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March/April 2010

HumBox

Contributed by:
Alison Dickens
Assistant Director (HE Programmes)
Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies
School of Humanities
University of Southampton Southampton, United Kingdom
<A.M.Dickens@soton.ac.uk>

The HumBox, an online space for the sharing of teaching and learning resources in the humanities was launched for free access by the world wide community, at the end of February.

The site uses the best principles of social networking sites to enable teachers in the humanities to showcase their teaching resources by publishing them on the web and sharing them with other practitioners. The HumBox currently has more than 1000 resources that have been contributed by 15 different Higher Education (HE) institutions in the UK, and has a growing user-community who review and comment on content; remix, edit and re-share resources, and use the site as a way to demonstrate their excellence in teaching and learning both through the resources they upload and the personal profile page they can create within the HumBox.

The HumBox is a dynamic site that lets users see who is reviewing and downloading their resources; lets them bookmark 'favourites', and make collections of themed or related materials. Each resource and collection has a unique URL to which students and other users can be directed. The HumBox also offers advice on key issues related to the publication of open content on the site, including advice on intellectual property rights (IPR) and copyright; on reviewing open educational resources; on tagging, and advice on good practice in attribution.

The HumBox is being developed as part of the HumBox project, funded under the JISC/HEA UK Open Educational Content initiative. The HumBox Project is a collaboration between four Higher Education Academy Subject Centres (English; History; Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies; and Philosophical and Religious Studies) along with eleven project partners in Humanities departments around the UK. The HumBox webspace was developed by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. More information on the HumBox project can be found on the website of the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. For more information about the HumBox, contact <llas@soton.ac.uk>.

Join the HumBox and showcase your excellence in teaching and learning to the world!

CACAO Project Overview

Contributed by:
Bosca Alessio
R&D Software Engineer
CELI s.r.l.
Turin, Italy
<alessio.bosca@celi.it>

CACAO (Cross-language Access to Catalogues And On-line libraries) is a European Union (EU) project, funded under the eContentplus program, that proposes an innovative approach for accessing, understanding and navigating multilingual textual contents in digital libraries and OPACs. CACAO offers a solution for cross-lingual and cross-border access to the contents of classical and digital libraries, enabling European users to find digital content irrespectively of their language.

By coupling NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques with available information retrieval systems the project aims at the delivery of a non-intrusive infrastructure to be integrated with current OPAC and digital libraries, crossing the chasm between sound innovation and adoption by library institutions for real life purposes. The result of such integration allows the user to express queries in his/her own language and retrieve volumes and documents in any of the available languages.

The proposed solution is based on the assumptions that users increasingly look at library contents using free keyword queries rather than more traditional library-oriented access (e.g., via Subject Heading). Thus, the adopted approach consists of translating the query into all the languages covered by the library/collection. Query translation is performed by means of bilingual dictionaries and features multi-word and named entities recognition, as well as state of the art techniques for query expansion and translations disambiguation.

CACAO adopts a linguistic agnostic approach: a set of core modules contain the logic of the system and focus on the management of the information harvested from libraries (via the OAI-PMH protocol) while the resources needed for supporting specific languages, as dictionaries, named entity recognizers, thesauri or lemmatizers, are included via external Web Services, thus allowing for an easy integration of new languages. CACAO infrastructure consists of a suite of web services exposing the system functionalities and includes a set of administration pages for configuring the different modules, monitoring exposed services and triggering off-line activities; graphical user interfaces are built on the top of these services and feature faceted navigation. A prototype of the system can be viewed online at the official project website: <http://www.cacaoproject.eu>.

The CACAO project ended in December 2009, but the the expertize capitalized during the project is going to be reinvested into Cross-Library Services (http://www.cross-library.com), a start-up company located in the region of Trento, Italy.

Digital Classicist Summer Seminar Series 2010

Contributed by:
Simon Mahony
Teaching Fellow
UCL Centre for Digital Humanities
University College London
London, United Kingdom
<s.mahony@ucl.ac.uk>

This Summer the Digital Classicist will once more be running a series of seminars at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, with additional support from the British Library. The focus will be on the subject of research into the ancient world that has an innovative digital component. We are especially interested in work that demonstrates interdisciplinarity or work on the intersections between Ancient History, Classics or Archaeology and a digital, technical or practice-based discipline.

For those not familiar with what we do, the Digital Classicist, set up in 2004, is a network, a community of users that share a common interest. We have a website, a wiki and have joined our blog with the Stoa Consortium. As well as sharing information about ourselves and our own work, members collaboratively compile, review and comment upon articles on digital projects, tools, and research questions of particular relevance to the ancient world. They also list guides to practice, introduce the discussion forum and, most importantly, list events. It is these events that more than anything else define the Digital Classicist community by providing a showcase for our members' research and a venue for discussion, introductions and inspiration for new collaborative relationships and projects.

Classicists belong to one of the most interdisciplinary and diverse disciplines in the academy. Classics departments are already filled with experts on literature, history, archaeology, ethnography, mythology, religion, philosophy, palaeography, linguistics, art, heritage and reception. These are scholars who are not only aware of the importance of applying the expertise of multiple disciplines to the complex problem of studying an ancient culture, but also of the importance of collaboration with academics from different backgrounds and with different skills.

The most striking and successful aspect of Digital Classics is its sense of community and collaboration. Digital Classicists do not work in isolation; they develop projects in tandem with colleagues in other humanities disciplines or with experts in technical fields: engineers, computer scientists and civil engineers. They collect data, conduct research, develop tools and resources, and importantly make them available electronically, often under free and open licenses, for reference and for re-use by scholars, students and non-specialists alike.

In previous years collected papers from these seminars (and also our conference panels) have been published in a special issue of an online journal (2006), edited as a printed volume (2007), and released as audio podcasts (2008-9).

The forthcoming Digital Classicist seminar series will be run on Friday afternoons 16:30 to 18:00 from June to mid-August. The programme will be circulated via various mailing lists and published on our website where you can also find details of the previous series together with an RSS feed.

All are welcome.

The Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Partnership

Contributed by:
Christy Henshaw
Digitisation Project Manager
Wellcome Library
London, United Kingdom
<c.henshaw@wellcome.ac.uk>

The Wellcome Library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and King's College London, have formed a partnership to create a free searchable and scalable online catalogue of 500 chiefly medical manuscript books written in Arabic and preserved in the Wellcome Library. Another aim of this joint project is to create a freely available cataloguing tool, which will facilitate remote cataloguing and access to the associated digitized images as well as exchange of metadata.

The project is partly funded by the Wellcome Trust and partly by a grant from the JISC's Islamic Studies Programme. The project is expected to be completed by February 2011.

The cataloguing tool is based on the methodology designed by N. Serikoff to catalogue the Haddad collection of Arabic manuscripts preserved in the Wellcome Library. It has been made a provision for the cataloguing tool in the future to be adaptable to create image-linked descriptions of the manuscript books written in other Asian languages. The data will be stored in the ENRICH TEI metadata schema. The key requirements for the technical development are as follows:

Data repository - ingest and storage of metadata, use of the TEI P5 / ENRICH schema, UNICODE, and data export to other standards.

creation of TEI P5 / ENRICH based XML schema
creation of a conversion programme from TEI P4 MASTER and ArabTeX to the new schema
store text as UNICODE
identify non-UNICODE characters specific to medieval Arabic manuscripts and manage their input and display
investigate problems/issues related to the storage, input and display of bi-directional UNICODE text
create export facilities to the Wellcome Library's cataloguing system (MARC21).

Input system - this will be the web-based user interface for administration, data input and QA.

design and build a web-based interface with template for data entry
develop a workflow for data input
create a facility to input Arabic characters (including non-standard characters) via a virtual keyboard and/or a transliteration scheme.

Delivery - the cataloguing data, which reflect all the aspects of a medieval hand-written book as a physical and historic object and as an intellectual repository will be combined with high quality cover-to-cover images of each manuscript. These freely available digital objects can be embedded in teaching materials, presentations and publications, images can be reused and repurposed under the Creative Commons Licence. This will enable users anywhere in the world to copy, distribute, display, and make derivative works for non-commercial use based on these images.

The website will be developed and hosted by the Bibliotheca Alexandria, while the Wellcome Library provides the cataloguing expertise and methodology, the digital images, and overall project management. King's College London (Centre for Computing in the Humanities) will manage the technical requirements specifications for the cataloguing tool, and create the TEI metadata template and mappings.

For more information, view our project website.

Frontiers of Science - Science Fact in a Comic Strip

Contributed by:
Ross Coleman
Director, Sydney eScholarship
University of Sydney Library
Sydney, Australia
<r.coleman@sydney.edu.au>

The University of Sydney Library recently announced the launch of the Frontiers of Science website.

Forty-nine years earlier, in 1961, a brand new kind of comic was launched in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald. More science fact than science fiction, and presented in dramatic black and white imagery, Frontiers of Science was a true life adventure of the story behind the amazing scientific breakthroughs of the day. Between 1961 and 1982 the syndicated comic strip appeared daily in over 600 newspapers worldwide.

Frontiers was significant in communicating and popularising science in a way that ensured the widest contemporary audience of the day was informed about, and understood, scientific concepts, theories, processes, discoveries and developments. It used one of the popular media of the day — newspaper comic strips.

Not only informative it was also quirky in its appeal to science and the public imagination — be it the space race, asteroids or medicine. It was published in a period where the popular perception was of science and technology providing solutions to the challenges of the mid-twentieth century.

The digitisation of these strips was, then, both an opportunity to re-discover and celebrate these forgotten works, and a case study in science communication.

Frontiers was co-written and produced by Professor Stuart Butler from the School of Physics at Sydney and journalist and film-maker Bob Raymond. The early art work in the series was by Andrea Bresciani, continued later by David Emersen.

In total 939 weekly episodes or "pulls" were created, each around a particular topic. Each pull had five strips, one for each weekday. The strips were initially published in the Sydney and within a few years the series was syndicated internationally – to the LA Times for syndication throughout the USA and Canada, and to Editors Press in New York for syndication and translation for Europe, South America and Asia. The Press Feature Service handled syndication in the UK. Writing and artwork continued to be managed by Stuart Butler and Bob Raymond in Sydney.

Publisher pulls and some of the original art work is located and archived in the Rare Books and Special Collections Library in Fisher Library at the University of Sydney. Digitisation and web site developed in association with Sydney eScholarship at the University Library. Digitisation was funded by the Science Foundation for Physics at the University of Sydney

Details about the technologies enabling the project can be found on the website, and includes image and metadata storage in DSpace and rendering through XTF (eXtensible Text Framework) for browsing and searching.

I N T H E N E W S

March/April 2010

University of Chicago Press Joins Current Scholarship Program

March 12, 2010 — "The University of Chicago Press and JSTOR announced today that they will join forces in the Current Scholarship Program. Scheduled to launch early next year, the program will bring scholarly content from leading not-for-profit publishers to a single integrated platform, making its use more innovative, efficient, and affordable for faculty, students, librarians and publishers...."

"...First announced last August, the Current Scholarship Program addresses some of the biggest challenges and inefficiencies in scholarly communications today. For scholars and educators, the program offers an improved online work environment that combines new content with complete journal backfiles. For librarians, the collaboration brings leading journals from multiple publishers together under one roof, allowing direct licensing through JSTOR."

"For more information about the Current Scholarship Program, see http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/programs/currentScholarship.jsp."

For more information, please see the full press release.

LYRASIS Receives $450,000 from NEH to Provide Regional Preservation Field Services

March 11, 2010 — "LYRASIS receives $450,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support a two-year project to provide preservation field services to libraries, archives, and historical organizations in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions of the US."

"With the support of the NEH and other organizations since 1984, LYRASIS Preservation Services has served as an effective agent for improving an institution's ability to preserve its collections. At the heart of LYRASIS Preservation Services is an extensive education and training program which increases preservation knowledge and skills, provides support for effective preservation planning and management, and improves disaster preparedness and recovery in cultural heritage organizations...."

"...Created in April, 2009 by the merger of PALINET and SOLINET and joined shortly thereafter by NELINET, LYRASIS is the nation's largest regional membership organization serving libraries and information professionals."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Free, practical guidance for e-resource practitioners from UKSG

March 8, 2010 — "UKSG, the organization that connects the information community, has today announced the latest chapters to be added to The E-Resources Management Handbook, its open access guide to the practical aspects of working with e-resources. The Handbook comprises 27 chapters on topics such as licensing, archiving, marketing and ERM systems; recent chapters include:

Peer review, by Fytton Rowland of Loughborough University, which outlines the methodology of peer review of scholarly publications, with some coverage of its history and purposes
A beginner's guide to working with vendors, by Joseph Thomas of East Carolina University, which considers the varieties of library-vendor relationships, issues with communication, product knowledge, licensing and negotiating, ongoing service responsibilities and ethics
E-resource management and the Semantic Web, by George Macgregor of Liverpool John Moores University, which provides an introduction to some essential Semantic Web concepts and the resource description framework (RDF) in the context of e-resource discovery
How to survive as a new serialist, by Glenda Griffin of Sam Houston State University, which provides information on organizations, associations, online and print resources, discussion lists and training events, and practical suggestions on getting started
COUNTER: current developments and future plans, by Peter Shepherd of COUNTER, which reports on the latest Codes of Practice to govern the recording and exchange of online usage data
Cancellation workflow, by Trina Holloway of Georgia State University, which posits practical procedures for reviewing library collections and selecting titles for cancellation."

"The Handbook is a completely free resource developed by UKSG to fulfill its charitable / educational charter."

For more information, please see the full announcement.

Resource Description and Access in Cataloger's Desktop

March 4, 2010 — "The Library of Congress and the Co-Publishers for RDA (Resource Description and Access) are pleased to announce that Cataloger's Desktop subscribers will be able to access the RDA Toolkit (due in June 2010) via Cataloger's Desktop."

"Cataloger's Desktop is the Library of Congress's integrated, online documentation system for cataloging and metadata resources. RDA Toolkit is a browser-based, online collection of cataloging-related documents and resources, including RDA (Resource Description and Access). Used together and available 24-7, Cataloger's Desktop and RDA will represent the current state of the art in cataloging and metadata documentation...."

"...The RDA Toolkit is published by the co-publishers for RDA, which includes the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association and Facet Publishing, the publishing arm of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP)."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Ready to Go: DSpace 1.6 is Now Available

March 3, 2010 — "...the DuraSpace organization announced the long-awaited release of DSpace 1.6, the popular turn-key open source application for managing and providing access to digital content used to create more than 800 repository instances worldwide. The release of DSpace 1.6 was led by Stuart Lewis, community release manager and IT Innovations analyst and developer at the University of Auckland Library. Lewis worked closely with DSpace developers, community members and DuraSpace staff to make the best possible version of DSpace 1.6 publicly available."

"Community-requested features in the new release include an enhanced statistics package which provides more information about how your repository is being used, an embargo facility so items can be kept dark for a period of time, and a batch metadata editing tool which can be used to change, add, find/replace metadata as well as facilitate mass moves, re-order values or add new items in bulk. And there's more, such as authority control which contains an integration with the Sherpa Romeo Service for publisher names, as well as the Library of Congress Nameservice...."

"...DSpace (http://Dspace.org) is an out-of-the-box open source repository application for delivering digital content to end-users. Globally it is the most widely used open source repository software for institutional repositories and open access repositories."

For more information and a list of other features, please see the full press release.

IMLS and SGS Issue Report on the Preservation of World Cultural Heritage

March 2, 2010 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Salzburg Global Seminar announce release of the report, "Connecting to the World's Collections: Making the Case for Conservation and Preservation of Our Cultural Heritage" based on a seminar held in Salzburg, Austria, October 28-November 1, 2009. The seminar, part of the IMLS's multi-year initiative on collections care, Connecting to Collections: A Call to Action, explored global themes related to conservation and preservation, including international needs, issues, perspectives, and accomplishments."

"The report includes practical recommendations to ensure optimal collections conservation worldwide and the Salzburg Declaration on the Conservation and Preservation of Cultural, which was passed by 60 participants hailing from 32 countries. The session combined presentations by leading experts in conservation and preservation throughout the world with small working groups tasked to make recommendations for future action in key areas, including emergency preparedness, education and training, public awareness, new preservation approaches, and assessment and planning. To access these resources, click here: http://www.salzburgglobal.org/2009/News.cfm?IDMedia=52858."

For more information, please see the full press release.

PLoS Launches Fast PDF Access with Pubget

March 2, 2010 — "Today, PLoS released Pubget links across its journal sites. Now, when users are browsing thousands of reference citations on PLoS journals they will be able to get to the full text article faster than ever before."

"Specifically, when readers encounter citations to articles as recorded by CrossRef (which are accessed via the 'CrossRef' link in the 'Cited in' section of any article's Metrics tab), a PDF icon will also appear if it is freely available via Pubget. Clicking on the icon will take you directly to the PDF...."

"...In this first phase, PLoS is linking to the free PDFs on Pubget. For those citations without a freely available PDF you have two options. The CrossRef link will take you to the publisher's site, where you can see if you have access. Or, if you work for any of the 200+ institutions in Pubget's network (for example MIT, and UCSF), you can use the citation to get the subscription PDFs right away on Pubget.com. If you want to add your institution to the Pubget network, just tell your library — Pubget is free."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Future of reference now showing at upcoming RUSA preconference

March 2, 2010 — "Reference and user services professionals won't want to miss the upcoming workshop, 'Reference Evolution: Envisioning the Future, Remembering the Past' which will be hosted by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) as a part of ALA's 2010 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C."

"The workshop, which is presented by RUSA's Machine Assisted Reference Section (MARS) and Reference Services Section (RSS), is open to all library professionals involved or interested in reference and user services at all types of libraries. The event is an opportunity to participate in a lively discussion of the current state of the profession, to see beyond the hype and identify where things are actually headed. Speakers will offer a 'state of the union' on the profession, acknowledging traditional reference tools and skills that remain relevant, and projecting how newer technologies will better serve patrons."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Are you UpNext? Share your thoughts on the Future of Museums and Libraries Wiki

February 24, 2010 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) invites you to help invent the future of museums and libraries through your participation in UpNext: The Future of Museums and Libraries Wiki. IMLS's first-ever wiki is a platform where individuals inside and outside of museums, libraries, and related fields can discuss, dissect, expand, and inform the issues outlined in the Future of Museums and Libraries: A Discussion Guide. IMLS will use the knowledge shared in the wiki to help shape the agency's strategic plan, research directions, publications, convenings, and grant making."

"In these tough economic times, strategic thinking is a wise investment in the future. Whether you work in, partner with, study, volunteer, visit or are just plain interested in museums and libraries and passionate about how they can continue to thrive in their service to the public-you have an opinion to be shared!"

"The wiki will be an opportunity to share resources, examples of what works, and vexing questions. We hope that it will be a thought provoking five weeks for all participants and provide food for thought for your career, your institution and the choices you face."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Netherlands joining forces to realize the EC Open Access pilot: OpenAIRE

February 24, 2010 — "OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe), a three-year project funded under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, has now taken up its work to implement Open Access on a pan-European scale. This ambitious effort unites 38 partners from 27 European countries. Utrecht University is the liaison for the Netherlands. SURFfoundation will be heading the helpdesk."

"The main goal of OpenAIRE is to support the Open Access pilot, launched by the European Commission in August 2008. This Open Access pilot, which covers about 20% of the FP7 budget, commits researchers from 7 thematic areas (Health, Energy, Environment, Information & Communication Technology, Research Infrastructures, Socio-economic sciences & Humanities and Science in Society) to deposit their research publications in an institutional or disciplinary Open Access repository, to be made available worldwide in full text. OpenAIRE will establish underlying structures for researchers to support them in complying with the pilot through European Helpdesk System, build an OpenAIRE portal and e-Infrastructure for the repository networks and explore scientific data management services together with 5 disciplinary communities."

For more information, please see the full press release.

DRIVER II European repository project concludes successfully

February 22, 2010 — "The two-year EU project DRIVER II — Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research — came to a successful end in mid-February 2010. The Review Committee approved all of the project's products. Check the results of the project at: http://www.driver-repository.eu."

"The purpose of the DRIVER II project was to create a future-proof repository infrastructure enabling open access to research results. The project involved converting the pilot developed in the DRIVER I project into a production environment. Initially, a minimum of 15 countries were to participate in the environment. In the end, 33 countries joined the partnership."

"One of the products of this collaborative European project is the D-NET 1.2 software package, used by the DRIVER search portal to provide access to more than 2,500,000 publications (articles, dissertations, books, lectures, reports and so on) in 249 repositories in 33 countries. The successor to this software, D-NET 2.0, will be suitable for enhanced publications. It currently exists in prototype but is not yet ready for production."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Scholarships for master's degrees in e-government and digital government

February 22, 2010 announcement from the University of Maryland College Park — "The Center for Library & Information Innovation (http://www.liicenter.org) in the iSchool at the University of Maryland College Park, in partnership with the Government Information Online (GIO; http://www.govtinfo.org/) initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago, received a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (http://www.imls.gov) for 20 master's of library science (MLS) e-government and digital government degree scholarships."

"This unique program is for students interested in careers in librarianship and other information sciences as specialists in digital government information and e-government services. The program will prepare graduates to take advantage of the evolving range of e-government services to develop government information services that are not based in physical collections."

"The program is online, and will begin in fall 2010. Applications are currently being accepted. Full tuition scholarships (20 total) are available to highly qualified applicants to the program, and the grant also includes travel funds for students to attend the Fall 2010 and 2011 Federal Depository Library Council meetings held in Washington, DC. Applications are due by May 1, 2010...."

"...More information regarding the program is available at http://www.liicenter.org/libegov. Contact John Bertot (jbertot@umd.edu e-mail; 301-405-3267 phone; jcbertot skype) with any questions."

Executive MLIS Program

February 22, 2010 annoncement from San Jose State University — "The Executive MLIS program at San Jose State University is designed for experienced library managers or supervisors who are interested in earning an ALA-accredited master's degree, allowing them to take the next step in their professional growth. The application deadline for Fall 2010 is March 30."

"The Executive MLIS program complements the professional experience of students, building upon their existing knowledge and preparing them to take on new leadership roles. Students explore the core competencies of librarianship, along with leadership topics, such as program evaluation, human resource management, marketing, and financial management."

"For more information or to apply online, visit the program website, at http://slisweb.sjsu.edu/execmlis/index.htm. Or contact the Executive MLIS Program Coordinator, Dr. Patricia C. Franks, Associate Professor, San Jose School of Library and Information Science, at pfranks@slis.sjsu.edu."

National Science Board Urges Action to Sustain U.S. Leadership in Science and Engineering Research

February 19, 2010 — "At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Board (NSB) released the policy-oriented companion piece to its biennial publication, Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI). SEI 2010 was delivered to the President and to Congress and disseminated broadly on Jan. 15."

"Carrying out its congressional mandate to oversee the collection of a very broad set of quantitative information about the U.S. science, engineering and technology enterprise, the NSB publishes the data and trends every two years in the SEI. When the data reveal trends that raise important policy concerns the NSB believes should be brought to the attention of the President, Congress and the public, it develops and shares a "companion" policy statement to the SEI."

"In its companion piece to SEI 2010, 'Globalization of Science and Engineering Research,' NSB Chairman Steven Beering writes, 'While increased global science and engineering (S&E) research capacity holds great promise for the advancement of scientific knowledge and collaboration in S&E across international borders, the U.S. government must be attentive to developments in S&E capacity around the world and take proactive steps to maintain our nation's competitive strength.'"

For more information, please see the full press release.

Museum Leaders Trade Information, Best Practices at IMLS Convening

February 17, 2010 — "On February 4 and 5, 2010, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) convened the first-ever forum of grantees in the 21st Century Museum Professionals Grants program. Meeting at the Beacon Hotel just a few blocks from the IMLS offices, museum professionals gathered to share and discuss successes and challenges in the implementation of grant-funded projects. Selected grantees provided short presentations on projects that are currently underway and fielded questions in panel style Q and A sessions."

"In addition to valuable peer-to-peer sharing, participants explored ideas and practices on various topics in small break-out groups on learning formats, evaluation techniques, standards and best practices, and Web-based products and resources. The groups also shared experiences with internship and museum studies programs, partnerships, dissemination of project results, and project sustainability after the grant award."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Schottlaender named 2010 Melvil Dewey Medal Award winner

February 10, 2010 — "Brian E. C. Schottlaender, The Audrey Geisel University Librarian at the University of California, San Diego, has been chosen to receive the American Library Association's 2010 Melvil Dewey Medal Award, sponsored by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). This prestigious professional honor, given in recognition of creative leadership of high order, is named after Melvil Dewey, who was actively interested in library management, library training, cataloging and classification and the tools and techniques of librarianship. Schottlaender has excelled in each of these areas."

"The jury for the 2010 Melvil Dewey Medal is pleased to honor Brian E. C. Schottlaender for his many accomplishments during a long and distinguished career in major research libraries. He has excelled as principal investigator in major research projects, as a leader of our profession and as a prolific presenter and author...."

"...The deadline for submissions of applications for the 2011 Melvil Dewey Award is Dec. 1, 2010 Guidelines and application forms are available at http://www.ala.org/ala/awardsgrants/awardsrecords/deweymedal/deweymedal.cfm"

For more information, please see the full press release.

Dutch higher education sector convinced of need for Open Access

February 8, 2010 — "Open Access — meaning free access to scientific and scholarly information — is winning ground, and more and more information is becoming freely accessible to the public. The parties concerned — including publishers — are increasingly accepting Open Access as the norm. At the Open Access seminar organised by SURF in Amsterdam, Prof. Jos Engelen, chairman of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), announced that his organisation would be providing a special Open Access budget of EUR 2.5m...."

"...Leading figures from the world of higher education and research expressed unanimous support for the view that scientific and scholarly publications that have been financed by the taxpayer should be available online free of charge...."

"...One problem for scientists and scholars is the need to publish in prestigious and expensive journals so as to receive a good rating, which is important when applying for grants from organisations such as the NWO. Prof. Engelen said that the NWO would investigate ways of ensuring that publications in Open Access would count more significantly towards the author's 'impact factor'..."

For more information, please see the full press release.

40 Million CrossRef DOIs Preserve the Record of Scholarship

February 5, 2010 — "CrossRef, which provides reference linking services for scholarly publications, has surpassed 40 million metadata records for scholarly content. Each of these records includes a CrossRef Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which allows the content to be accessed by a permanent link on the Internet. Of these 40 million items, 87 percent are from journals. Content from scholarly books and reference works makes up more than 5 percent and another 5 percent is from conference proceedings."

"CrossRef includes metadata from more than 2900 publishers, 20,000 journal titles, and 100,000 book titles, which represent CrossRef's fastest growing content type. Content comes from 6 continents, including publishers from low-income countries through arrangements with organizations like the Information Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP)."

For more information, please see the full press release.

A new way to access the OAIster database

February 3, 2010 — "OCLC is pleased to announce that a freely accessible site for searching only OAIster records is now available. With this OAIster site, you are able to search only OAIster and its millions of metadata records...."

"...OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources hosted at the University of Michigan since 2002. Launched with grant support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OAIster was developed to test the feasibility of building a portal to open-archive collections using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). In 2009, OCLC formed a partnership with the University of Michigan in order to provide continued access to open-archive collections through the OAIster database."

For more information, please see the full press release.

UC San Diego, NYU, & University of Illinois Libraries to Collaborate on Next-Generation Archival Management Tool

Mellon Foundation Grant to fund merging of Archivists' Toolkit and Archon

February 2, 2010 — "The University of California, San Diego; New York University; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Libraries are teaming up to develop a next-generation archival management tool, thanks to a grant in the amount of $539,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."

"The grant will support the planning and design of a new software tool for the description and management of archives, based on the combined capabilities of Archivists' Toolkit™ (AT) and Archon™. The two predominant open-source archival tools are currently utilized by numerous academic libraries, special collections, archives, and museums worldwide, including universities like UCLA and Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Diego Zoo, and smaller archival repositories like the Niels Bohr Archives in Denmark and the Biblioteca Ateneu Barcelonès in Spain."

"Planning activities will include the development of a next-generation architectural framework as well as a complete review of the new archival tool's required and desirable functional specifications. Members of the archival community will be consulted during the planning and product development stages."

For more information, please see the full press release.

President's budget freezes library funding, omits school libraries from education increase

February 1, 2010 — "President Obama today released his FY2011 Budget Proposal to Congress, calling for a freeze to federal library funding under the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), the primary source of federal funding for libraries. Under the President's plan, LSTA would be level-funded at $214 million."

American Library Association President Camila Alire said: quot;'Federal funding may be a small percentage of the funding America's libraries receive, but it is critical. The ALA calls on Congress to support America's libraries by not only restoring the funding lost to libraries in the President's budget proposal but by increasing the funding, which is desperately needed.'"

For more information, please see the full press release.

President Requests $265,869,000 for Institute of Museum and Library Services

February 1, 2010 — "President Obama has requested $265,869,000 for fiscal year 2011 for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The request, which was transmitted to Congress today, is the same as the FY 2010 enacted levels for the Institute's programs and administration. The proposed budget will support museums and libraries as they re-energize the economy, fuel partnerships and knowledge sharing, and provide much-needed services to their communities."

"The President requested $213,523,000 for the nation's 123,000 libraries. Of that amount, approximately 80 percent ($172.5 million) is distributed through the Grants to States program to the State Library Administrative Agencies (SLAAs) in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories, and freely associated states, according to a population-based formula. These grants help libraries meet the community needs, use technology to develop new service models and reach underserved populations."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Nature launches iPhone App, signals EPUB support next

February 1, 2010 — "Nature, the world's leading science publication, unveils its iPhone application (app) today. iPhone and iPod Touch users can search, browse, read and bookmark full text content from Nature and Nature News, and search PubMed. The nature.com mobile app is available free of charge in the iPhone App Store and on nature.com from 1 February 2010 at www.nature.com/mobileapps."

"The nature.com mobile app will work with the newly announced iPad from launch, and Nature Publishing Group (NPG) will be producing EPUB files that can be read using Apple's iBooks and other e-readers."

"Access to the full text of all Nature and Nature News content through the app is free as an introductory offer until the 30 April 2010. Users will need to be registered on nature.com, NPG's publishing platform."

"Users will be able to read full text articles immediately or save them for later, search nature.com, set up saved searches, or browse the latest news and research. To ensure that research papers and news articles are truly readable on the iPhone, NPG has designed the nature.com mobile app to provide high resolution, zoomable figures, and a special references view."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Successful reuse of research data requires integrated approach

January 28, 2010 — "On 23-24 September 2009 an international discussion workshop was held in Berlin, prepared and organised by Knowledge Exchange. The main focus of the workshop was on the benefits, challenges and obstacles of re-using data from a researcher's perspective. The most important message from the wide variety of presentations was that successful reuse not only requires efforts directed at the technical issues, but also at providing incentives for researchers, both to share and re-use."

"These incentives can be provided by funding opportunities, but also by incorporating data sharing and re-use in the research assessment. The issue of data re-use would be a lot more relevant to researchers if publishers, for example, asked authors for data to underpin their publications. Alternatively researchers' data being cited in a journal should be rewarded. Technical aspects should also be addressed, e.g. by supporting data storage and sharing facilities. This requires not only specialised staff but also agreed standards (metadata, ontologies) which will allow different datasets to be evaluated, compared and combined. Researchers will need to be trained, but awareness will also need to be created at a higher level. Bottom-up and top-down approaches need to work in unison."

"At the workshop the use cases presented by researchers from a variety of disciplines were supplemented by two keynotes and selected presentations by specialists from infrastructure institutions, publishers, and national and European funding bodies. Thanks to this broad approach it became clear that certain challenges and obstacles are comparable across disciplines and organisations. As a general recommendation the participants agreed that it is time to cooperate in more ambitious international activities to establish reliable and sustainable support for initiatives in the field of data related research infrastructure..."

For more information, please download the full press release in PDF format.

Elsevier's Scopus Partners with CWTS and SCImago to Offer Multidimensional Evaluation of Research Journals

Metrics to be Powered by Scopus and Freely Available Online

January 26, 2010 — "TextElsevier, a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced that its flagship product Scopus has successfully partnered with the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) and the SCImago Research Group, endorsing two complementary journal metrics, SNIP and SJR. The metrics will be freely available online at www.journalmetrics.com, and integrated into Scopus, allowing researchers around the world to analyze journals within the abstract and citation database. The indicators will offer a greater currency and flexibility in journal performance measurement than any single-metric method currently available."

"SNIP, which stands for Source Normalized Impact per Paper, measures a journal's contextual citation impact and was developed by CWTS. It allows direct comparison of journals in different subject fields, by accounting for the frequency at which authors cite other papers, the speed of maturation of citation impact, and the extent to which the database covers the field's literature."

"SJR stands for SCImago Journal Rank, and was developed by the SCImago Research Group. It is a measure of the scientific prestige of scholarly sources: value of weighted citations per document. A journal transfers its own 'prestige', or status, to another through the act of citing it. In effect, this means that a citation from a source with a relatively high SJR is worth more than a citation from a source with a lower SJR...."

"...The journal metrics will be updated twice annually and made available to Scopus subscribers at http://www.scopus.com and to non-Scopus users at www.journalmetrics.com free of charge."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Call for New Nominations for Memory of the World International Register

January 21, 2010 announcement from Punas Das — "UNESCO is inviting new nomination proposals for inscription on its Memory of the World International Register, a list of library collections and archive holdings of world significance, which was established in 1997 to promote documentary heritage of universal value."

"Nominations should ideally be submitted through the National Commission for UNESCO or the Memory of the World National Committee in the country where it is located. Proposals should be based on the selection criteria listed in the General Guidelines to Safeguard Documentary Heritage, which stipulates that the most important criterion for inscription on the register is the universal significance of the documentary heritage."

"The deadline for the submission of nominations is 31 March 2010 and no late submissions will be accepted. They should be submitted to UNESCO's Memory of the World Secretariat either by mail accompanied by an electronic version on diskette, CD-Rom or USB key (addressed to Joie Springer, Memory of the World Programme, Information Society Division, 1, rue Miollis, 75732 Paris Cedex 15, France), or by email to j.springer@unesco.org."

For more information, please see the UNESCO web site.