I N   B R I E F

May/June 2013
Table of Contents

The Europeana Newspapers Project: Improving Access To Europe's Newspapers

Contributed by:
Friedel Grant
Communications Officer
LIBER
The Hague, South Holland, The Netherlands
friedel.grant [at] kb.nl

Imagine being able to freely and effectively search millions of historic newspapers from across Europe. Such a resource would give researchers and the general public a way to discover and analyze an unparalleled range of topics, from major historical events like wars, politics and natural disasters to the finer details of life in local communities.

This is the goal of the Europeana Newspapers Project: to make over 18 million newspaper pages from 12 European countries available worldwide available via the Europeana ecosystem of online services, with aggregation carried out by The European Library. The project also aims to apply advanced technical processes to some 10 million of these newspaper pages so that they become fully searchable.

The current situation for many online newspaper collections is quite different. Their pages are often presented as images rather than searchable text and this makes it difficult for researchers to locate articles or terms of interest.

A survey conducted by Europeana Newspapers in 2012 revealed that while 85% of libraries offered free access to their digitized newspapers, a third had never employed any technique to make the full-text of their newspaper content searchable. Of the libraries who had experimented with Optical Character Recognition (OCR – the process by which scanned images of handwritten or printed text are converted into a machine-readable format), only half were confident enough in the quality of this work to make it available to their users.

In addition to creating a wealth of full-text newspaper content, the Europeana Newspapers Project will work in other areas to improve access to digitized newspapers. It will, for example, use a process known as Named Entity Recognition (NER) to identify specific people, locations and organizations within the newspaper text.

Effort is also being focused on the creation of a best-practice metadata model for newspapers. This will allow content from the project, and future newspaper material, to be efficiently integrated with the Europeana website in alignment with the Europeana Data Model (EDM) standard.

Work in all of these areas will continue until the Europeana Newspapers Project finishes in 2015. You can learn more about the project via the website or by attending one of our many upcoming Information days and Workshops.

We are also interested in hearing from any libraries with digitized newspaper collections, who may want to participate in the network of the project.

For more information, please see http://www.europeana-newspapers.eu or follow our project news via Twitter (@eurnews) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/EuropeanaNewspapers).

JHOVE2 Released

Contributed by:
Sheila Morrissey
Senior Research Developer
ITHAKA
Princeton, New Jersey, USA
sheila.morrissey [at] ithaka.org

The JHOVE2 development community announced the release of Version 2.1.0 of the open-source JHOVE2 format characterization tool on March 18, 2013.

JHOVE2 is an open source application and framework for format-aware characterization. JHOVE2 is the successor to JHOVE, the original characterization system developed by Harvard University and JSTOR Electronic Archiving Initiative (now known as Portico). The original JHOVE characterization framework is widely used by international digital library programs and preservation repositories. During the course of its extensive use, however, a number of limitations imposed by idiosyncrasies of design and implementation were identified.

With funding from the Library of Congress under its National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), the California Digital Library, Portico, and Stanford University collaborated on a two-year project to develop and deploy a next-generation architecture providing enhanced performance, streamlined APIs, and significant new features. The JHOVE2 project generalizes the concept of format characterization to include identification, validation, feature extraction, and policy-based assessment. The target of this characterization is not a simple digital file, but a (potentially) complex digital object that may be instantiated in multiple files.

Version 2.0.0, released by the original project partners, included the JHOVE2 pluggable framework, with modules to perform identification, format feature extraction and validation, format instance assessment, checksum computation, and output in plain text, XML, and JSON. The JHOVE2 identification module employs the UK National Archives DROID format identification tool. The format modules included in the original release were ICC color profile, SGML, Shapefile, TIFF, UTF-8 encoded text, WAVE audio, XML, and ZIP.

Version 2.1.0 of JHOVE2 includes 3 new format modules, 1 new identifier module, 1 new output module, and several bug fixes and enhancements in the 2.0.0 release. The new format modules included in this release are for the ARC, WARC, and GZIP formats. The new Identifier module uses the UNIX "file" utility, giving JHOVE2 users the choice of employing either DROID or file for identification of file formats. The new XSL Displayer module, which extends the XML output module, can perform XSLT transformations on XML output before displaying it.

This release also reflects a new milestone in the JHOVE2 development community. The new format and identifier modules are the contribution of developers from institutions (Bibliothéque Nationale de France and NETARKIVET.DK) beyond the original project participants.

The JHOVE2 development community welcomes all interested members of the preservation community to contribute to improving and extending the JHOVE2 tool.

Please see the release notes at https://bitbucket.org/jhove2/main/downloads for detailed information about the release and for information about configuring JHOVE2 to use the new identifier module.

For information about issues resolved in this release, known bugs, open issues, and enhancement requests, please refer to the JHOVE2 Issues page.

For detailed installation and configuration instructions please refer to the JHOVE2 User's Guide.

For detailed guidance on developing additional format modules please refer to the JHOVE2 Architectural Overview and the JHOVE2 Programmer's Guide.

Questions concerning the use of JHOVE2 and module development should be addressed to JHOVE2-TechTalk-l@listserv.ucop.edu.

Specific errors or suggestions may be reported to the JHOVE2 issue tracker.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) Relaunched with New Features

Contributed by:
Dom Mitchell
Community Manager
DOAJ
Copenhagen, Denmark
dom [at] doaj.org

2013 is a very exciting year for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ - http://www.doaj.org). As well as its 10-year anniversary in May, it has a new Advisory Board, bringing valuable expertise and wisdom from the publishing and library communities. It is developing new acceptance criteria to ensure that the content listed in it remains of the highest quality and is as Open Access as possible. Plus, it has a raft of new and important features.

DOAJ was founded in Lund, Sweden, in May 2003. If you are on Twitter or on the JISC, GOAL or SPARC Europe listservs, it is hoped that you will have already read about the recent activity at the DOAJ headquarters. Under the directorship of Lars Bjørnshauge, with a new team at the helm, DOAJ relaunched on an improved platform and with added features in March 2013. The transition happened seamlessly, with zero downtime, thanks to our dedicated technical partner, Sempertool (http://www.sempertool.dk/). The areas of improvement are predominantly related to Search, Browsing and Export & Sharing. (You can find a summary of all the new features at http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=loadTemplate&template=features&uiLanguage=en.)

As users become more adept at searching for online information, so their expectations of the quality of content returned in a search or held in a database rise. Users expect speed and accuracy above all else and with this in mind, DOAJ has greatly improved its Search functions, thereby increasing the findability and visability of the content therein. We have added functionality that allows users to refine and filter search results by publisher name, the type of resource (as in article or journal), the language that the article was published in (DOAJ currently lists content in 51 languages!) and the type of license attributed to the content by the publisher. Users can also click an author's name or a keyword to retrieve other content by the same author or with the same keywords.

To facilitate a more accurate browsing experience, we have added extra filters to the Browse page, giving the user the option to filter by words in a journal title, by country, by license type and whether or not the journal has publication charges. This last filter recently revealed that over 50% of the content on DOAJ has no author charges, which caused great excitement on Twitter!

There's a huge amount of value in the data indexed in DOAJ and we know that users retrieve the data for re-use elsewhere. To facilitate this, we have added new Export and Sharing functions. Users can now share journal entries on DOAJ with over 330 online communities, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Connotea and StumbleUpon. We've added compatibility with Reference Manager, EndNote and BibTex so that users can export references from DOAJ and, for users of Firefox. We have also added Zotero compatibility.

Of course, the value of the data in the DOAJ database will only ever be as good as the metadata sent to it. All of the metadata in DOAJ is provided by our publishing partners and so DOAJ relies on them to keep it as precise and up-to-date as possible. DOAJ is constantly working with publishers to remind and assist them with the uploading and updating of article-level metadata (DOAJ indexes ∼1.1 million articles at the time of writing) and licence information.

The Directory exists to maintain and develop a source of reliable information about open access scholarly content on the web; to increase the visibility, dissemination, discoverability and attraction of open access journals and to enable scholars, libraries, universities, research funders and other stakeholders to benefit from the information and services DOAJ provides. DOAJ also wants to start and contribute to conversations on Open Access issues within the larger publishing community. I invite you to take part in the growing Open Access conversation by following us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DOAJplus.

Scholars Portal Certified as a Trustworthy Digital Repository

Contributed by:
Steve Marks
Digital Preservation Librarian
Scholars Portal
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
steve [at] scholarsportal.info

In February, 2013, Scholars Portal was certified as a Trustworthy Digital Repository by the Center for Research Libraries.

Scholars Portal is a shared IT service provider to the 21 university libraries composing the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL). Scholars Portal provides central services supporting inter-library loan, virtual reference, and reference management, among others. It also provides a platform for the local loading and delivery of content licensed by the 21 OCUL members.

Since 2002, Scholars Portal has served as a local load point for OCUL collections, and the current holdings comprise approximately 34 million scholarly journal articles, 500,000 books, and an increasing number of numeric and geospatial datasets. Scholars Portal's TDR audit focused on the journals repository platform, the oldest and most highly used of the Scholars Portal content repositories.

CRL's method for auditing Trustworthy Digital Repositories generally follows ISO 16363 standard: Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repositories, while incorporating specific metrics that CRL has developed and incorporating a panel of advisors from the repository's user community. The audit covers three broad categories of the repository's operations: Organizational Infrastructure, Digital Object Management, and Infrastructure/Security Risk Management.

On a five-point scale, Scholars Portal scored 5, 4, and 4 on each category respectively, for a total of 13 out of a possible 15 points. With this certification, Scholars Portal becomes the fourth TDR formally recognized by CRL, and the first such repository in Canada.

OCUL and the Scholars Portal team are interested in promoting the discussion of digital preservation practices, and making the process – and the policies and procedures behind it – available to as many organizations as possible. As such, all TDR documentation of a non-sensitive nature has been made freely available on the Scholars Portal wiki. Interested parties are encouraged to read, re-use, or dissect any documents found there in hopes that they will help propel the conversation. Any questions around Scholars Portal's policies or workflow can be directed to Steve Marks, the Scholars Portal Digital Preservation Librarian.

A Week In the Trenches at SXSW 2013

Contributed by:
Butch Lazorchak
Digital Archivist
NDIIPP, Library of Congress
Washington, DC, USA
wlaz [at] loc.gov

South by Southwest is a marathon. Actually, it's more like trying to sprint your way through a hot and dusty marathon populated with approximately 60,000 badge-wearing attendees across the Interactive, Film and Music conferences and numerous others in town to bask in the vibrations. In other words, it's crazy, amazing and discombobulating all at the same time.

It is a great venue for getting exposed to new ideas, and this year the libraries, archives and museum communities (LAMs) made great strides in drawing attention to the work we do by engaging SXSW attendees with information, technology savvy and good humor while thinking outside the (Library) Box.

The outreach started with the work of ER&L and its partners (especially Bonnie and Sandy Tijerina and Christine Goetz) and their sponsorship of the #ideadrop house. The Ideadrop house acted as a clubhouse for people to decompress a bit from the mania of the conference while also serving as a stimulating meeting place to share ideas about topics affecting LAMs (I spoke with Andrea Leonelli of Digital Music Trends at the house on sound preservation issues). They hosted a number of presentations over the course of the week, many of which were streamed live and recorded for later viewing.

Another shout-out goes to Andrea Davis, a Reference and Instruction Librarian at the Naval Postgraduate School who's the brains and brawn behind the @sxswLAM account and who co-hosted a well-received SXSW interactive session on 'Libraries: The Ultimate Playground,' which brought a diverse group of people together to think about the future of libraries.

Other excellent sessions included Culture Hack: Libraries & Museums Open for Making, Poetry in Motion: Sound Culture & Data Mining, the Pop Up Archive workshop on building an archive, as well as two panels we hosted, one for Interactive on 'Why Digital Maps Can Reboot Cultural History' and one for Music on 'Citizen Archivists and Cultural Memory.'

One of my favorite sessions was 'Can Crowdfunding Save Local Government Budgets?,' an exploration of how governments are exploring ways to leverage crowdfunding initiatives to build community engagement and fund projects. Definitely an area for the digital stewardship community to strongly explore and I recommend a look at the work of panelist Rodrigo Davies from the MIT Center for Civic Media.

I took an afternoon during the week to make a trip up the hill to visit a couple of efforts at the University of Texas doing groundbreaking work in digital stewardship. First up was a trip to the Briscoe Center for American History and their video game archive. The Briscoe houses an amazing collection of artifacts in addition to being the archive of George 'The Fat Man' Sanger, a legendary video game composer. Special thanks to Zach Vowell, Justin Kovar, Jessica Meyerson and the rest of the staff of the UT Video Game Archive who are down in the trenches figuring out how to get valuable information off of tangible media that is rapidly becoming obsolescent.

Next up was a jaunt across campus to the Harry Ransom Center. In addition to housing the first photograph, the Center is doing pioneering work on digital manuscript collections. I received a tour from Gabriela Redwine and Megan Barnard who took me deep into the depths of the center to see some of their amazing collections.

They've recently published an electronic book called 'Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories,' a guide that offers recommendations to help ensure the physical and intellectual well being of born-digital materials transferred from donors to archival repositories. The book represents the tip of the iceberg on the interesting work they're doing with digital forensics and providing archival access to digital materials (Redwine also sits on the professional experts panel for the BitCurator project).

Finally, one of the most interesting and thought-provoking things I saw at the conference was the film 'Downloaded.' The movie tracks the rise and fall of the Napster software tool (which also happens to provide a capsule history of peer-to-peer file sharing on the internet) and provides a thoughtful look back at that tumultuous time and explores issues that still vex the digital community to this day.

I N   T H E   N E W S

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer Swears In Five Presidential Appointees to the National Museum and Library Services Board

May 9, 2013 — "Yesterday, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Stephen Breyer administered the oath of office to five individuals who will serve on the National Museum and Library Services Board. The board is the advisory body for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Althemese Pemberton Barnes, Vishakha Desai, Tammie Kahn, George Kerscher, and Jacquelyn K. Sundstrand were appointed by President Barack Obama. Members of the board are selected based on their expertise and commitment to libraries or museums."

"IMLS Director Susan Hildreth said, 'We welcome the collective experience and knowledge our newest members will bring to the board. Their service on the National Museum and Library Services Board will help keep libraries and museums at the forefront of the movement to create a nation of learners. The IMLS staff and I look forward to working with them.'"

For more information please see the full press release.

Young wins ALA presidency

May 7, 2013 — "Courtney Louise Young, head librarian at the Penn State Greater Allegheny, has been elected president-elect of the American Library Association, defeating. Barbara Froling Immroth, professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. As ALA president, Young will be the chief elected officer for the oldest and largest library association in the world."

"Young will become president-elect at the close of the 2013 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago and will assume the ALA presidency at the close of the 2014 ALA Annual Conference in Las Vegas."

For more information please see the full press release.

Wiki Loves Public Art - a photo contest bringing art online

May 1, 2013 — "The Wiki Loves Public Art (WLPA) photography contest launches today. The Wikimedia/Europeana collaboration encourages people in Austria, Finland, Israel, Spain and Sweden to take pictures of Public Domain artworks and upload their photos under a free licence, so that they can be used in online projects such as Wikipedia."

"The goal of the Wiki Loves Public Art contest (http://e2.ma/click/rx6pc/n6erwb/v4yn8) is to get as many pictures of public art as possible available under a free licence on Wikipedia's online database, Wikimedia Commons (http://e2.ma/click/rx6pc/n6erwb/bxzn8). The photos can then be seen and used by anyone, anywhere. At the same time, the world's sixth largest website, Wikipedia, will see a boost in its art coverage as photos from the contest can be added to the online encyclopedia to illustrate its articles. The contest is organised by Wikimedia Sverige, Europeana, volunteers in the Wikimedia chapters and affiliated groups in each of the participating countries."

"The photos uploaded for the contest will first be judged nationally, after which the ten best pictures from each country will be sent to an international jury. The prizes for the three internationally best pictures - which will be announced in July - are travel gift certificates for 500 euros, 300 euros and 200 euros and on top of that, Europeana has sponsored high quality prints of the winning pictures that will be sent to the winners."

"'We are doing this to increase our common collection of photos of artworks and to make them easily accessible to everyone through Wikipedia. This is also a fun way to start contributing for volunteers', says the international WLPA coordinator, John Andersson."

"The contest has been challenging to organise because most countries lack a national database of their artworks. In addition, the countries participating have a diverse set of copyright laws, so that the public artworks that can be photographed for the contest differ between countries. For example, in Finland the contest focuses on outdoor sculptures whose creators have been dead for 70 years or more. In Spain and Austria, on the other hand, any public artwork can be photographed. In some countries, the focus has been on working with national art museums so that people can go and take photos of particular museum collections."

"'With WLPA, we are also trying to raise awareness of copyright laws and the fact that in some countries national legislation can even make you a criminal for taking photos of publicly owned artworks, the same artworks you pass on your way to work or school every day', states John Andersson."

For more information please see the full press release.

ARL and Society of American Archivists Awarded IMLS Grant for Mosaic Scholarship Program

April 19, 2013 — "ARL and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) have been awarded a $487,652 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program in support of the new ARL/SAA Mosaic Scholarship Program – a diversity recruitment program that seeks to attract students to the archives and special collections profession and provide support for them during graduate school. The program will provide a full suite of financial benefits and career development and placement support to 15 students from traditionally underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups entering academic studies in archival science, special collections librarianship, or similar graduate programs."

"This collaborative diversity recruitment program will expand SAA's existing Mosaic Scholarship, established in 2008, to help advance SAA's diversity strategic priority. The new program will offer minority candidates an opportunity to pursue graduate education in archival science or special collections librarianship while gaining valuable, 'hands-on' experience in a large archives or library environment. The ARL/SAA Mosaic Scholarship Program will increase the number of qualified, experienced, and diverse archivists and special collections librarians in the hiring pipeline, providing them with practical training and skills development that will render them competitive in the current job market. The program curriculum will encourage Mosaic Scholars to assume leadership roles within their professional organizations and associations and equip them to lead discussions concerning the preservation of documentary records in the digital age."

For more information please see the full press release.

Mellon Grant Awarded to NISO to Encode E-Resource License Templates in ONIX-PL

Encodings to be deposited for free distribution in GOKb and KB+ knowledgebases

April 18, 2013 — "The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the National Information Standards Organization a grant to support the encoding of a collection of template licenses for e-resources into the ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) format. The encodings will be deposited into the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebase for free distribution to the library, publishing, and library systems community. The deposited encodings – 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 to match their negotiated license and implementation. The project will also fund publicly available training resources that will inform community members on how to use those encodings for their own purposes."

"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, has already encoded all of the licenses for JISC Collections-subscribed content and deposited them in their KnowledgeBase Plus (KB+) database. While KB+ has proven a useful tool for institutions in the UK, it has not moved beyond this venue because the encodings produced by the JISC Collections are restricted to JISC members' usage. To encourage ONIX-PL adoption and the use of encoded licenses, JISC Collections provided additional funding to support the project and provide training in the encoding format and the ONIX-PL Editing software...."

"More information, including the project proposal, is available on the NISO website at: http://www.niso.org/workrooms/onixpl-encoding/."

For more information please see the full press release.

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Launches Today

April 18, 2013 — "The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) launched a beta of its discovery portal and open platform today. The portal delivers millions of materials found in American archives, libraries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions to students, teachers, scholars, and the public. Far more than a search engine, the portal provides innovative ways to search and scan through its united collection of distributed resources. Special features include a dynamic map, a timeline that allow users to visually browse by year or decade, and an app library that provides access to applications and tools created by external developers using DPLA's open data...."

"...The DPLA portal is powered by a rich repository of information, known as the DPLA platform, which enables new and transformative uses of America's digitized cultural heritage. With an application programming interface (API) and maximally open data, the DPLA can be used by software developers, researchers, and others to create novel environments for learning, tools for discovery, and engaging apps. The DPLA App Library (dp.la/apps) features an initial slate of applications built on top of the platform; developers and hobbyists of all skill levels are freely able to make use of the data provided via the platform...."

"...Led by Cohen, the DPLA aims to expand the realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used. To date, the DPLA has partnered with six state and regional digital libraries and an equal number of large cultural heritage institutions – including the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, and Harvard University – to provide access to millions of unique digital objects...."

"...The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America's libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America's heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used."

For more information please see the full press release.

Making research easier to track

April 18, 2013 — "This month sees the UK's Research Councils' (RCUK) revised policy on open access (OA) come into force for publicly-funded research to be disseminated through OA routes. A new metadata application profile called RIOXX has been developed by Jisc and UKOLN to ensure that university Institutional Repositories can start to comply with this policy."

"Currently key information about research outputs are not systematically recorded and funders and universities face a challenge in tracking research across systems. The first release of RIOXX and the associated guidance focuses on applying consistency to the metadata fields used to record research funder and project/grant identifiers. This will allow research outputs to be consistently tracked between systems thus saving time and effort for activates such as research reporting, compliance checking and gathering business intelligence...."

"...RIOXX also takes into account the need for interoperability between repositories, current research information systems (CRISs) and the Outcome Collection Systems (ROS), and Researchfish operated by research funders. It is has taken into consideration other metadata schemas such as ETHoS and OpenAIRE. Future releases of the profile and guidelines will also include the agreed language to track OA publications, and support compliance monitoring with the Research Councils' policy on OA...."

"...If you would like to find out more about future events on how to adopt and use RIOXX please contact Balviar Notay [b.notay at jisc.ac.uk], Jisc programme manager. For technical queries please email admin at rioxx.net."

For more information please see the full press release.

WebWise Reprise 2013: Free Online Webinars

April 16, 2013 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), in cooperation with Heritage Preservation, is presenting WebWise Reprise, two online events based on the IMLS WebWise 2013 conference. Both webinars will feature how cultural institutions are using digital images to increase and improve access to their collections. Using Collections Images in Online Exhibits will be held on Monday, June 3, 2013, from 2:00-3:30 p.m. EDT, and Using Collections Images in Educational Materials will be on Wednesday, June 5, 2013, from 2:00-3:30 p.m. EDT."

"WebWise Reprise will be hosted in the Connecting to Collections Online Community, which is part of Connecting to Collections, a multifaceted national initiative of the Institute of Museum and Library Services to aid museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies in their care of collections. The online community draws on many resources that were developed for the initiative, including the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf and the Raising the Bar Workshops and Webinars."

"Since 2000, the WebWise conference has brought together representatives of museums, libraries, archives, systems science, education, and other fields interested in the future of high-quality online content for inquiry and learning. This annual conference highlights recent research and innovations in digital technology, explores their potential impacts on library and museum services, and promotes effective museum and library practices in the digital environment. It also provides recipients of technology-based grants from the Institute an opportunity to showcase their exemplary projects."

For more information please see the full press release.

Digital Humanities and Digital Preservation

April 12, 2013 blog posting by Leslie Johnston, Library of Congress — "This past April 8 was the 2013 'Day of Digital Humanities.' Started in 2010, this is an annual event of blogging and tweeting about the experience of digital humanities by graduate students, professors, alt-academics, librarians and other participants who identify with the field. And 'the field' of Digital Humanities can be whatever you define it to be. And you fit in however you see fit."

"For me, it's thinking about sustainability and preservation."

"I have had the privilege of working at three research universities with a strong presence in the digital humanities. I saw groundbreaking collections built, and was witness to both the beginning and the end of the life cycle for many projects. As I have seen projects reach a transition point – moving between institutions when a key person moves, or ending development upon a retirement or end of a grant – I have seen the sometime panicky look when someone realizes that something has to happen with their digital resource. It may have to be packed up to be moved and installed in another environment, or frozen in its current state, or perhaps shut down entirely. I learned a lot of lessons that I still live by in my work in digital preservation."

• What is it to sustain and/or preserve a digital humanities project?
• Sustainability and preservation depend on active management of a project.
• Sustainability and preservation start at the beginning of the life cycle.

"So what does this mean for scholars and researchers in the digital humanities? While one would like to focus on pure scholarship – discovering new sources, intuiting new interpretations, writing and designing innovative ways of presenting the outcomes of the research – sustainable technology has to be a consideration alongside the scholarly endeavor."

"Open content format standards must be considered and decisions should be documented. The infrastructure (and code) should be documented, including the process for building and installing the project. The operations of an application and its interface should also be documented. Not least of all, the rights and provenance of all content and metadata MUST be documented, or stewardship organizations may be wary of sustaining and making a project available for the long haul without understanding the intellectual property risks. All of this will ensure a better chance for long-term sustainability and accessibility for any digital humanities project."

For more information please see the full blog posting.

IMLS Statement on FY 2013 Budget

April 8, 2013 — "On Tuesday March 26, 2013, the President signed H.R. 933, the "Consolidated and further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2013" into law. The Act provides $219,821,202 for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). IMLS programs and administration sustained a 5% sequester reduction, and an additional 0.2% rescission. These reductions were applied equally to each museum program and to the IMLS research and administration accounts. For library programs the reduction was achieved by allocating a 4% reduction for Grants to State Library Administrative Agencies and greater reductions to the national competitive grant programs. See http://www.imls.gov/assets/1/AssetManager/FY2013_IMLS_Budget_Table.pdf for a complete table."

For more information please see the full press release.

NPG to launch Scientific Data to help scientists publish and reuse research data

April 4, 2013 — "Nature Publishing Group (NPG) today is pleased to announce the Spring 2014 launch of Scientific Data. Open for submissions this autumn, Scientific Data is a new open-access, online-only platform for the publication of descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets. Scientific Data will initially focus on experimental datasets from the life, biomedical and environmental science communities with future plans to expand to other fields in the natural sciences."

"Scientific Data will introduce and publish a new type of content called Data Descriptors: peer-reviewed, scientific publications that provide detailed descriptions of experimental and observational datasets. Data Descriptors will be a combination of traditional scientific publication content and structured information curated in-house, and are designed to maximize reuse and enable searching, linking and data mining. Data Descriptors may be associated with articles from a broad range of journals."

For more information please see the full press release.

Oxford Journals compliant with Research Councils UK and Wellcome Trust open access policies

April 4, 2013 — "Oxford Journals compliant with Research Councils UK and Wellcome Trust open access policies Oxford University Press (OUP) is pleased to announce that from 1 April 2013 our journals will be compliant with the Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Wellcome Trust policies on open access (OA). OUP is mission-driven to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. We embrace both 'gold' and 'green' open access publishing to support this mission. We are committed to working with our society partners to support sustainable OA for each community, and have consulted with each of our partners to decide on the best route to compliance for each journal."

"OUP's open access programme, Oxford Open, dates back to 2004. We publish 13 fully open access titles, and over 120 'hybrid' titles. In total through these two channels we published over 3,200 open access papers in 2012. With the new funding policies in place, we want to ensure we meet the needs of our authors and will be extending open access options to virtually all our journals."

For more information please see the full press release.

Wiley Journals Comply With New Open Access Policies of UK Funders

April 3, 2013 — "John Wiley & Sons, Inc, announced today that the majority of Wiley's journals in its open access publishing program now offers authors funded by The Wellcome Trust and Research Councils UK the opportunity to publish their articles under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY license when paying an Article Publication Charge (APC). This will support authors in complying with funder requirements that came into place April 1, 2013. The CC BY license allows others to modify, build upon and/or distribute the licensed work (including for commercial purposes) as long as the original author is credited...."

"...Wiley has also updated its self-archiving policy for RCUK authors. If an author funded by RCUK chooses to publish in a Wiley journal but doesn't select and pay for OnlineOpen, they will be able to self-archive the accepted version of the article after a 12 month embargo period (starting with first publication online), or after a 24 month embargo for authors funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). If a journal does not offer an open access option, the embargo period is reduced to 6 months (RCUK's STM Councils) or 12 months for authors funded by AHRC and ESRC."

"A limited number of society owned journals have not adopted the new self-archiving policy and/or the new OnlineOpen license policy and will continue to publish under the usual journal copyright license terms."

"Wiley now publishes eighteen fully open access journals and additional journals are expected to publish in 2013. Wiley's OnlineOpen option is offered by more than 1200 journals or more than 80% of its titles. This option is available to authors of articles who wish to make their article available to non-subscribers on publication. When selecting OnlineOpen, authors, their funding agencies, or their institutions, pay an APC to ensure that the article is made available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley Online Library. Wiley Open Access Journals and those published under OnlineOpen are deposited in PubMed Central."

For more information please see the full press release.

ACM Expands Options for Free Access to Content of ACM Publications

April 2, 2013 — "ACM is introducing several policy changes that will increase access to its journals and conference proceedings. The changes are intended to better balance the needs of authors and researchers in the computing community, many of whom have expressed a desire for expanded rights and open access options to ACM publications from its Digital Library (DL). The publishing policy changes not only expand author rights but provide greater levels of flexibility in the transition to open access...."

"...Under the options now available, authors who prefer to have ACM manage the rights and permissions associated with their work can continue to use the traditional ACM Copyright Transfer Agreement."

"Authors who want to retain copyright of their work can choose an equivalent exclusive licensing agreement developed by ACM. It grants certain publication and distribution rights to ACM but allows authors to retain the core intellectual property rights that are important to many authors. Authors can also select an author-pays option that enables them to retain all rights to their work and allows them to make it openly accessible in perpetuity via the ACM DL."

"In addition, the new publishing policy enables open access to the most current proceedings volume of ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) conferences at the option of their sponsoring SIG. SIGs may also make their conference proceedings freely available via the ACM DL platform for up to two weeks before the event and for a total of one month. Intended to facilitate easy access to the proceedings by conference attendees, these changes will also enable the computing community to learn about the latest technology developments presented at conferences during the time of the event."

For more information please see the full press release.

CC-BY license option now available on 42 NPG journals

April 2, 2013 — "NPG now offers authors a wider choice of journals using the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and its publishing partners have today introduced the CC-BY license option on twenty-two further journals, including Nature Communications. Of the 61 NPG journals that are open access or have open access options, 42 now offer the choice of CC-BY as one of the options."

"The Wellcome Trust and RCUK revised public access policies came into effect on 1 April 2013. These funders will require a CC-BY license when their funds are used to pay open access article processing charges...."

"...Twenty-one of the journals introducing a CC-BY option are published by NPG on behalf of publishing partners and either offer open access options, or are open access journals. They join Scientific Reports and the 19 NPG-owned academic journals that introduced CC-BY in 2012."

For more information please see the full press release.

Review of E-Lending Published

March 27, 2013 — "The lending of E-books by public libraries will enhance library services for users, but the interests of booksellers and publishers must be protected too, Culture Minister Ed Vaizey said today."

"A Government-commissioned report, An Independent Review of E-Lending in Public Libraries in England by William Sieghart, published today, sets out the following principles:

• Public libraries should be able to offer a remote E-lending service to their readers, free at the point of use;
• The interests of publishers and booksellers must be protected through 'frictions' that limit the supply of E-books in the same way that physical book loans are controlled;
• Pilot projects later in the year should test business models and help gather evidence of best practice; and
• The Public Lending Right should be extended to on-site e-loans, with consideration further ahead to including remote e-loans."

"A series of pilot projects between publishers and libraries this year, using established literary events, will test business models and user behaviours to help provide a solid evidence base for going forward."

For more information please see the full press release.

Artificial intelligence expert Robert Wilensky dies at 61

March 25, 2013 — "Robert Wilensky, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the campus's first faculty members in artificial intelligence when the field was just taking off, has died at age 61...."

"...Wilensky's career at UC Berkeley spanned nearly 30 years, beginning in 1978 when he joined the faculty in computer science. He later was appointed a professor at the School of Information and Management Sciences (now the School of Information, or I School), which he helped form...."

"...One of Wilensky's most notable contributions to the university was the UC Berkeley Digital Library Project, launched in the early years of the World Wide Web to develop techniques to make books and research materials from any library available online. The project also linked technical material together so that different layers of information can be selectively displayed and linked to other documents. This has become commonplace on the Web and in tools like Google Earth...."

"...The UC Berkeley Digital Library was launched in 1994 with a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and NASA. Two years later, the project got a big boost when IBM donated a 6 terabyte data-storage system valued at nearly $750,000."

For more information please see the full press release.

4C Project - Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation

March 25, 2013 — "The EC has launched a major new initiative to help organizations invest confidently in digital curation and preservation."

"4C Project - 'the Collaboration to Clarify the Costs of Curation' - will help organisations across Europe to invest more effectively in digital curation and preservation."

"Research in digital preservation and curation has tended to emphasize the cost and complexity of the task in hand. 4C reminds us that the point of this investment is to realise a benefit, so our research must encompass related concepts such as 'risk', 'value', 'quality' and 'sustainability'. Organizations that understand this will be more able to effectively control and manage their digital assets over time, but they may also be able to create new cost-effective solutions and services for others."

For more information please see the full press release.

Everyone On! Libraries Play Essential Role in Connect2Compete Campaign

March 21, 2013 blog posting by Susan Hildreth, IMLS — "Today, the nonprofit Connect2Compete is launching a national campaign inspired by the FCC. EveryoneOn is a public awareness effort designed to help all Americans access free digital literacy training in their libraries and community centers. Connect2Compete will also offer consumers access to programs providing discounted high-speed Internet and low-cost computers."

"Be on the lookout for a number of television, radio, print, and Internet advertisements about EveryoneOn in the coming weeks and months thanks to the AdCouncil, which will be communicating the value of digital literacy and driving people to the EveryoneOn.org website or helpline (1-855-EVRY1ON)."

For more information please see the full blog posting.

Kirtsaeng v. Wiley: Copyright 'war not over yet,' says intellectual property expert

March 20, 2013 announcement from the Cornell University Press Office — "Peter Hirtle, senior policy advisor in the Cornell University Library with a special mandate to address intellectual property issues, comments on the Supreme Court's ruling in the case Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., which determined that the first-sale doctrine protecting the re-sale of books and other copyrighted material does apply to materials manufactured abroad."

"'In an overwhelming victory for consumers and libraries, the Supreme Court decided that first-sale does apply to foreign manufactured goods. In its decision, it cited the horrible impact that any other finding would have on the ability of libraries to acquire, lend, and even publicly display books.'"

"'While this decision represents a win for all who believe that if 'you bought it, you own it,' the war may not yet be over. The two decisions supporting Kirtsaeng also noted that Congress has the power to give copyright owners the ability to segment markets along geographic lines. We will have to remain alert to possible legislative initiatives."

Internet and Web pioneers win the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

March 18, 2013 — "Five engineers who created the Internet and the World Wide Web have together won the inaugural £1 million Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for their innovations, which have revolutionised the way we communicate and enabled the development of whole new industries. Today a third of the world's population use the Internet and it is estimated to carry around 330 Petabytes of data per year, enough to transfer every character ever written in every book ever published 20 times over."

"Engineers Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin, Tim Berners- Lee and Marc Andreessen were today announced as the winners by Lord Browne of Madingley in the presence of HRH The Princess Royal at the Royal Academy of Engineering, which administers the prize. The winners will come to London in June for the formal presentation of the prize by Her Majesty The Queen."

"The art of engineering lies in the efficient combination of technologies to deliver the most meaningful results for society. The international team of judges for the Prize consider that these five outstanding engineers epitomise this approach in the way that they designed and built the Internet and the Web."

For more information please see the full press release.

CENDI Honors Two with 2012 Meritorious Service Awards

March 12, 2013 — "Lisa Weber, Director, Information Technology Policy and Administration Division at the National Archives and Records Administration, and Annie Simpson, Invasive Species Information Specialist at the United States Geological Survey, have been honored with the 2012 CENDI Meritorious Service Award, which was presented at the CENDI meeting on January 9, 2013, in Alexandria, Virginia, at the US Patent and Trademark facility. CENDI's Meritorious Service Award recognizes an individual(s) or team that makes 'a noteworthy contribution to CENDI and to federal interagency cooperation through its events, publications, administration, or outreach.' This year, the organization presented two awards."

"CENDI recognized former chair Lisa Weber for her work in the past year developing an organizational infrastructure poised to accommodate CENDI's continued success. Reworking CENDI's budgeting, membership retention, and accounting processes are among her most significant contributions to the group. Her long-time involvement with CENDI, understanding of scientific and technical information operations, and expertise in information policy enabled her to prepare meeting agendas that 'provided a clear course to refining the scope of CENDI and determining activities and contributions that CENDI can make to the federal government, despite changing priorities and shrinking budgets.'"

"Serving as a co-chair of Science.gov Alliance for the past year, Annie Simpson was recognized with the CENDI Meritorious Service Award for her 'leadership and untiring dedication to the revitalization and collaborative work of the Science.gov Promotions Working Group and the activities surrounding Science.gov's 10th Anniversary.' Science.gov, CENDI's flagship project, is an interagency initiative of 17 U.S. government science organizations within 12 federal agencies, and delivers one-point search access for over 200 million pages of scientific and technical information and more than 55 scientific databases. Simpson's creativity and enthusiasm for at CENDI has significantly benefitted CENDI's and Science.gov's visibility among key communities of interest."

"CENDI is an interagency consortium of senior scientific and technical information (STI) managers from 13 U.S. federal agencies that represent over 97% of the federal research and development budget. The CENDI Secretariat is headquartered in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. CENDI is managed by Information International Associates, Inc., under the direction of Bonnie C. Carroll. More information about CENDI can be found at http://www.cendi.gov."

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