed to keep pace with online reader behavior, network interactions with content, social media, and online content management. Exemplified by innovative new platforms like ImpactStory, a new movement is growing to develop more robust alternative metrics – called altmetrics – that complement traditional citation metrics. NISO will first hold several in-person and virtual meetings to identify critical areas where altmetrics standards or recommended practices are needed and then convene a working group to develop consensus standards and/or recommended practices. The project is funded through a $207,500 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation...."

"...The first phase of the project will gather two groups of invited experts in altmetrics research, traditional publishing, bibliometrics, and faculty assessment for in-person discussions with the goal of identifying key altmetrics issues and those that can best be addressed through standards or recommended practices. This input will form the basis of two virtual meetings open to the public to further refine and prioritize the issues. Additional community input will be sought through an array of electronic and social mechanisms and events coordinated with major community conferences. A report summarizing this input will identify the specific areas where NISO should develop standards or recommended practices, which will be undertaken by a working group convened in phase two. The complete project from initial meetings to publication of standards is expected to take two years. Information about the meetings and other methods for participation will be announced on the NISO website (www.niso.org) and in the monthly Newsline e-newsletter (www.niso.org/publications/newsline/)."

For more information please see the full press release.

Inaugural Class of National Digital Stewardship Residents Selected

June 19, 2013 — "The Library of Congress, in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, has selected 10 candidates for the inaugural class of the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program. The nine-month program begins in September 2013."

"The NDSR program offers recent master's program graduates in specialized fields – library science, information science, museum studies, archival studies and related technology – the opportunity to gain valuable professional experience in digital preservation. Residents will attend an intensive two-week digital stewardship workshop this fall at the Library of Congress. They will then work on a specialized project at one of 10 host institutions in the Washington, D.C. area, including the Library of Congress. These projects will allow them to acquire hands-on knowledge and skills regarding collection, selection, management, long-term preservation and accessibility of digital assets."

"The residents...were selected by an expert committee of Library of Congress and Institute of Museum and Library Services staff, with commentary from each host institution."

For a full list of selected residents and more information please see the full press release.

21 New Preservation Vocabularies available at id.loc.gov

June 19, 2013 announcement from Tracy Meehleib, Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress — "The Library of Congress and PREMIS Editorial Committee has made available 21 new value vocabularies to be used with preservation metadata in LC's Linked Data Service for Authorities and Vocabularies (http://id.loc.gov/). Each vocabulary reflects a controlled list of values for semantic units specified in the PREMIS Data Dictionary version 2.2. Previously only 3 preservation vocabularies were available from the service, so they now cover a much wider range of PREMIS semantic units. The PREMIS Editorial Committee recently announced the publication of a revised PREMIS OWL ontology based on PREMIS version 2.2 which makes use of the 24 value vocabularies available in http://id.loc.gov."

"All of these preservation vocabularies are available at: http://id.loc.gov/preservationdescriptions/."

Inaugural Class of National Digital Stewardship Residents Selected

"The residents listed below were selected by an expert committee of Library of Congress and Institute of Museum and Library Services staff, with commentary from each host institution."

For more information, including the list of selected candidates, please see the full press release.

Path breaking partnership helps national library preserve thousands of e-journals for future generations

June 19, 2013 — "The British Library and digital preservation specialist Portico announced today that they will be working together to ensure that thousands of electronic journal titles will be collected, preserved and made available to current and future generations of researchers."

"The partnership will help the British Library – along with five other legal deposit libraries – to meet regulations that recently became law in the United Kingdom and that extend the practice of legal deposit from traditional print publications to non-print publications such as e-journals, blogs and websites in the UK web domain."

"Portico will utilize its established workflow and processes to create standardized and uniform journal content that can be exported to the British Library. They have started with 1,500 journals from three publishers that are already preserving content with Portico. As necessary, Portico will develop new tools for processing additional publisher content."

"The British Library and Portico began their work together through a pilot project in 2012. The two organizations developed their systems as part of the pilot and were thus able to 'turn on' automatic delivery of content to the British Library as soon as legislation passed."

For more information please see the full press release.

VIVO to Join DuraSpace Organization as Incubated Project

June 19, 2013 — "The DuraSpace organization and the VIVO Project are pleased to announce that after initial fundraising and planning, VIVO is entering an incubation period with DuraSpace. The incubation process will focus on assisting VIVO in becoming a sustainable, community-driven project; on continuing to develop new releases of the VIVO software and ontology; and on expanding the VIVO community beyond the over 100 organizations currently engaged with the project."

"VIVO is an open source semantic web application for integrating and sharing information about researchers and their activities and outputs at a single institution, while supporting discovery of related work and expertise across a distributed network of linked data profiles. VIVO is fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature and enables collaboration across traditional boundaries of geography, organizational structure, and type. Through the discovery of researchers and their common interests, expertise, and achievements, VIVO enables the identification of collaborative teams to work across academic research, clinical, and applied domains."

For more information please see the full press release.

Academics earn street cred with TED Talks but no points from peers, IU research shows

June 18, 2013 — "TED Talks, the most popular conference and events website in the world with over 1 billion informational videos viewed, provides academics with increased popular exposure but does nothing to boost citations of their work by peers, new research led by Indiana University has found."

"In the comprehensive study of over 1,200 TED Talks videos and their presenters, lead author Cassidy R. Sugimoto, an assistant professor in IU Bloomington's Department of Information and Library Science http://ils.indiana.edu/, and a team of researchers from Great Britain and Canada, also looked at the demographic make-up of TED Talks presenters – only 21 percent were academics, and of those only about one-quarter were women – and the relationship between a presenter's credentials and a video's popularity."

"Data gathered from the TED website http://www.ted.com/talks and from YouTube also found that male-authored videos on YouTube were more popular and more liked than those authored by women -- possibly because research has shown that females are less likely to comment on YouTube than males -- and that videos by academics were commented upon more often than those presented by non-academics. While YouTube videos by male presenters were more viewed than those by women, this was not true of the TED website."

For more information please see the full press release.

ALA Task Force releases digital literacy recommendations

June 18, 2013 — "The American Library Association's (ALA) Digital Literacy Task Force recently released its recommendations to advance and sustain library engagement in digital literacy initiatives nationwide. These conclusions and recommendations include comments from several public programs held at ALA conferences, as well as two online virtual public programs and task force meetings that included observers from different stakeholder groups."

"Libraries of all types – school, academic and public – play a vital role in ensuring all people have the skills and abilities to succeed in the Digital Age. The Task Force's recommendations build on the January 2013 Task Force report 'Digital Literacy, Libraries, and Public Policy' and constitute a call to action on the part of the ALA, library education programs, front-line librarians, various funding bodies and the diverse stakeholders who use and support library services."

"The Task Force recommends that ALA have a member body that focuses on digital literacy and libraries. This group should consist of members with broad ALA representation. It would provide library leadership in digital literacy initiatives across and beyond the library community and track progress against these recommendations."

For more information please see the full press release.

2013 Digital Publishing Creative Ideas Contest: Open Call

June 11, 2013 — "Frankfurt Academy and the Goethe-Unibator announce the 2013 Digital Publishing Creative Ideas Contest. We are seeking creative ideas in the area of Digital Publishing."

"There is tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs to take advantage of the transformations taking place in the publishing industry. Value propositions in publishing are changing as well as new technological possibilities. The need to find ways to capture value from content is driving change. Capturing value is what innovation is all about."

"The Call for the 2013 Digital Publishing Creative Ideas is now open...Deadline: 15th August 2013."

For more information please see the full press release.

OCLC completes major technical upgrade of core WorldCat infrastructure

June 10, 2013 — "On June 6, OCLC completed the development work to convert the underlying structure for its WorldCat database to Apache HBase, a distributed platform in use by many global information providers, including Facebook, Adobe and Salesforce.com. This marks the conclusion of a significant technical update to the WorldCat database of more than 300 million library records and more than 2 billion library holdings that will offer new options for data analysis and faster service to libraries and their users."

"The Apache Hadoop software collection is a framework that allows for the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of computers. HBase is a top-level Apache Software Foundation project built on Hadoop that provides major data handling improvements for these very large datasets. OCLC WorldShare applications for library management, resource sharing, metadata and discovery rely on access to a variety of large and growing datasets, including the WorldCat database."

For more information please see the full press release.

Survey shows that social media has graduated to academia

June 7, 2013 — "A new survey of colleges across Scotland shows that social media, and particularly YouTube, has firmly entered the learning environment as teaching and learning tools, with its use growing significantly year on year."

"In the 2012 ETNA (Enhanced Training Needs Analysis) survey, carried out by the Jisc Regional Support Centre (RSC) in Scotland and launched today at their annual conference in Edinburgh, nearly three quarters of academics in further education agree that social media tools enhance the quality of the learning experience. YouTube is by far the most popular tool, while Facebook and particularly Twitter, lag well behind. However, the survey also identifies a strong need for staff training in the use of social media."

"The 2012 ETNA survey is the fifth of its kind in Scotland, with ETNA surveys having been carried out for more than a decade across Scottish colleges, analysing technology in further education and able to show trends over time. In 2012, 1,700 staff took part, including more than 700 academics across 40 of the 43 colleges. Together with responses from admin and support staff, managers, learning resource staff, learning technologists, and technical and network staff, it provides a comprehensive picture of technology in the learning landscape."

For more information please see the full press release.

IMLS and WebJunction Convening Examines Continuing Education for Library Professionals

June 6, 2013 — "Today the Institute of Museum and Library Services and WebJunction hosted a convening of fifteen library continuing education influencers in Arlington, Virginia, including representatives of state libraries, library associations, non-profit providers of library continuing education, and schools of library and information science."

"They gathered to discuss the state of continuing education for library staff in the United States and to seek sustainable solutions for unmet needs within the library community. The goal of the meeting was to identify opportunities – through new partnerships, projects, and action steps – to move libraries forward and grow library leadership...."

"...IMLS will post a report from the convening at imls.gov in the coming months."

For more information please see the full press release.

Bodleian Libraries secure Heritage Lottery Fund support to develop archivists of the future

June 4, 2013 — "The Bodleian Libraries have received initial support for a £280,000 bid from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for the Developing the next generation archivist project, part of the Skills for the Future programme. The support will part-fund a programme to allow the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries to provide six trainee archivists with the skills required to become professional digital archivists. The Bodleian Libraries will be seeking additional support to cover the remaining costs of the project."

"The funding will support a training program that will run between 2014 and 2019, training six archivists over this period. Bodleian Libraries will now work with the Heritage Lottery Fund to progress its plans to develop the project...."

"...This project is meant to open the door to applicants who might not have previously considered a career in archives, and it is hoped that the project will attract a wide range of applicants. One of the goals of the project is to encourage diversity in the workforce for the future, and it particularly encourages individuals with backgrounds in Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine to consider a career in archives."

For more information please see the full press release.

Europeana Releases First Free iPad App

June 4, 2013 — "Europeana, Europe's digital library, museum and archive, has launched its first free iPad app. 'Europeana Open Culture' introduces the public to hand-picked and beautiful collections from some of Europe's top institutions, and allows people to explore, share and comment on them."

"Designed by Glimworm IT during a Europeana hackathon, the app provides an easy introduction to Europe's glorious art treasury through five specially curated themes: Maps and Plans, Treasures of Art, Treasures of the Past, Treasures of Nature and Images of the Past."

"For more information on how the app works, go to http://muse-opensource.org/. Those interested in the code can check the GitHub repository and provide their feedback to api@europeana.eu."

"Download the app from iTunes and start your cultural treasure hunt!"

For more information please see the full press release.

NISO Publishes Recommended Practice and Technical Report on Improving OpenURLs Through Analytics

June 3, 2013 — "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the publication of a new recommended practice, Improving OpenURLs Through Analytics (IOTA): Recommendations for Link Resolver Providers (NISO RP-21-2013). These recommendations are the result of a three-year study performed by the NISO IOTA Working Group in which millions of OpenURLs were analyzed and a Completeness Index was developed as a means of quantifying OpenURL quality. By applying this Completeness Index to their OpenURL data and following the recommendations, providers of link resolvers can monitor the quality of their OpenURLs and work with content providers to improve the provided metadata-ultimately resulting in a higher success rate for end users. The project is summarized in a technical report, IOTA Working Group Summary of Activities and Outcomes (NISO TR-05-2013), which was published along with the recommended practice."

"'OpenURLs are context-sensitive URLs widely used by publishers and libraries to allow end users to connect to the full-text of e-resources discovered during a search,' explains Aron Wolf, Data Program Analyst with Serials Solutions and member of the IOTA Working Group. 'To ensure that the user accesses the most appropriate copy of a resource (one that is preferably free to the user due to a subscription through the user's library), the OpenURL link connects to a link resolver knowledgebase. The metadata embedded within the OpenURL is compared through the link resolver with what is held in or licensed through the library and the end user is then presented with the available full-text access options. At a typical academic library, thousands of OpenURL requests are initiated by patrons each week. The problem is that too often these links do not work as expected because the metadata in the OpenURL is incorrect or incomplete, leaving users unable to access the resources they need.'"

"'Through our analysis, the IOTA Working Group found that there was a pattern to the failures in OpenURLs,' states Adam Chandler, Electronic Resources User Experience Librarian at Cornell University Library and Chair of the IOTA Working Group. 'The Completeness Index was developed as a method of predicting the success of OpenURLs from a given provider by examining the data elements that provider includes in the OpenURLs from its site. This metric can serve as a tool to help determine which content providers are more likely to cause linking problems due to missing data elements in their OpenURLs and can identify exactly what the problems are. The Recommended Practice explains how to implement the measures so that problems can be clearly identified and steps taken with the content providers to improve the quality of the metadata.'..."

"...The IOTA Recommended Practice and Technical Report are both available for free download from the IOTA Working Group's page on the NISO website at: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/openurlquality."

For more information please see the full press release.

China boosts top quality science publications by 35% in 2012

May 29, 2013 — "Authors based in China contributed 8.5% of all research papers published in Nature branded journals in 2012, up 35% on 2011 figures. This is according to the Nature Publishing Index 2012 (NPI) China, published today as a supplement to Nature. Authors from institutions in China contributed 303 papers published in Nature branded journals in 2012, up from 7.0% (225) in 2011 and 5.3% (152) in 2010. In 2000, just six articles published in Nature branded journals had co-authors from institutions in China."

"The data released in the NPI adds to evidence that China is rapidly boosting its quality research output, and becoming a global leader in scientific publishing and scientific research. A global analysis will be released in June 2013, and China is expected to have made gains in 2012 against nations that traditionally lead in scientific outputs."

"The top two institutions remain stable from 2011 to 2012: the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) leads, followed by the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) complete the top five. In sixth place, BGI was a strong performer in 2012, up from tenth in 2011. An analysis in the NPI indicates that SJTU and Zhejiang University (seventh in 2012, up from 11th in 2011) are rapidly growing their high quality research output. The NPI also provides indicators that China, traditionally strong in physical sciences, is making gains in high quality life sciences research."

For more information please see the full press release.

CrossRef's FundRef launches: Publishers and funders track scholarly output

May 28, 2013 — "FundRef, the funder identification service from CrossRef, is now available for publishers to contribute funding data and for retrieval of that information. FundRef is the result of collaboration between funding agencies and publishers that correlates grants and other funding with the scholarly output of that support."

"Publishers participating in FundRef add funding data to the bibliographic metadata they already provide to CrossRef for reference linking. FundRef data includes the name of the funder and a grant or award number. Manuscript tracking systems can incorporate a taxonomy of 4000 global funder names, which includes alternate names, aliases, and abbreviations enabling authors to choose from a standard list of funding names. Then the tagged funding data will travel through publishers' production systems to be stored at CrossRef...."

"...FundRef helps researchers comply with funder requirements to report the results of financial support they have received. The CrossMark service enables publishers to display FundRef data in a standardized way. FundRef data is also freely available to funding organizations, publishers, libraries, research institutions, scholars, authors, and the public through CrossRef's search services, application programming interfaces (APIs), XML queries, and data distribution channels. A beta version of FundRef Search allows anyone to search the data from the publishers and funders that participated in the pilot for funder names and abbreviations: http://search.crossref.org/fundref. In addition, CrossRef Metadata Search (http://search.crossref.org) allows search by grant number."

For more information please see the full press release.

New nationwide collaboration aims to connect the arts and military personnel

May 21, 2013 Announcement from Cindy Dashnaw for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library — "The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is helping to announce the launch of Blue Star Museums for 2013, a collaboration of the National Endowment for the Arts, Blue Star Families, the Department of Defense, and more than 1,800 museums across America to offer free admission to all active duty military personnel and their families from Memorial Day through Labor Day 2013."

"On Nov. 11, 2013, VonnegutFest will include a Veterans Reclaim Armistice Day panel featuring veterans who are writers, artists, journalists and more, as well as a writing workshop presented by the Indiana Writers Center. And a number of the Library's IDADA First Friday events feature military artists and writers."

"Leadership support for Blue Star Museums has been provided by MetLife Foundation through Blue Star Families. The complete list of participating museums is available at http://www.arts.gov/bluestarmuseums."

For more information please see contact Cindy Dashnaw, cdashnaw@bohlsengroup.com.