I N   B R I E F

November/December 2011

Report on the International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives 2011 (SDA 2011)

Contributed by:
Livia Predoiu
Researcher
University of Magdeburg, Germany
predoiu@ovgu.de

Dr. Andreas Nürnberger
Professor
University of Magdeburg, Germany
andreas.nuernberger@ovgu.de

Dr. Seamus Ross
Dean and Professor
iSchool, University of Toronto, Canada
seamus.ross@utoronto.ca

The International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives (SDA 2011) was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2011) this year in Berlin on the 29th of September. The motivation of the workshop was to stimulate research in the intersection of semantic web technologies and digital archiving in order to create sustainable long-term perspectives for digital cultural heritage. Digital archiving is a richly interdisciplinary research domain, and the next step digital archiving has to take is one towards Semantic Digital Archives that shift the focus of digital archives to knowledge representation and knowledge management issues surrounding digital archiving. In this way, new and sophisticated solutions can be devised to connect the content and the context of digital material with archival strategies and the software and hardware that is used for storing and retrieving digital archival material. Hence, one major aim was to provide an opportunity for collaboration and cross-fertilization between the digital libraries, the digital archives and the semantic web communities. All aspects of these emerging Semantic Digital Archives were of interest in the workshop and submissions on all these topics were strongly encouraged.

The workshop was well accepted by the community and was able to attract 23 submissions from which 6 long papers and 7 short papers were selected, yielding 13 papers altogether. The papers covered a broad range of topics in the area of Semantic Digital Archives, bringing together people from archives, museums, digital libraries and the semantic web.

The workshop opened with a presentation by Dr. Winfried Bergmeyer from the computer games museum of Berlin. In his talk, he nicely motivated the broad spectrum of requirements that need to be tackled when archiving software: from hardware archiving issues, over emulation of outdated computer hardware to legal issues regarding the copyright of outdated software. Many of these problems were picked up again by the subsequent presentations and dealt with in more detail. For example, an approach for hardware organization according to the content of the archival material was proposed. Another presentation provided interesting insights into the life cycle of archived product contexts in companies and an approach on how to deal with the life cycle by means of semantic web technology. In addition, a couple of linked data infrastructures for harvesting digital archival material from different providers and presenting the archival content in the linked data format in portals were presented. Combinations of typical digital archiving technology such as LOCKSS and languages for representing archival records such as the Encoded Archival Context—Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) Tag Library with semantic web technology were critically reviewed as well. The kinds of heritage that we discussed were taken from a broad range of archival domains such as psychology, statistical studies in the social sciences and television. Hence, the workshop nicely illustrated a broad spectrum of requirements from several application domains.

The workshop closed with an in-depth summary and discussion of the topics presented at the workshop in order to critically review the arguments and requirements of the research communities involved and to point out open issues and challenges for future work. Overall—probably due to the diversity of backgrounds of the participants involved—the workshop managed to trigger quite controversial discussions and to open up inspiring new views on the field.

More information about the workshop can be found at its home page http://sda2011.dke-research.de. Online CEUR proceedings will soon be available as well, at which time a link to the proceedings will be provided on the home page of the workshop.

Report on the Fourth Workshop on Very Large Digital Libraries

Contributed by:
Leonardo Candela & Paolo Manghi
{leonardo.candela, paolo.manghi}@isti.cnr.it
Italian National Research Council
Pisa, Italy

Yannis Ioannidis
yannis@di.uoa.gr
University of Athens
Athens, Greece

The 4th Workshop on Very Large Digital Libraries was held in Berlin, Germany on September 29, 2011, in conjunction with the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2011) – formerly known as the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL). The workshop series started in 2008 with the aim of promoting discussions on the specific research area going under the umbrella of "very large digital libraries" – with a long term goal of establishing it as a research field on its own. This year the workshop called for contributions focusing on "research data" in the context of very large digital libraries and archives.

The workshop program comprised two invited talks and six presentations. The invited talks elaborated on: (i) state of the art, issues and open research directions related to content based retrieval in very large datasets of visual documents; and (ii) challenges affecting the development of Collaborative Data Infrastructures across scientific disciplines. The six presentations elaborated on: (i) functional and architectural requirements of a general bit repository mass processing service, capable of abstracting over several programming models and platforms; (ii) digital preservation of relational databases by focusing on the conceptual model, hence considering database semantics as an important aspect of the preservation strategy; (iii) a scalable strategy based on the "extract, transform, archive" workflow for automatically addressing research-data problems, ranging from the extraction of legacy data to its long-term storage; (iv) The Language Archive (LAT) infrastructure and its transition towards open federated archive environment by means of openness to novel metadata formats; (v) performance improvements in the open source Greenstone digital library software that resulted from a more detailed understanding of the demands made of its database component when building large collections; and (vi) an extension of the data storage model of Invenio – a software platform for building a web-based (document) repository developed at CERN – to efficiently deal with figures and data.

A brainstorming session concluded the workshop. This final session confirmed the agreement that a digital library can be considered "very large" if any of the aspects on user management, content management, functionality management, and policy management becomes "very large" with respect to (a) volume – the number of entities is huge; (b) velocity – the speed requirement for collecting, processing and using entities is demanding; or (c) variety – the heterogeneity in terms of entity types to be managed and sources to be merged is high. Moreover, it was agreed that very-largeness is a matter of thresholds and challenges capturing the limitations of current solutions.

To pursue the workshop discussion and involve the community in the large in the identification of "challenges" characterising Very Large Digital Libraries, the LinkedIn group "Open Forum on Very Large Digital Libraries" has been created.

A detailed report of the workshop has been submitted to the SIGMOD Record. More information about the workshop, the accepted papers and the presentations are available from the dedicated website.

UNC's Digital Innovation Lab: Fostering Public Digital Humanities

Contributed by:
Pamella R. Lach, PhD
Manager, Digital Innovation Lab & Project Manager, "Main Street, Carolina"
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
plach@email.unc.edu

We recently launched the Digital Innovation Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a virtual and interdisciplinary space created to support, promote and facilitate public digital humanities. Collaboration informs every aspect of our work in creating publicly-faced projects, developing methodologies, and building tools that are scalable, reusable and repurposable. Our team spans a range of disciplines; our faculty directors, Robert Allen (American Studies) and Richard Marciano (School of Information and Library Science – SILS), bring differing but complimentary perspectives on the digital humanities. Our four graduate students, who function as project managers and programmers, represent SILS and Computer Science; two of us have previous graduate training in History and Anthropology.

Our efforts to promote public digital humanities and humanistic social sciences are informed by a recent move towards "big data." Such a shift has prompted important methodological questions: As we move from a position of data scarcity to one of data abundance, how do we adapt our scholarship, teaching, and learning? And how do we accomplish all three in ways that are accessible to a broad range of users?

The Digital Innovation Lab's work contributes to these ongoing conversations by developing and demonstrating best practices for the digital humanities. Our showcase project, "Main Street, Carolina" is an open-source digital history toolkit for spatializing and visualizing digitized historical content. Developed with an NEH Digital Startup Grant and a C. Felix Harvey Foundation Award to Advance Institutional Priorities at UNC-Chapel Hill in partnership with the Carolina Digital Library and Archives at Wilson Library, "Main Street, Carolina" models collaborative project development and experiential education. We match graduate students in our American Studies Digital Humanities classes with statewide cultural heritage organizations such as historical preservation societies, museums, and libraries. Our students receive course credit and hands-on experience in digital technologies as they develop online exhibits, walking tours, and discovery tools for our clients to deploy in their local communities. We have developed K-12 lesson plans for several projects and are currently exploring how we might incorporate user-generated content. And we have used many of these projects as discovery and learning platforms in our undergraduate classrooms.

To aid our work and the work of others, we are experimenting with methods for automating data harvesting from historical sources to facilitate mashing up different data sets in ways not easily accomplished before the digital age. We are working on extracting data from OCR'd city directories and historic urban ground plan maps to see just how much these processes could be automated or crowd-sourced.

In the end, we hope that our work can help stimulate and support innovative work in the digital humanities. This work has the potential to transform scholarship and graduate/undergraduate training while opening up the door for citizen scholars, archivists, and curators. Pooling our efforts as a community of practitioners across the university, the state, the country and around the world will engender previously unimaginable projects that could change the way people understand and relate to their own pasts.

Can We Agree TERMS? Shaping Techniques for Electronic Resource Management as a Model of Best Practice

Contributed by:
Jill Emery: jemery@pdx.edu
Collection Development Librarian, Portland State University, Oregon, USA
and
Graham Stone: G.Stone@hud.ac.uk
Information Resources Manager, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom

Back in 2008, we (Jill Emery, then at the University of Texas, now at Portland State and Graham Stone from the University of Huddersfield) started a discussion about e-resource management. We began by swapping ideas between the US and UK about what e-resource management meant to us and how we could put it into practice. After much debate we settled on the electronic resources lifecycle upon which to base our ideas and TERMS was born. We then set about trying to expand on the concept by detailing our experience of best practice. However we soon realised that we had something much bigger than we had first thought, and we decided to expose our ideas to open peer review to make sure we were on the right track – to keep it real!

Commencing in September, in order to solicit feedback from Libraryland, we started releasing a new TERM every week via a blog, a Twitter hashtag and a Facebook group. Currently, we have 112 followers on Twitter, 14 direct followers of the TERMS blog, and 142 members in our Facebook group.

So far we have received some great feedback, but we want more! Tell us about your areas of best practice and help us refine TERMS for others to use. Does what we have said relate to e-books? What are your experiences? We would also like to share workflows – recent research has shown that over 1/3 of academic libraries put workflow management at the top of their prioritization list, and this area has also been highlighted as a gap by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) ERM Data Standards and Best Practices Review, and in the UK by the Managing Electronic Resource Issues (MERI) project.

Here's how you can follow TERMS:

BLOG: http://6terms.tumblr.com/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/6TERMS

Facebook: Search for TERMS; it is an open group.

The 6 TERMS we will be covering are:

1. Investigation of New Content for Purchase/Addition
2. Acquisition of New Content
3. Implementation
4. Ongoing Evaluation and Access
5. Annual Review
6. Cancellation and Replacement

New BLDS Digital Library Is Helping Research from Developing Countries Enjoy a Wider Global Readership

Contributed by:
Henry Rowsell
Acquisitions Librarian
British Library for Development Studies (BLDS)
Brighton, E. Sussex, United Kingdom
h.rowsell@ids.ac.uk

With so many library users now expecting to access information through search engines, developing-country publications tend to get overlooked in favour of the wealth of research available online from American and European academic institutions.

The British Library for Development Studies (BLDS) has the largest collection of economic and social development materials in Europe, and over half of it originates from developing countries. But until now, much of the BLDS physical collection has only been available to visitors to the library or users of its Document Delivery service. BLDS is hoping that its newly launched Digital Library will help redress the situation by making research from developing countries more accessible and visible online.

The new service, funded by the UK's Department for International Development, has been created to help decades of research from developing-country institutions enjoy a wider global readership. BLDS is working with partner research institutes in Africa and Asia to digitise their printed publications and host them online so they can be easily found through search engines. Nearly 600 papers – from Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Ghana and India – have been digitised so far with more to be added in coming months as BLDS continues building partnerships with research institutes.

The publications in the BLDS Digital Library are being made available through a Creative Commons licence. Permissions have been sought and successfully obtained on this basis, because the licence protects the intellectual property rights of the copyright-holding institution while still maximizing the opportunity for future sharing and dissemination of their content. Copying or distribution of work licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives licence is permitted under the following conditions:

• The work must be attributed.
• The work cannot be used for commercial purposes.
• The work may not be altered in any way.

The digitisation process uses Covergold Locator Rapide scanning and ABBYY FineReader OCR (optical character recognition) software to preserve the readability of older documents and to allow free-text searching. All files are converted into PDF format. The repository software is DSpace, chosen because it is an open-source product with a worldwide community of users that is large and growing, especially in Africa and the global South.

For more information on the BLDS Digital Library, contact Henry Rowsell or visit the BLDS Global Projects webpage at http://blds.ids.ac.uk/global-projects.

I N   T H E   N E W S

November/December 2011

IMLS Partners with George Mason University's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for 2012 WebWise Conference

November 4, 2011 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today that George Mason University's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM), partnering with the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC), has been chosen to help organize the 2012 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital Age."

"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. A signature initiative of IMLS, 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 with an opportunity to showcase their exemplary projects."

"The theme for the 2012 WebWise conference will be 'Tradition and Innovation,' as panelists and presenters investigate the use of digital technologies in the humanities, especially history. A variety of IMLS-funded projects will be demonstrated during the conference. The conference will be preceded by a day-long 'unconference.'"

"Save the Date: WebWise will take place Wednesday through Friday, February 29 - March 2, 2012 at the Renaissance Harbor Place in Baltimore, MD."

For more information, please see the full press release.

IMLS Awards Grant to OCLC's WebJunction to Get Communities on the Path to Digital Inclusion

November 4, 2011 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a grant of $249,871 to OCLC's WebJunction for a project aimed at helping communities across the country get started on the path to digital inclusion. The project will complement IMLS's efforts to help libraries and other community-based organizations (CBOs) make strategic decisions about providing public access to broadband."

"Working with its partners, TechSoup Global, and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), OCLC's WebJunction will evaluate the needs of libraries, CBOs, and city and county managers seeking to get started with digital inclusion. Based on these findings, the partners will create and test a summit agenda for local community gatherings to develop a shared understanding about digital inclusion and begin to create an action plan. The partners will make improvements to the agenda based on the test results and select a limited number of sites to participate in an in-person summit. Participating sites will identify teams of library representatives, city or county managers, and CBO representatives to participate in the program. Each team will develop and host at least one digital inclusion activity in its local community. The partners will also provide resources online at WebJunction, TechSoup Global, and ICMA's Knowledge Network. In addition, partners will evaluate and publish outcomes, and jointly report to IMLS on project effectiveness and lessons learned."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Elsevier Announces Winners of Apps for Library Idea Challenge

November 3, 2011 — "Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, today announced the winners of the Apps for Library Idea Challenge at the 2011 Charleston Conference in Charleston, SC. The international competition encouraged librarians and information professionals to conceptualize solutions to the challenges that they and their constituents face in addressing the search and discovery of information."

"Following the submission period (May 13 to September 2, 2011), an international panel of judges selected 10 app concepts as finalists. The community was invited to comment on the finalists and vote for their favorite idea. Two grand-prize winners were selected – one by the panel of judges and one by community vote:"

"Judge's Choice Grand Prize: External link Journals/Conferences @ Your Fingertips, proposed by Low, Ke Khoon, a librarian at the National University of Singapore, would identify the top 20 journal or conference titles relating to the user's search results, ranked by number of relevant articles, and deliver RSS feeds with table of contents for these journals."

"Community Choice Grand Prize: External link JTOCs 2 Go, proposed by Andrea Szwajcer, a librarian at the University of Manitoba, Canada, would enable users to customize a journal table of contents notification service with full-text viewing and sharing of articles in a clean, easy-to-read format."

For more information, please see the full press release.

IMLS Seeks Input on Proposed Framework for Digitally Inclusive Communities

ONLINE Survey LIVE November 2, 2011 - November 30, 2011

November 2, 2011 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services, working together with the International City/County Management Association and the University of Washington Information School, is seeking public input on its proposed framework for Building Digitally Inclusive Communities. The framework is intended to help community leaders convene community discussions to get the information and stakeholder engagement they need to make strategic decisions about providing public access to broadband."

"The Building Digitally Inclusive Communities framework was developed through consultation with more than 100 organizations and individuals, who shared their expert knowledge about different communities' lessons learned and best practices. It describes a vision for digital inclusion and eleven principles. It also makes recommendations about how to get started to develop a implement a community action plan for digital inclusion...."

"...Survey respondents will be asked about their opinion about the value of the framework to support community collaboration (individuals, businesses, community organization and government), the usefulness of the principles identified in the guide and the effectiveness of report in raising awareness about digital inclusion."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Global Open Access Portal launched

November 2, 2011 — "The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP), aiming at presenting a top level view of Open Access to scientific information, was launched at a special side event organized during the 36th session of the UNESCO General Conference, on Tuesday 1 November 2011, at Paris Headquarters."

"The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) presents a snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world."

"For countries that have been more successful in implementing Open Access, the portal highlights critical success factors and aspects of the enabling environment. For countries and regions that are still in the early stages of Open Access development, the portal identifies key players, potential barriers and opportunities."

For more information, please see the full press release.

DuraSpace Launches Open-Source Cloud Service

DuraCloud helps define cloud's purpose by preserving scholarly, scientific and cultural heritage for future generations

November 1, 2011 — "DuraSpace, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving the world's scholarly, scientific and cultural records, today announced the launch of its managed cloud service, DuraCloud. As the only managed software service that lets organizations archive content across more than one cloud provider, DuraCloud ensures that irreplaceable documents, imagery and videos are always accessible. A number of the country's most prestigious institutions including MIT, Columbia University, Northwestern University, and Rice University have signed up to use the managed cloud service to preserve digital resources...."

"...Archiving digital libraries and research output for academic institutions, museums, and other knowledge stewards, DuraCloud offers:

• Replication and synchronization of content across multiple cloud providers through one unified interface
• Access to a suite of applications embedded in the DuraCloud platform to do more with your data
• Data distribution and streaming to any internet-linked device
• Secure storage of digital archives and periodic content 'health checks' assuring information is being preserved as it should be
• A simple-to-use yet powerful dashboard to manage all content across the cloud
• An open-source community dedicated to on-going technological development, along with support assistance to ease the transition into the cloud"

For more information, please see the full press release.

Commission's Recommendation on Digitisation and Digital Preservation

October 28, 2011 — "The European Commission has just adopted a Recommendation on Digitisation and Digital Preservation, asking Member States to step up their efforts, pool their resources and involve private actors in digitising cultural material and making it available through Europeana."

"In particular, the Recommendation invites Member States to:

• put in place solid plans for their investments in digitisation and foster public-private partnerships to share the gigantic cost of digitisation (recently estimated at 100 billion EUR). The Recommendation spells out key principles to ensure that such partnerships are fair and balanced.
• make available through Europeana 30 million objects by 2015, including all Europe's masterpieces which are no longer protected by copyright, and all material digitised with public funding.
• get more in-copyright material online, by, for example, creating the legal framework conditions enabling large-scale digitisation and cross-border accessibility of out-of-commerce works.
• reinforce their strategies and adapt their legislation to ensure long-term preservation of digital material, by, for example, ensuring the material deposited is not protected by technical measures that impede librarians from preserving it."

"The Recommendation is an update of a first recommendation adopted in 2006...."

For more information, please see the full press release.

IMLS Announces the 2011 National Medal for Museum and Library Service Recipients

October 25, 2011 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has selected five libraries and five museums to receive the 2011 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. The National Medal is the nation's highest honor for museums and libraries for extraordinary civic, educational, economic, environmental, and social contributions. Recipients must demonstrate innovative approaches to public service and community outreach."

"The winners of the National Medal for Museum and Library Service are selected each year by the Director of IMLS, following an open nomination process and based on the recommendations of the National Museum and Library Services Board."

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

1. Alachua County Library District, Gainesville, FL
2. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
3. Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, OH
4. EdVenture Children's Museum, Columbia, SC
5. Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA
6. Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Collegeville, MN
7. Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Richmond, VA
8. Madison Children's Museum, Madison, WI
9. San Jose Public Library, San Jose, CA
10. Weippe Public Library & Discovery Center, Weippe, ID"

For more information, please see the full press release.

NISO Launches New Open Discovery Initiative to Develop Standards and Recommended Practices for Library Discovery Services Based on Indexed Search

October 25, 2011 — "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) voting members have approved a new Open Discovery Initiative work item to develop standards and recommended practices for next generation library discovery services. Using an aggregated index search of a wide range of resources, licensed and free, from multiple providers, these discovery services have the ability to deliver more sophisticated services with instant performance, compared to the federated search techniques previously used."

"'Marshall Breeding (Director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Vanderbilt University), Jenny Walker (Consultant for Ex Libris), and I hosted an Open Discovery Initiative invitational meeting at the ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans in June 2011,' stated Oren Beit-Arie Chief Strategy Officer at Ex Libris. 'We wanted to gauge interest in exploring the issues encountered with these new discovery services and in pursuing more formal standards or best practices for information providers to provide content to discovery services. We received an overwhelmingly positive response from stakeholders, which led the group to bring the project forward to NISO.'"

"...Individuals interested in participating in this working group should contact Nettie Lagace (nlagace@niso.org). An interest group list for this project (opendiscoveryinfo@list.niso.org) will be available for those who would like to receive updates on the Working Group's progress and provide feedback to the group on its work. Information on how to subscribe is available at http://www.niso.org/lists/."

For more information, please see the full press release.

EU Commissioner Kroes: "Open access to research is a must for the competitiveness of Europe'

October 24, 2011 — "The EU Commissioner for Europe's Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, this morning gave the starting signal for the Dutch contribution to the annual international Open Access week. In a video message on the http://www.surf.nl/open2011 website, Ms Kroes says that open access to research results – both publications and research data – is not just a luxury. She sees Open Access as a must for the Netherlands and Europe if they are to be able to compete internationally."

"Each year sees Open Access coming more into the spotlight. In the Netherlands, this happens at many higher education institutions in the form of the 'Open 2011' event, which runs from 24 October to 4 November. 'I'm very proud', says Ms Kroes, 'of the many activities that are taking place in the Netherlands to deliver Open Access.' The national programme for Open 2011 is being coordinated by SURF, the Dutch collaborative ICT organisation for higher education and research."

"This year's Open 2011 in the Netherlands focuses not only on Open Access to research but also to education. Access to knowledge, information, and data is essential in higher education and research, and using it provides the basis for knowledge transfer and knowledge generation. Research and education that is paid for with the taxpayer's money should be accessible and should be used efficiently...."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Digital Public Library of America and Europeana Announce Collaboration

October 21, 2011 — "Two major digital library networks have reached an agreement to collaborate in ways that will make a large part of the world's cultural heritage available to a large part of the world's population. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which will provide access to digital collections from libraries, archives, and museums in the United States, announced today that it will design its technical structure in a way to promote interoperability with that of Europeana, which has developed a similar system to link the libraries, museums and archives of Europe."

"Robert Darnton, a DPLA Steering Committee member and University Librarian at Harvard, said, 'The association between the DPLA and Europeana means that users everywhere will eventually have access to the combined riches of the two systems at a single click. The aggregated databases will include many millions of books, pamphlets, newspapers, manuscripts, images, recordings, videos, and other materials in many formats.'"

"Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana, welcomed the agreement, saying that 'Europeana was designed to be open and interoperable, and to be able to collaborate with the DPLA is a validation of that aim. By this combined effort on two continents, Europeana and the DPLA hope to promote the creation of a global network with partners from around the world.'"

For more information, please see the full press release.

National Archives Digitization Tools Now on GitHub

October 18, 2011, Posted on the Blog of the United States National Archives — "As part of our open government initiatives, the National Archives has begun to share applications developed in-house on GitHub, a social coding platform. GitHub is a service used by software developers to share and collaborate on software development projects and many open source development projects."

"Over the last year and a half, our Digitization Services Branch has developed a number of software applications to facilitate digitization workflows. These applications have significantly increased our productivity and improved the accuracy and completeness of our digitization work."

"We shared our experiences with these applications with colleagues at other institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, and they expressed interest in trying these applications within their own digitization workflows. We have made two digitization applications, 'File Analyzer and Metadata Harvester' and 'Video Frame Analyzer' available on GitHub, and they are now available for use by other institutions and the public."

For more information, please see the full blog posting.

Mortenson Center for International Library Programs Receives 2011 Champaign-Urbana International Humanitarian Award

October 13, 2011 — "The Mortenson Center for International Library Programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library was selected to receive a 2011 Champaign-Urbana International Humanitarian Award for its efforts to facilitate international cooperation through research and education. The cities of Champaign and Urbana and the 2011 Champaign-Urbana International Humanitarian Awards Steering Committee honored the Mortenson Center on September 29, 2011."

"The Mortenson Center works to strengthen international ties among libraries and librarians worldwide for the promotion of international education, understanding, and peace. Over 900 librarians from more than 90 countries, including China, South Africa, and Ukraine, have participated in professional development programs offered by the organization-the only one of its kind in the world."

For more information, please see the full press release.

IMLS issues grant for further collaborative study of Virtual Reference Services

October 7, 2011 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a federal agency, has awarded a National Leadership Grant for a collaborative research project between OCLC Research and the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information (SC&I) to investigate library-based Virtual Reference Services (VRS)."

"OCLC Senior Research Scientist Lynn Silipigni Connaway will join Rutgers University SC&I faculty members Marie L. Radford and Chirag Shah as Co-Principal Investigators in a study of new models that permit more collaborative and sustainable delivery of virtual reference services. The $250,000 National Leadership Grant recently announced by IMLS will support the project for two years beginning this month. The grant, which was made to Rutgers, represents about 45 percent of overall funding for the project, with the remainder coming from Rutgers and OCLC."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Call for Nominations: 2012 National Medal for Museum and Library Service

Nomination Deadline: December 15, 2011

October 6, 2011 — "Supporters of outstanding museums and libraries are encouraged to nominate these institutions for the National Medal for Museum and Library Service, the nation's highest honor for exemplary museum and library community service. The National Medal honors museums and libraries that make extraordinary civic, educational, economic, environmental, and social contributions. Medal winners receive a $10,000 award and are honored at a National Medal award ceremony held in Washington, D.C."

"Any individual, including a museum or library employee, may nominate a museum or library in the United States and its territories for the National Medal. Public or private nonprofit museums, including zoos, art, history, science and technology, children’s, and natural history museums; historic houses, nature centers, and botanical gardens; and all types of nonprofit libraries, including public, school, academic, research, and archival, are eligible to receive this honor."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Institutional Repository Services for Federal Science Agencies Underway

October 5, 2011 — "The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) of the U.S. Department of Commerce and Information International Associates, Inc. (IIa), a small, woman-owned company in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, have recently formed a Joint Venture (JV) to develop an Institutional Repository (IR) Service for federal agencies. Institutional Repositories are collections of agency scientific and technical information documents and other content that represent the work and mission of the agency, provided as a searchable, digital collection. The IR will be hosted by NTIS and promoted and supported by expert content managers and a technical team from IIa and NTIS. As part of this new NTIS line of business, the IR will provide a framework through which federal agency content can be made available, providing users with increased ease of access and agencies with cost savings...."

"...Individual IRs will be developed for agencies based on a core set of services with optional services, including those based on Web 2.0 technologies. This IR Service will be a valuable asset for smaller agencies, agency components, projects and programs that need to provide information collection and dissemination but do not have sufficient IT and content management support, for agencies who are interested in support for retooling their current repositories, and for agencies seeking to take advantage of new technologies such as mash-ups, blogs, and wikis which they can reuse and repurpose from other resources through the IR. Agencies will be able to respond to growing Administration Open Government requirements for transparency and citizen involvement. One major benefit will be that cost savings will occur as the technology and development of the system is shared – not redeveloped in multiple settings...."

"...NTIS seeks to improve dissemination of new cutting edge scientific, technical, and engineering information (STEI) and economic, social and environmental information by permanently enlarging, preserving and providing ready access to its collection of this information. NTIS promotes the development and application of this STEI and other information by providing technologically advanced global e-commerce channels for dissemination of specialized information to business, industry, government, and the public. In addition, NTIS supports other federal agencies in the distribution of their science and information products to the public."

For more information, please download the full press release from the NTIS web site under "Updates".

Deb Hunt Voted President-Elect of SLA

October 3, 2011 — "The 2011 election for the Special Libraries Association's (SLA) Board of Directors drew to a close on Wednesday, 28 September, with 2,393 SLA members casting their votes. The voting resulted in five new members being selected to the association's governing body:

• President-Elect: Deb Hunt
• Chapter Cabinet Chair-Elect: Debbie Schachter
• Division Cabinet Chair-Elect: Ann Koopman
• Directors: Marilyn Bromley and Hal Kirkwood"

"The Special Libraries Association (SLA) is a nonprofit global organization for innovative information professionals and their strategic partners. SLA serves more than 9,000 members in 75 countries in the information profession, including corporate, academic and government information specialists. SLA promotes and strengthens its members through learning, advocacy and networking initiatives."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Europe's national librarians support Open Data licensing

September 28, 2011 — "Meeting at the Royal Library of Denmark, the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), has voted overwhelmingly to support the open licensing of their data. CENL represents Europe's 46 national libraries, and are responsible for the massive collection of publications that represent the accumulated knowledge of Europe."

"What does that mean in practice? It means that the datasets describing all the millions of books and texts ever published in Europe – the title, author, date, imprint, place of publication and so on, which exists in the vast library catalogues of Europe – will become increasingly accessible for anybody to re-use for whatever purpose they want."

"It will mean that Wikipedia can use the metadata, linking it to all sorts of articles; it will mean that apps developers can embed it in new mobile tools for tourism or teaching. Crucially, for information scientists, it will mean that vast quantities of trustworthy data are available for Linked Open Data developments, creating relationships between elements of information that's never been possible before. The potential to create new relationships between datasets from Europe's greatest libraries creates what an expert in Semantic Web technology, Dr Stefan Gradmann, Professor of Library and Information Science at Humboldt University, Berlin, has called a 'knowledge-generating engine'."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Europeana trials new software in Remix launch

September 26, 2011 — "Europeana, the digital library, museum and archive, has opened a new interactive video space, Europeana Remix, which enriches ashort film on a First World War friendship using the latest HTML5 and Popcorn.js technology."

"Europeana Remix plays the video in HTML5, and uses the Popcorn.js framework to let users call up resources that are related to the story, from Europeana, Flickr, Wikipedia, Oxford University, Google maps and other web services. Users can leave comments at any point and share their stories or URLs. 'Europeana Remix gives users a new experience of inter-relating cultural content without leaving the video space,' says Harry Verwayen, Europeana's Business Development Director. 'It will be exciting to see how this new technology affects the way that people get involved with stories on the web.'"

"Europeana is experimenting with HTML5 to create new interactive cultural experiences, and because HTML5 is fast, seamless and unobtrusive. HTML5 is set to become a standard way to play video online. Popcorn.js, a new Javascript framework, is used because it utilises the great new features of HTML5 and combines web resources seamlessly to the movie player to give the user greater choice and interactivity."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Call for Applications: Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program Grant

September 23, 2011 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is accepting applications in the following grant program:"

"Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program
Deadline: December 15, 2011"

"Web Conferencing with Program Staff
IMLS staff are available by phone and through e-mail to discuss general issues relating to Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grants."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Wiley-Blackwell Signs Open Access Agreements with Telethon Italy, FWF Austrian Science Fund, and Max Planck Society

September 22, 2011 — "Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc, has signed open access funding agreements with three European research organizations: the Max Planck Society in Germany, the FWF Austrian Science Fund, and Telethon, one of the largest biomedical non-profit organizations in Italy. These agreements provide active financial support and a streamlined process for authors to ensure open access to their published research in Wiley-Blackwell journals."

"Telethon and the FWF have open access policies, requiring published articles to be freely available online and funded research papers to be deposited in UK PubMed Central. Authors can comply with those policies when publishing in any Wiley Open Access journal or by choosing the OnlineOpen option, which is available for many Wiley-Blackwell journals. Telethon and the FWF will pay open access publication charges for authors publishing in any participating Wiley-Blackwell journal, who are reporting original results of FWF or Telethon funded research. The Max Planck Society agreement applies only to funded research published in any Wiley Open Access journal."

"All the agreements ensure that the article is made open access upon publication in Wiley Online Library, as well as being deposited to PubMedCentral (PMC) and mirrored to the UK version of PMC (UKPMC)."

For more information, please see the full press release.

DOE Scientific Research Data Now Easier to Find

September 20, 2011 — "Researchers funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) can now make their scientific research data easier to cite and easier to find from worldwide sources. The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is now registering publicly available scientific research datasets created by DOE-funded researchers through DataCite. OSTI, within the Office of Science, became a member of DataCite in January 2011 to facilitate access to DOE datasets. Through this membership, OSTI assigns permanent identifiers, known as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), to the individual datasets to aid in citation, discovery, and retrieval. Creating stable pathways to these datasets makes the scientific process more accessible and the research more replicable for future discoveries."

"In August, OSTI minted the first DOI for a DOE dataset through DataCite. The dataset is from the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility. ARM is a multi-laboratory, user facility created to advance scientific knowledge in a wide range of interdisciplinary earth sciences. ARM is set to register approximately 700 datasets with OSTI in the initial implementation. This "DOIs for datasets" service helps enable achievement of the DOE goal to provide open access to experimental data, as set forth in the DOE 2011 Strategic Plan...."

"...Since 2009, DataCite, a not-for-profit organization formed in London in 2009, has registered over 1 million DOI names. DataCite aims to establish easier access to research data and increase acceptance of research data as legitimate, citable contributions to the scholarly record. OSTI is one of three U.S. members of DataCite, along with the California Digital Library and Purdue University Libraries. DOE is the only U.S. Federal agency offering this service through DataCite."

For more information, please see the full press release.

Copyright © 2011 Corporation for National Research Initiatives