I N   B R I E F

November/December 2010

Linked Data for Climate Research

Contributed by:
Dr. Andrew Woolf
Environmental Informatics Lead
STFC e-Science Centre
Harwell, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
andrew.woolf@stfc.ac.uk

UEA's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is recognised as a world-leading centre for the analysis and provision of climate datasets, including a widely used global temperature record. Recommendations arising from inquiries into the 2009 hacking of emails from CRU are that additional focus should be placed on making available climate research data and that these should include, wherever possible, both raw and processed data, with processing methods and codes.

The ACRID (Advanced Climate Research Infrastructure for Data) project will develop an approach to publishing climate research data, including full provenance information. A 'linked-data' approach will be used, supporting emerging open data principles and citeable links with research publications.

The outcomes should be relevant to the wider climate science community as well as to other fields of research, where data should be regarded as a scientific resource with equivalent importance as the research publication. The approach we develop will be applied to four high-profile climate research datasets.

Specifically, the project will:

• develop an information architecture addressing the scientific data workflows that arise in some aspects of climate research
• deploy infrastructure to capture relevant metadata for climate research data, software, and workflows
• develop a 'linked-data' approach to publishing and citing climate research data
• prototype our approach using four climate research datasets: CRUTEM, CRU TS, an example set of tree-ring chronologies used to develop climate reconstructions, and HadCET.

The project is a partnership between UEA's Climatic Research Unit, based in the School of Environmental Sciences, and the e-Science Centre based at STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. UEA will contribute climate research expertise, software, and data; while STFC will develop the data citation and publishing architecture.

A number of standards and technologies will be used in this project, including: RDF, OAI-ORE, Climate Science Modelling Language (CSML), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, netCDF file format, etc.

Project Cumulus – Getting Services from the Cloud

Contributed by:
John King
Cumulus Project Manager
Roehampton University
London, United Kingdom
j.king@roehampton.ac.uk

Cumulus is a JISC-funded project that is exploring the problems and potentials of making a Higher Education business application available "in the cloud". The project directly addresses the problems resulting from Universities being locked into a particular supplier's technology for delivering their applications. These technologies tend to be built so that a particular business function receives data and provides data to the suppliers' own systems, and only links to other systems using complicated "point to point" interfaces.

The Project Cumulus Team consists of the system supplier, UNIT4, and the Universities of Christ Church Canterbury, De Montfort, Lincoln, Nottingham and Roehampton. This team will work together to develop a version of the UNIT4 Curriculum Management System hosted "in the cloud" and supported by Web Services. These Web Services will be managed by an Enterprise Service Bus, which will "orchestrate" the movement of data into and out of the module. As a result the module will become capable of being used by any institution, based on business need, regardless of their existing student information systems. This is a much more flexible way of responding to business requirements and will result in new, less expensive ways of implementing, supporting and maintaining the module in individual institutions.

Project Cumulus builds on the work within the JISC e-Framework that has culminated in the Flexible Service Delivery concept and programme. This programme helps institutions to develop a more flexible approach to the way in which Information Technology supports business requirements and builds on work done on Enterprise Architecture and Service Oriented Architecture within the UK Higher Education Sector. The programme pursues the achievement of real transformational change and improvement, real efficiency savings, and other measurable strategic and educational values through the streamlined and flexible provision of administrative and student services.

Project Cumulus documents can be found at http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/cumulus. The site also provides the necessary information should you wish to contact us.

SURFACE Launch

Contributed by:
Philip Bolton Jr.
Outreach Assistant (Graduate Intern)
Syracuse University Library
Syracuse, NY, USA
pcbolton@syr.edu

A new institutional repository, SURFACE, has been launched by the Syracuse University Library. SURFACE "gathers, organizes, disseminates, and preserves the cultural and scholarly record of Syracuse University. At the same time, it increases the visibility of authors' works; maximizes research impact; facilitates interdisciplinary research; and provides local, regional, and global communities with immediate and permanent access." Simultaneously, this initiative also attempts to foster a more open, scholarly atmosphere at Syracuse University.

Currently, Syracuse University's culture isn't one of open scholarship. The librarians at Syracuse are reaching out in many ways to help and mitigate this lack of open-access awareness. The librarians work from the ground up—in the sense that they have to plant the seeds of open-access with faculty and let them grow until the University administration can see the fruits and establish publishing mandates for its entire faculty.

However, so far, SURFACE has been a success. In just a few weeks of gathering, SURFACE's holdings rocketed from a few hundred to recently surpassing 2,000 items. The launch party allowed the endorsements to be heard from several faculty, who lauded the advantages of the initiative. The Deans also lauded the initiative because of how it reinforces the very essence of the University's mission, "scholarship in action and helps facilitate the crucial mission of the university as a public good."

For more information, contact Charlotte Hess (Hess@syr.edu), who is the Associate Dean for Research, Collections, and Scholarly Communication.

Large-scale Digitisation Programme Launched at the Wellcome Library

Contributed by:
Christy Henshaw
Programme Manager, Wellcome Digital Library
Wellcome Library
London, UK
c.henshaw@wellcome.ac.uk

In Summer 2010 Wellcome Library embarked on a large-scale digitisation programme to digitise its collections and make them available online. From 2010 - 2013, the Library will be building a digital library infrastructure and digitising a critical mass of content related to the theme of "Modern Genetics and its Foundations". This will serve as a major pilot project to establish the systems and methodologies to be used in the longer term. The ultimate aim is to create a world-class online resource for the History of Medicine, including a large proportion of the Library's own collections, as well as digital content from relevant external collections.

During the next 2-3 years, the Library will focus on building a robust, scalable digital library infrastructure. This includes a digital asset management system with secure storage, a workflow system to manage the digitisation and ingest processes, a search system that will search across all digital and physical collections (including full-text), and a digital delivery system. Interpretative content providing insights into History of Medicine topics and innovative web tools will create a unique and engaging interface for researchers, teachers, students and the general public.

The content to be digitised during the pilot programme includes major collections of archival papers from such notable individuals as Francis Crick, Fred Sanger, and Arthur Ernest Mourant. Printed books will also be digitised, providing the context and background to the field of genetic research as well as more modern developments in the area. Across the two collections, around a million pages will be made freely available online. Funding has also been earmarked to enable relevant external collections to be digitised and included in the digital library. It is expected that content will be available online by the end of 2012.

Further information can be found on the Wellcome Digital Library project blog.

An OpenCourseWare as a Corporate Contribution to Public Knowledge

Contributed by:
Philip Bolton Jr.
Intellectual Property Manager
Syracuse University OpenCourseWare
Syracuse, NY, USA
pcbolton@syr.edu

When JP Morgan Chase signed a collaboration deal with Syracuse University in 2007, one of the goals of the collaboration was to create an OpenCourseWare (OCW) with the Syracuse University's prestigious iSchool faculty. Today, the OCW contains twelve courses with at least twenty-two more courses to come. The scope of the OCW is small compared to that of many other OCWs, e.g. MIT's. Syracuse's OCW attempts to capture the content of an undergraduate minor and graduate certificate program called "Global Enterprise Technology."

The Global Enterprise Technology programs are meant to prepare information science students for corporate jobs and to inform them about corporate cultures, technologies, systems, etc. Further, these courses available through Syracuse's OCW are meant to help instructors at other institutions around the U.S. or potentially around the globe to teach these courses and help create more corporate savvy information specialists.

Currently, the project faces two main issues. First, the OCW is built upon eduCommons and Plone, so the project team is having a difficult time deciding on design specifications, which are hindered by the lack of granular text manipulation. Second, on an intellectual property note, materials provided by JP Morgan Chase are sometimes fused into the course materials. This creates an additional process of sending course materials to JP Morgan Chase constituents in order to remove private and proprietary company information.

Despite the small project scope and those few issues, the Syracuse OCW seems to demonstrate an effective compromise between corporate and educational interests.

For more information, contact Philip Bolton Jr (pcbolton@syr.edu).

SPQR: The Semantic Integration of Dispersed Antiquity

Contributed by:
Mark Hedges
Deputy Director, Centre for e-Research
King's College London
London, United Kingdom
mark.hedges@kcl.ac.uk

For years, researchers into classical antiquity have been producing digital resources, a significant proportion of them being databases or corpora of marked-up texts. These resources often exist in isolation, and yet they address related topics, communities and time periods, and would be of much greater utility to researchers if they could be linked up and explored as if they were part of a single rich data landscape.

SPQR is a collaboration between King's College London, Edinburgh University and Humboldt University Berlin, and is funded by JISC under its Managing Research Data programme. The project grew out of earlier research, which showed that integrating these resources required a detailed understanding of the semantics of the data, semantics that were for the most part left implicit, and complicated further by the fuzzy, uncertain, interpretative and even contradictory nature of the available data—an inevitable factor in the primary research data for antiquity. Here semantic approaches have great potential, as they provide a flexible way of formalising resources and the links between them, and SPQR aims to investigate this potential for integrating datasets relating to classical antiquity.

One issue addressed was how to represent the information. For interoperability with the wider information space, we are building our ontology around the Europeana Data Model developed by the EU-funded Europeana project for modelling cultural heritage data—with a view to future publication of resources into the Europeana portal—and enhancing it with emerging domain-specific vocabularies. Of key importance here was to address the semantic issues identified above as problematic.

We are also investigating mechanisms for breaking the information out of its current silos, transforming it from its legacy formats and exposing it as linked data. A key issue here was investigating the extent to which such mapping and linking can be implemented for our material using automated methods. The diversity of the sources and their relative lack of formalisation suggests that there will be a strongly human element in these processes, which will at most be "computer-assisted".

Our resources include corpora of inscriptions marked up as TEI XML, databases of papyri, catalogues of coins and other text-bearing objects, and archaeological databases, as well as web-based resources that already expose relevant information in "linkable" form, such as Pleiades (ancient place names) and Papyri.info (metadata for papyri). These resources overlap in terms of time, places and people, although their contents are quite different.

One output will be a demonstrator allowing scholars to explore across datasets in an intuitive way, following paths through the data via common attributes. However, there is a rich variety of resources that could be included, so we are incorporating tools to allow other users to integrate new datasets, and add annotations and links. This framework will allow the research community to build up a critical mass of related material whose utility as a research tool will be significantly greater than that of the sum of its parts.

The Anytime Learning Literacies Environment (ALLÉ) Project

Contributed by:
Lyn Greaves
National Teaching Fellow
Faculty of Professional Studies
Thames Valley University
London, United Kingdom
Lyn.greaves@tvu.ac.uk

The UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), Learning and Teaching Innovation Grant funded Anytime Learning Literacies Environment (ALLÉ) project has created a flexible learning opportunity in the form of a digital journey. The journey is comprised of a series of learning objects, which enables learners to embark on their own interactive journey and help them develop their learning and literacy skills.

The learner journey is in 3 parts (the digital tools journey, the library journey and academic journey) and is currently being used by first-year business students in two universities in different authentic learning contexts. Two contrasting approaches are exploring how the artefacts are used to scaffold learners' digital skills acquisition. Thames Valley University are scaffolding the journey within the curriculum, whilst at London Metropolitan University students are being encouraged to use the journey according to their needs. Evaluation will tell us how students will interact with these journeys, and if indeed the journeys will provide the desired skills (through pre- and post-testing). Following extensive evaluation the journey will be updated as a result of the feedback.

One of the outcomes of the project is that the learner journey and its component parts (the individual topic-based learning objects) will be made available for other institutions to be able to customise and adapt them to their specific institutional and course needs. The learning objects have been created using the GLO Maker authoring tool, which enables them to be easily edited and adapted.

For more information, contact Lyn Greaves (Lyn.greaves@tvu.ac.uk).

The CAiRO (Curating Artistic Research Output) Project

Contributed by:
Stephen Gray
Project Manager
JISC Digital Media
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
stephen.gray@bristol.ac.uk

Data created by the UK's research-active performance and visual arts HE departments is often rich, technically accomplished, and amazingly varied. 'Practice-as-research' generated by the arts can differ from other types of research data in some fundamental ways; instead of being either a completed research output or source data supporting such an output, a single artwork can be both publication and research data. The creative arts can also generate highly complex data which might include a delicate combination of software, physical object and event. Perhaps an audience member is required to contribute to or activate a work. The challenges involved in preserving and maximising the use of such specialised and non-standardised research can be considerable.

This might be part of the reason why no national, subject-based repository exists within the UK to act as custodian for practice-as-research data. Where an individual institution has made its own provision for preserving and maintaining research output (via an institutional repository service for instance) the arts practitioner-researcher cannot usually expect a service built to house text-based documents to cope with such complex data. More commonly, this type of research is housed in a university's departmental collection, often built and maintained by researchers themselves.

In recognition of this situation, project CAiRO (Curating Artistic Research Output) is funded, as part of the JISC Managing Research Data programme, to offer the skills and knowledge needed to manage practice-as-research data. The project will achieve this by creating a post-graduate teaching module aimed squarely at the creative arts researcher. This module will enable the researcher to effectively self-archive and also to communicate need to third parties in order to negotiate appropriate levels of service. The entire data management module will be road-tested and refined via two Summer schools for existing PhD students to be held in Bristol in 2011.

CAiRO is a joint initiative, bringing together JISC Digital Media, the Digital Curation Centre and the University of Bristol Department of Drama: Theatre, Film and Television.

We are taking a very user-lead approach and welcome individuals or institutions to become part of our user group. Input and feedback from our user group will help us to develop and refine our teaching materials throughout the project. More information and contact details can be found at http://www.projectcairo.org. We would also encourage interested parties to subscribe to our project blog, also available via our website.

At the close of the project all teaching and learning materials will be made freely available under Creative Commons licence via http://www.projectcairo.org and also via the Open JORUM repository.

Just the Facts: How the DRAGNET Custom Search Evolved

Contributed by:
Terry Ballard
Assistant Director of Technical Services for Library Systems
The Mendik Library
New York Law School
New York, NY, USA

Every law library in the land maintains a page of recommended free web resources. One day I was looking at the one at my library's page and remembered that Google gives you the option to create a search bar that only looks at databases that you select. I created a new one and began adding sites recommended by the Law Library of Congress and the New York Law School's pages. The purpose of this was to create a gadget for the library's Facebook page. As more sites were added, it became clear that the gadget was becoming much more powerful. Input any legal topic and 100 hits are found in an instant, with a high degree of relevance.

By the time I showed this to my fellow librarians, about 50 web resources were covered, and the gadget was an immediate hit. It went live in August at http://www.nyls.edu/library/research_tools_and_sources/dragnet, but there was considerable discussion about what to call the gadget. We settled on DRAGNET, a name suggested by library director Camille Broussard. Working backwards, I devised the acronym "Database Retrieval Access using Google's New Electronic Technology." On August 30 I posted an announcement about DRAGNET to a number of legal and automation forums, which led to thousands of users trying out the new device within days.

With all of the librarians involved in selection, the site has settled on slightly more than 80 free web resources, and a DRAGNET committee has been formed to oversee improvements and new content. In the meantime, DRAGNET has spawned several "children". The Mendik Library had been tracking about 150 law journals with full text online content. In September 2010, a Google Custom Search bar was added to those pages. Another project introduced in October provides a custom search device for Federal and state constitutions and codes.

The only problem we noticed with the device was the limitation of search results to 100 hits. To address that problem, we instructed users to carefully construct their searches and add the current year to bring in the newest material. I heard from several people that there are ways to work around the search limitation—chiefly by adding "Refinements," or extra search tabs. The library released this version in November with added tabs, such as Federal Law and International Law, that eliminate the 100 hit limit. As in the basic setup of the device, this is all done with a fairly intuitive template, and no knowledge of coding is required to set up a DRAGNET. Librarians who want to set up a localized DRAGNET for their own area are welcome to contact me for advice.

My experience with DRAGNET has proven once again how easy it is to become a pioneer on the Internet. The Google Custom Search technology had been available for years, but it never occurred to anyone to use this to manage searching in the vast universe of free legal data.

I N   T H E   N E W S

November/December 2010

JISCMail digital preservation list's 10th anniversary

Announced by Neil Beagrie, November 13, 2010 — "The Digital Preservation list passes a significant milestone today—its 10th birthday. Today there are some 1300 subscribers in over 30 countries."

"The first message was posted on 13th November 2000 and there have been many thousands of postings since then. A full archive for the list since its inception is available on JISCMail at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=digital-preservation."

NISO Announces Availability of NCIP Implementer Registry

Site brings together information about vendors' implementations of NCIP.

November 10, 2010 — "NISO is pleased to announce the availability of the NCIP Implementer Registry, a site that allows vendors to share information about their implementations of the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (ANSI/NISO Z39.83, Parts 1 and 2). NCIP addresses the need for interoperability among disparate circulation, interlibrary loan, and related applications by standardizing the exchange of messages between and among computer-based applications."

"At this time, the following vendors have indicated their use of NCIP by signing up for the registry: Auto-Graphics, Ex Libris, Innovative Interfaces, Inc., and Rapid Radio. The registry is linked from the NCIP website (www.niso.org/workrooms/ncip) and from the NCIP maintenance agency site (www.ncip.info)."

"The registry allows vendors to enter information about their implementations of Version 1 of the standard, now deprecated but still widely used, and Version 2 of the standard, the current version of the standard adopted in 2008. Vendors may participate in the standard as an initiator of messages, a responder to messages, or both."

"By making this information publicly available, libraries will be able to see which vendors currently support NCIP, which version(s) of the standard are supported, and which messages in the standard are supported. In 2010 the NCIP Standing Committee defined two sets of core messages for accomplishing essential tasks: the Resource Sharing and the Self-Service. All required messages must be enabled for a vendor to claim support for a core message set. Depending on the role the vendor is playing in the transaction, the vendor must either support the messages as an initiator or responder."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Rural library outreach a new initiative in 'free-choice learning' movement

November 9, 2010 — "Rural and small town libraries are one of the newest forces being tapped to improve the science literacy of Americans through lifelong, 'free-choice learning' opportunities in which people learn scientific, engineering and technical information somewhere other than school."

"A new initiative, supported by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, will help rural librarians tap into scientific expertise in their local communities, organize local events, provide video and other supporting materials, and essentially create adult 'science clubs' across the nation."

"Educational experts across the nation increasingly point to the low levels of science knowledge by graduating high school and college students, and the implications this has for technological progress, economic growth and new jobs. But most American adults have similar levels of science knowledge as their foreign counterparts, and consistently outperform adults from such places as Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom."

"The real problem, the OSU researchers say, is that at the elementary, middle and high school levels, students don't always take advantage of learning opportunities outside school, which tend to reinforce and complement what they learn in traditional science courses. This is particularly the case for children from many low-income and minority families."

"Various approaches are being developed to deal with this situation. OSU is a leader in an NSF-supported Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education, and involved in other initiatives to engage children and youth of all backgrounds in free-choice science learning, such as a project supporting girls' engagement in science. Another major study is beginning soon to document how children and youth in Portland, Ore., use resources, both in and out of school, to learn about science."

For more information, please see the full press release.

ACM Launches New Site with Focus on Future of Computing

November 3, 2010 — "ACM's prominent online publication Ubiquity has a new scope and expanded content dedicated to the future of computing and the people who are influencing its trajectory from technical, economic, and educational perspectives. Its peer-reviewed content and interactive website have been redesigned to enhance access and understanding of the rapidly expanding computing field that touches people's daily life. The new Ubiquity includes fresh features and commentary that offer novel perspectives on core computing as well as developments at the edges of the field. It also has an international board of editors with distinguished representatives from industry and academia who will contribute content and review submissions for publication."

"Chief Editor Peter J. Denning defined Ubiquity as a destination for evaluating technology trends, airing provocative issues, and introducing influential people in the field."

For more information, please see the full press release.

University of Pittsburgh becomes member of HathiTrust

November 2, 2010 — "The University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS) has become the newest member of HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. The ULS is contributing thousands of volumes, the result of over a decade of digitization efforts. Among the contributions are many works from the Darlington Library, the first major library collection donated to the University of Pittsburgh; volumes from the Library's extensive collection of 19th Century Schoolbooks; and theses and dissertations from the University's degree programs."

"'Membership and participation in the HathiTrust is part of a multi-pronged approach to permanent archival storage of the digital books, dissertations and other materials we have created over the past ten years of aggressive digitization of library content at the University of Pittsburgh,' said Dr. Rush G. Miller, Hillman University Librarian and Director of the University Library System. 'It will allow us to insure that these open access digital materials will always be available in perpetuity.'"

"Launched in 2008 the HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising more than two dozen partners."

"Over the last two years, the partners have contributed nearly 7 million volumes to the digital library, digitized from their library collections through a number of means including Google and Internet Archive digitization, and in-house initiatives. Close to 1.5 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the Web."

"HathiTrust serves a dual role. First, as a trusted repository it guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds, providing the expert curation and consistent access long associated with research libraries. Second, as a service for partners and a public good, HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections. This includes viewing, downloading, and searching access to public domain volumes, and searching access to in copyright volumes. Specialized features are also available which facilitate access by persons with print disabilities, and allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into 'collections' that can be searched and browsed."

For more information, please contact Crystal McCormick Ware, crystalw@pitt.edu.

Checklist helps select research data to be preserved

November 2, 2010 — "The quantity of research data continues to grow. Because of this increasing volume of data, it is important to know how long researchers and institutions want it to be preserved. Just as important is knowing what data is worth preserving. To help researchers decide, general guidelines have been drawn up for selecting the relevant information. The guidelines are based on three studies – from the perspective of three separate scientific/scholarly disciplines – that were commissioned by SURFfoundation and that looked at how researchers deal with research data and how they store and share it."

"Study on dealing with research data
Researchers have various different ways of dealing with research data, sharing it, and storing it for the long term. The differences are not just between separate disciplines but also within individual departments. The three studies were carried out from the perspectives of different disciplines. Despite the differences, they were able to formulate a number of general principles. The studies were carried out by DANS together with 3TU Data Centre, Leiden University, and the International Institute of Social History (IISG) (an institute forming part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, KNAW):

• Data Curation in Arts and Media Research (Leiden University) — This study surveys the current situation regarding the management and reuse of research data in art history, comparative arts research, and media studies.
• IISH Guidelines for preserving research data: a framework for preserving collaborative data collections for future research (IISG) — This study followed researchers as they worked through the dynamics of data collection in online collaboration environments.
• Selection of Research Data; Guidelines for appraising and selecting research data (DANS and 3TU) — This study shows the latest situation in the area of selecting research data, based on a survey of the literature, interviews with important figures, and the experience gained by DANS and the 3TU Data Centre. General guidelines have been drawn up for assessing and selecting research data."

For more information, please see the full press release.

HathiTrust Search Widget

Announcement by Heather Christenson, CDL HathiTrust Project Manager, November 1, 2010 — "CDL (California Digital Library) has developed a search box that can be placed on any web page to search the HathiTrust Digital Library directly from websites, learning management systems, library guides and more."

"There are a number of different versions to choose from:

• full text search
• full text search with option to limit to full view only
• bibliographic search
• bibliographic search with option to limit to full view only
• bibliographic search with multiple limit options (title, author, subject, identifier, publisher, series title, contributing library, full view only)"

"More information on the date ranges, subjects and languages represented in HathiTrust may be found at: http://www.hathitrust.org/visualizations_callnumbers."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Library of Congress Unveils Redesigned Search System for Archival Finding Aids

Searching special collections at the Library of Congress has just gotten easier.

October 28, 2010 — "Thanks to a completely redesigned search system, at http://www.loc.gov/findingaids/, 1,100 finding aids will now smoothly lead remote and onsite researchers to more than 32 million archival items in the Manuscript, Music, American Folklife, Prints and Photographs, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound, and other Library of Congress research centers."

"Clean, more powerful displays help visitors search and browse through the finding aids. Each finding aid progressively describes the parts of an individual collection, summarizes the overall scope of the material, conveys details about the individuals and organizations involved, and notes the conditions under which the collection may be accessed or copied. Links are provided from the finding aids to related digitized content when available."

"Better keyword access to all Library finding aids as well as to the contents of individual documents lets users see their search results 'in context.' Users can start a search on almost any page, making search refinement easy and eliminating the need to click back to a search page to conduct a new search."

"Moving between archival finding aids and the Library's collections in the Library of Congress Online Catalog is also now possible through integrated browse lists of subjects, names, titles and dates. Users can also follow links directly to individual collection records."

For more information, please see the full press release.

IMLS Grant to U-Michigan to Study Large-Scale Digitization

Announcement from Glenda Bullock, School of Information, University of Michigan, October 27, 2010 — "University of Michigan School of Information Associate Professor Paul Conway has received a two-year National Leadership Grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to support his research on validating quality in large-scale digitization."

"Conway's project, 'Validating Quality in Large-Scale Digitization: Metrics, Measurement, and Use-Cases,' grows out of a planning project for evaluating the quality of digital objects in the HathiTrust Digital Library, for which he received an Andrew Mellon Foundation grant in 2009. HathiTrust is a shared digital repository for the nation's great research libraries with over 7 million digitized volumes."

"Mass digitization of books and serials is generating vast digital collections and transforming education and research at all levels. But this transformation has also given rise to questions about the quality and value of some of the digital copies produced by such large-scale projects."

"Conway's project will rigorously address some of these questions. 'This research project is an effort to learn what quality means for users in a large-scale digitization program. IMLS's valuable support will help us take a major step toward automating quality review and sharing the characteristics of digitized books and journals.'"

For more information, please contact Glenda Bullock gbullock@umich.edu.

Tibbo named to professorship, archivists presidency

October 27, 2010 — "Helen Tibbo, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the new president of the Society of American Archivists."

"Founded in 1936, the society is North America's oldest and largest national archival professional association. Its mission is to serve the educational and informational needs of more than 5,500 individual and institutional members and to provide leadership to ensure the identification, preservation and use of records of historical value. For more information, visit http://www2.archivists.org/."

"Tibbo also was recently appointed Alumni Distinguished Professor in the school, where she has been on the faculty since 1989. She has been an assistant dean and associate dean. The professorship is awarded to tenured professors with exceptional records of distinction."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Six New Members of National Museum and Library Services Board Take Oath of Office

October 27, 2010 — "On October 18, Archivist of the United States David S. Ferreiro administered the oath of office to six new members of the National Museum and Library Services Board (NMLSB), the advisory board of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). All six new members were appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate earlier this year."

"'IMLS relies heavily on the National Museum and Library Services Board for the invaluable advice it provides,' said IMLS Acting Director Marsha L. Semmel. 'These six new members have broad knowledge and expertise, and represent a wide range of disciplines within the museum and library fields. We are grateful for their willingness to engage in this important public service.'"

"The new members are as follows:

• John Coppola
• Dr. Carla Hayden
• Mary Minow
• Dr. Lawrence J. Pijeaux, Jr.
• D. Winston Tabb
• Robert Wedgeworth"

For more information, including details regarding the new members' backgrounds, please see the full press release.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the University of Washington, and the International City/County Management Association to Develop a Framework for Digitally Inclusive Communities

October 19, 2010 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today that it is awarding a $150,000 cooperative agreement to the University of Washington in partnership with the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) to develop a framework for digitally inclusive communities."

"'Public access to high-speed internet is becoming essential to meet the workforce development, education, civic engagement, government services, and health information needs of communities. And people increasingly depend upon libraries and community-based organizations to provide that access,' said Marsha L. Semmel, IMLS Acting Director. 'The framework for digitally inclusive communities will help policymakers and practitioners make decisions that enhance their communities' social and economic well-being.'..."

"...The framework, which will identify the principles, elements, and characteristics of organizations and communities that foster digital inclusion, is intended to be a first step in the future development of benchmarks and community-level guidelines. Representatives of libraries, community-based organizations, business, local government, and non-governmental organizations will be engaged in the development and use their knowledge of the needs and complexities of local communities to ensure the applicability of the framework."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Special Libraries Association Inducts Three Into Hall of Fame

October 14, 2010 — "A pioneer of solo librarianship, a valuable mentor to and advocate of librarians around the world, and a tireless supporter of the SLA New York Chapter are the latest information professionals to be inducted into the Special Libraries Association's Hall of Fame."

"SLA reserves Hall of Fame recognition for members at or near the end of their active professional careers. The honor recognizes service and contributions to the association."

"The 2010 inductees are Guy St. Clair, Judith Field, and John Ganly."

For the biographies of the three inductees, please see the full press release.

Revision of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) - Call for Comments

Announcement from Michael Rush (Yale University) and Bill Stockting (British Library), Co-chairs, TS-EAD October 14, 2010 — "In February this year the Society of American Archivists charged a new subcommittee of the Standards Committee, the Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Description (TS-EAD), to undertake a revision of the standard within a period of 5 years."

"To ensure the greatest possible input from EAD users around the world, the subcommittee has an extensive international membership and is calling for proposed changes to the current version, EAD 2002. The deadline for change proposals is 28 February 2011."

"In completing the revision process the subcommittee will take note of the Design Principles for Enhancements to EAD published at the time of the last revision. The subcommittee will take account also of the global success of EAD and current implementation practice. It will endeavour to encourage continued adoption of EAD as a tool for the online dissemination of archival information by ensuring that EAD is as economical and straightforward as possible to implement and use."

"To propose changes, please fill out the form at http://www.archivists.org/standards/ead/eadRevisions.asp. Please fill in a separate form for each change suggested, with a brief description and the rationale for the proposed change. Comments may also be sent by e-mail to ts-ead@archivists.org and should include the information in the form. To ensure that the revision process is as open as possible, all comments must be attributable to named individuals and affiliated organisations where appropriate. Anonymous responses will not be considered."

Creative Commons launches Public Domain Mark; Europeana and Cultural Heritage Institutions lead early adoption

October 11, 2010 — "Today, Creative Commons announces the release of the Public Domain Mark, a tool that enables works free of known copyright restrictions to be labeled in a way that clearly communicates that status to the public, and allows the works to be easily discovered over the Internet. The Public Domain Mark effectively increases the value of the public domain by making works that are already free of copyright readily accessible to the public. The Mark makes it clear to teachers and students, artists and scientists, that they are free to re-use material. Its release benefits everyone who wishes to build upon the rich and vast resources that are part of the shared public domain."

"Europeana—Europe's digital library, museum and archive—is the first major adopter of the Public Domain Mark. The tool will become the standard mark for works free of known copyright that are shared via the Europeana portal, playing an important infrastructural role in the EU's efforts to ensure that all works shared online are marked with rights information. Europeana, whose partners include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Germany's Bundesarchiv (Federal archives), estimates that the millions of out-of-copyright works made accessible via its searchable database will be labelled with the Public Domain Mark by mid-2011."

"Creative Commons worked closely with Europeana and several of its members throughout the development of the Public Domain Mark. That process also included a public consultation period and review by CC's worldwide affiliate network comprised of legal experts from more than 70 jurisdictions. The Public Domain Mark, to be used for marking works already free of copyright, complements Creative Commons' CC0 public domain dedication, which provides an easy and reliable way for adding new works to the public domain prior to the expiry of copyright."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Europeana opens virtual exhibition space

Announcement from Friedel Grant, Europeana, October 7, 2010 — "Europeana, Europe's digital library, museum and archive, has launched two online exhibitions that explore highlights of art and literature - Reading Europe and Reshaping Art Nouveau."

"Reading Europe: European culture through the book showcases the full texts of 1,000 of Europeana's most fascinating books, from medieval cookbooks to 18th century English bestsellers. Many literary masterpieces can be found in their earliest printings, including Don Quixote in the first Spanish edition and Dostoyevsky's The Idiot in the first Russian edition. Visitors can browse richly decorated manuscripts and discover compelling historical works like Jammers Minde—the fascinating 17th century autobiography of a King's daughter and her 22-year imprisonment in Copenhagen's infamous Blue Tower."

"Reading Europe offers a unique opportunity to view literary gems in 32 languages, from Albanian to Yiddish. It was commissioned by Europeana and curated by The European Library, working with experts in Europe's national libraries. It gives users an engaging introduction to some of Europe's literary highlights, selected from among nearly 5 million digitised texts on Europeana...."

"...Reshaping Art Nouveau takes visitors on a cross-border journey that encompasses everything from domestic furnishings and decorative art to architecture and advertising. It tells the story of how the curved lines and floral themes of Art Nouveau—Jugendstil in German, Stile Liberty in Italian—brought an elegance and a hint of decadence to urban life as it swept through every European capital around 1900."

For more on Europeana and Reshaping Art Nouveau Online, contact Friedel Grant on +31 (0) 70 314 0182 or Marcomms@europeana.eu.

ARL and Ithaka S+R Awarded IMLS Grant to Study Digitized Special Collections

September 30, 2010 — "The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), in collaboration with Ithaka S+R, has been awarded a grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grants Program in the amount of $464,286 to study how libraries, archives, and museums are sustaining digitized special collections. The 2-year study builds upon past work examining sustainability of digital resources done by Ithaka S+R."

"Project activities under this cooperative agreement will include a survey of digitized special collections and focused interviews with leaders and project staff in selected cultural heritage organizations who manage those collections. The study's final report of lessons learned, recommendations, and case studies will be freely shared through the partners' websites, through a webcast, and conference presentations."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Library Releases Final Study Showing Dire State of Sound Recording Preservation and Access

Study to Inform a Library of Congress National Plan to Protect Audio Heritage

September 29, 2010 — "Digital technology alone will not ensure the preservation and survival of the nation's sound history. That is one of the findings in a major study released today by the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) detailing the state of sound-recording preservation and access. The study was mandated by the U.S. Congress under the 'National Recording Preservation Act of 2000' (P.L. 106-474) and is the first comprehensive study on a national level that examines the state of America's sound-recording preservation ever conducted in the United States."

"Titled 'The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age,' the study outlines the interlocking issues that now threaten the long-term survival of America's sound-recording history. It also identifies the public and private policy issues that strongly bear on whether the nation's most culturally and historically important sound recordings will be preserved for future generations...."

"...'The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age' is available for purchase and as a free download at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub148abst.html. Information for this study was gathered through interviews, public hearings and written submissions. NRPB previously commissioned five ancillary studies in support of this final report, which will lay the groundwork for the National Recording Preservation Plan, to be developed and published later this year."

For more information, please see the full press release.

ALA, Center for Library and Information Innovation receive grant to develop e-government Web resource for libraries

September 29, 2010 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a $581,609 grant to the American Library Association (ALA) and the Center for Library and Information Innovation (CLII) of the University of Maryland's iSchool to develop a Web resource to help libraries and governments better assist users with successfully engaging in e-government activities. Project partners also include the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Information Institute at Florida State University."

"Developed jointly by ALA and CLII, this Web resource will include service and resource content, tutorials, best practice approaches to government-library collaborations, embedded expert government information digital reference, guidance on the provision of e-government services, the ability to share and exchange practices, and tools to facilitate local customization of e-government service provision and resources in libraries. This Web resource will facilitate the ability of libraries to:

• Provide essential e-government services to their residents and communities;
• Work with agencies to develop collaborations to facilitate services to individuals; and
• Develop a range of collective support tools, templates, and training materials that help libraries of all types engage in e-government services rather than each library working on its own."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Pitt Unveils Espresso Book Machine at Hillman Library

Revolutionary technology prints perfectly bound paperbacks in just minutes; could lower the cost of select student textbooks

September 27, 2010 — "An exciting and revolutionary method of printing books is now in operation at the University of Pittsburgh."

"The Espresso Book Machine (EBM), which can print a library-quality paperback book with a full-color laminated cover in just minutes, was shown to a number of Pitt dignitaries, librarians, and members of the news media who gathered to watch a demonstration this week at Pitt's Hillman Library."

"The machine, the first of its kind to be used in Pennsylvania, was purchased this summer by Pitt's University Library System (ULS), working in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Press and the University Book Center, to print books as the titles are ordered—a less expensive process than buying a minimum run from a printing company. Pitt is one of only 30 universities worldwide to have the EBM."

"The EBM's software system, called EspressNet, connects the machine to a vast network of permissioned content, including nearly a million titles in the EspressNet database, thousands of titles in the ULS D-Scribe online collections, and books published by University of Pittsburgh Press. The EBM will print, align, mill, glue, bind and trim anything that a laser printer can print-from textbooks to lab journals. A typical book can be produced in less than seven minutes."

For more information, please see the full press release.

IMLS Awards National Leadership Grants to 34 Institutions, $17,311,078 Distributed

September 27, 2010 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the primary source of federal support for the nation's museums and libraries, announced the 34 institutions that are receiving National Leadership Grants (NLG) totaling $17,311,078. The projects funded by these grants will have national impact and generate results that can be widely replicated, extending the benefit of this federal support. In addition to the grants announced today, NLG collaborative planning grants totaling $763,715 were announced in July."

"Funded project grants fell into the following categories:

• Advancing Digital Resources: Support the creation, use, presentation and preservation of significant digital resources, as well as the development of tools to enhance access, use, and management of digital assets.
• Research: Support projects that have the potential to improve museum, archival, and library practice, resource use, programs, and services. Both basic and applied research projects are encouraged.
• Demonstration: Support projects that produce a replicable model or practice that is usable by other institutions for improving services and performance.
• Library-Museum Collaboration Grants: Support collaborative projects that address the educational, economic, cultural, and social needs of a community."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Oxford University Press reaches open access milestone

September 24, 2010 — "Oxford University Press (OUP) is pleased to announce that the 100th journal has now joined its Oxford Open initiative. The Journal of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Infectious Diseases, which are to be published by OUP on behalf of the Infectious Diseases Society of America from 2011, have become the 100th and 101st journals to participate."

"OUP launched Oxford Open in July 2005 with 24 journals. Over the past five years the programme has grown to include six 'gold' fully-open access titles, including Nucleic Acids Research, and 95 optional-open access titles, which allow authors to pay an open access publication charge to make their paper freely available online immediately. Authors also have their papers automatically deposited and made publicly available in PubMed Central by OUP, where subject relevant...."

"...Oxford Open includes titles from the full range of subjects published by OUP, including life sciences, medicine, law, humanities, maths, and social sciences. OUP also supports 'green' OA by allowing authors to deposit their 'accepted' manuscripts in institutional or subject repositories after a specified time period (dependent on individual journal policy)."

For more information, please see the full press release.

2010 Digital Preservation Award Shortlists Press Release

September 21, 2010 — "The Institute for Conservation (Icon) and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are delighted to announce the shortlist for the Digital Preservation Award 2010."

"Digital data is fragile so we have to think hard about what sort of digital legacy we want to leave behind,' explained William Kilbride of the DPC. 'Our generation has invested as never before in digital resources and we've done so because of the opportunity they bring. They have grown in volume, complexity and importance to the point that our children are baffled by the inefficiencies of the analogue age. Pervasive, fluid and fragile: digital data is a defining feature of our age. But it will take a co-ordinated effort of research and training to ensure that our digital memory is available tomorrow.'"

"'That's why we sponsor the Digital Preservation Award. It celebrates the excellence and innovation that will help to ensure our digital memory is available tomorrow. It is one of five awards which are collectively called the Conservation Awards, co-ordinated by a working party of the Institute for Conservation (ICON) and sponsored by us.'"

"Short-listed for the Digital Preservation Award (in no particular order) are:

• The MEMENTO Project: Time Travel for the Web, from Old Dominion University and the Los Alamos National Lab in the United States
• Web Continuity: ensuring access to online government information, from The National Archives UK
• PLATO 3: Preservation Planning made simple from Vienna University of Technology and the PLANETS Project
• The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access
• Preserving Virtual Worlds, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign with Rochester Institute of Technology, University of Maryland, Stanford University and Linden Lab in the United States"

For more information, please see the full press release.

Deposit, save, share, find that content and data: new UC3 services launch

September 16, 2010 — "The University of California Curation Center (UC3) is excited to be launching three new services September 15 and 17, 2010. They include Merritt (named for CDL's close neighbor, Lake Merritt), a tool for the UC community to manage, archive and share their content safely, persistently and for the long term, EZID (ee-zee-eye-dee), and JHOVE2. EZID provides researchers a way to persistently identify and access a scholar's research such as datasets, critical to the long-term distribution and availability of the work, and JHOVE2 is improved software for managing digital collections. UC campus colleagues have also contributed to the enhancements of these tools."

"Please contact UC3 for more information and refer researchers with long term access and preservation needs at http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/contact.html."

"These services are a part of UC3's strategy for curation micro-services. Learn more at: http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/curation/index.html."

For more information, please see the full press release.

ibiblio receives $50,000 donation

September 14, 2010 — "ibiblio, the public's library and digital archive, has received $50,000 from the Beal Fund of the Triangle Community Foundation on behalf of Lulu.com. Lulu.com is an open publishing resource that helps authors distribute their work for profit and helps buyers find the content they need. The gift was made to support ibiblio's continued growth as one of the Internet's largest public libraries."

"...ibiblio.org, which will celebrate its 18th birthday in October, was one of the first Web sites on the Internet. It historically has been a pioneer in a number of areas, including Internet radio. Today, ibiblio is home to one of the largest 'collection of collections' on the Internet and hosts nearly 2,500 non-software related projects."

"'All the giving to ibiblio helps us reach out further and touch more people,' said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio and clinical associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 'We process anywhere from 12 to 16 million transactions per day on ibiblio.'"

For more information, please see the full press release.

University of Texas San Antonio opens nation's first bookless library on a university campus

September 9, 2010 — "UTSA officials announced Thursday the opening of the Applied Engineering and Technology (AET) Library, the nation's first completely bookless library on a college or university campus. The 80-person capacity library, which caters to College of Sciences and College of Engineering students, is a satellite of the larger John Peace Library on the Main Campus."

"Electronic research is central to the AET Library. Instead of storing printed volumes, the library offers students a rapidly growing collection of electronic resources including 425,000 e-books and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions. Skilled science and engineering librarians are available during library hours to help students who need research assistance."

"UTSA's electronic library is catching on quickly with students, who are finding that the library staff is more available to assist them now that they don't have to circulate and reshelve books. Publications that students want to read also are more accessible because the online format allows many students to simultaneously access the same volume...."

"...With the eLibrary open, UTSA is exploring ways to take the bookless concept even further. In the next few months, there are plans to start providing pre-loaded collections of eBooks on eReader devices such as iPad or Kindle for students to check out and take home."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Copyright © 2010 Corporation for National Research Initiatives