I N   B R I E F

November/December 2013
Table of Contents

Connecting Presidential Collections

Contributed by:
Sheila Blackford
Librarian
Miller Center, University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia USA
blackford [at] virginia.edu

The Miller Center at the University of Virginia has received a three-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to make presidential materials more accessible. The world of presidential materials is vast, with many different types of resources located in a wide variety of libraries, museums, and sites. The Miller Center is working to develop a website that will give users one centralized place to search across digital collections on the U.S. presidents.

Connecting Presidential Collections ("CPC", http://presidentialcollections.org/) was created as a test site last year as part of a planning grant from the IMLS. The initial partners included the Massachusetts Historical Society (home to President John Adams's papers), The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, and the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum. This subsequent IMLS grant will allow the Miller Center to finalize the website and add more partner collections.

To be included in the CPC website, partner organizations submit metadata about their collections That data is then aggregated using Solr as the search index and Blacklight as the front-end user interface. Users can then use the site to search across collections and click through to partner organizations' websites when they find digital objects they would like to see. The goal is to simplify the search process for users while simultaneously increasing the exposure of these valuable collections.

In addition, the Miller Center will work with potential partners whose collections are not yet ready to be included in CPC. After identifying the range of challenges that might prevent an organization from participating, the Miller Center plans to create a video library of workshops to help organizations prepare their collections for inclusion. The goal of this video library is to address general issues that organizations might face when attempting to create or improve their digital collections.

The Connecting Presidential Collections grant project also includes the creation of a comprehensive collection-level catalog of presidential materials that will help researchers and librarians by laying out the location of presidential materials (such as letters, manuscripts, publications, artwork, possessions, home sites, and many others).

The final part of this project involves presidential papers that are currently available only on microfilm. Although many microfilm collections have been digitized, the resulting products are often only a pile of images with little metadata to guide the user to valuable content. Working with three collections of presidential papers, the Miller Center will experiment with ways to create document-level metadata using technical tools and existing finding aids and indexes.

The overall goal of Connecting Presidential Collections is two-fold: to simplify the landscape of presidential materials (making it easier for librarians, scholars, and researchers to navigate those historical resources), and to collaborate with presidential sites and libraries to raise the visibility of their valuable, and too often hidden, collections.

Empowering the University of New Hampshire User Community with the Power of PLACE

Contributed by:
Thelma Thompson
Associate Professor & Government Information and Maps Librarian
University of New Hampshire
thelma.thompson [at] unh.edu

Eleta Exline
Assistant Professor & Scholarly Communication Librarian
University of New Hampshire
eleta.exline [at] unh.edu

Michael Routhier
Information Technologist, Earth Systems Research Center
University of New Hampshire
mike.routhier [at] unh.edu

The University of New Hampshire Library and its partner, the Earth Systems Research Center, have been awarded a grant in the amount of $474,156 from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, National Leadership Grants for Libraries Program (Grant Award Number: LG-05-13-0350-13) to build PLACE, the Position-based Location Archive Coordinate Explorer. PLACE will be a geospatial search interface that will use embedded geospatial coordinates to enable easier discovery of information that can be difficult to locate through text based searching. Through PLACE, via a click or delineation of a search polygon on a web map, users will zoom to a region and will locate all UNH Library Digital Collections objects whose geographic extents intersect. Initially, PLACE will provide access to geographic collections focused on the region, but it will be flexible and expandable as collections grow. The project will provide users with access to these collections through a flexible visual interface and provide a toolkit for other institutions to implement in their geospatial collections. Ready access to embedded geospatial information in a flexible visual interface will contribute to the development of 21st-century skills by library users, such as visual, global, and environmental literacy.

The project will contribute to two open source communities: Open Geoportal (OGP) and Fedora. Tasks to accomplish our goals include creating standards compliant metadata for prototype collections and ingesting digital objects into Fedora, purchasing and configuring a dedicated server for our instance of OGP, and integrating OGP with the Fedora Solr index to provide a basic level of OGP functionality. We will build new tools not currently available in Geoportal using Jscript and Jquery. The universal gazetteer tool will involve a common library of polygons, such as county boundaries, which will be available via pull down lists. Time series data is important for assessing changes over time: a cross reference table and a time slider on the interface will make it easier for users to select datasets by time periods. We plan usability studies throughout the project to optimize interface design, and enhancements for providing geospatial access to the unique geological fieldtrip guidebook literature, a feature supported in our needs analysis.

The African American Theater History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries

Contributed by:
Cecily Marcus
Curator, Givens Collection of African American Literature and Performing Arts Archives
University of Minnesota Libraries
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
marc0082 [at] umn.edu

The history of African American theater, from its earliest influences to its current artists and thinkers, is not common knowledge. It is not taught in public schools and is not part of university curricula in a systematic or sustained way. The political and cultural histories from which African American artistic and intellectual traditions arise are too often elided, overlooked, or misrepresented. As a result, many of the choices made by African American theater companies – from play selection to set and costume design to artistic direction – take place within a context that is often obscured.

The question of context is important for all theaters but is especially pointed for African American theaters. Hundreds of years of African American theater history has been consistently under-documented, at the same time that theaters themselves, both historically and in our own time, face precarious futures and can close under duress, their archives unsaved and their memories dispersed or disappeared. Of the 200 theater groups borne of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, only ten still exist, with Penumbra Theatre in St. Paul being the largest. Lou Bellamy, Penumbra's founding Artistic Director, has echoed August Wilson's perspective that black artists have an added pressure to "mark their passing on the road." Archives provide a means to make that mark through the documentation of a rich history that is at a heightened risk of being lost.

The University of Minnesota Libraries' African American Theater History Project seeks to address the need for a deeper understanding of the historical, cultural, and political contexts that inform African American performing arts by improving the accessibility of a national collection of openly available archival materials. A 2013 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library services will enable the development of a shareable online search tool of digitized and born digital archival materials that can live on any website, and will aggregate openly available metadata to provide cross-institutional access to content from the collections of leading institutions such as the Digital Public Library of America, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Tulane University's Amistad Center, and the Smithsonian.

Led by the University of Minnesota's Performing Arts Archives and Givens Collection of African American Literature, in partnership with Penumbra Theatre Company, the project team will work with theater professionals, libraries, and museums to identify extant archival material relevant to African American theater and the cultural history that inspires it. The African American Theater History Project will also work to add content to the Digital Public Library of America to deepen its collection of African American cultural-historical materials.

MedOANet: Mediterranean Open Access Network for coordinated open access policies and strategies in Mediterranean Europe

Contributed by:
Victoria Tsoukala, PhD
Department for Strategic Planning and Development, National Documentation Centre/NHRF
Coordinating person/ MedOANet
Athens, Greece
tsoukala [at] ekt.gr

Vasso Kalaitzi
Department for Strategic Planning and Development, National Documentation Centre/NHRF
Athens, Greece
vkala [at] ekt.gr

Mediterranean Open Access Network (MedOANet) is an FP7 project funded by the Science in Society scheme and running from December 2011 until November 2013. MedOANet was designed to strengthen national open access initiatives and to facilitate the development of coordinated policies in six Mediterranean European countries: Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Turkey.

The project was designed along three lines of work: mapping the open access ecosystem in the six countries, facilitating national coordination and facilitating regional coordination among these countries.

Three surveys in the six countries, one each among research funding organizations (RFOs), research performing organizations (RPOs) and publishers, helped obtain a nuanced understanding of the processes and structures in place regarding Open Access, as well as relevant quantitative and qualitative data, in view of supporting the development of coordinated open access policies aligned with the European mandates in project countries. The results of the surveys are under publication. Further, MedOANet developed an online tool, the Open Access Tracker that tracks the development of open access policies and initiatives (funder policies, repositories etc.). The Tracker is the first online tool to bring together in one place in the web information from various international registries to profile each country.

National coordination activities was aimed at enabling each of the six countries to move towards nationally coordinated agendas on open access. The project partners engaged national policymakers, developed national task forces and organized national workshops, bringing stakeholders together, sometimes for the first time. These activities strengthened national coordination and helped the countries situate themselves in the wider context of European policy developments in view of alignment.

Regional and European coordination activities expanded on the former two strands of work: A European workshop and an international conference intensified coordinated policymaker and stakeholder engagement at the regional and European level. The MedOANet Final Conference provided a unique opportunity to explore the very important developments that have taken place in the last couple of years in terms of open access policies in Europe. The aim of the conference was to present the results of the project and place them in their wider European context.

The conference included an impressive line-up of international and Greek speakers and was of particular interest to research policy-makers, such as research funders and research performing institution administrators, specialists on open access, students and interested individuals to explore current trends in Open Access in Greece and Europe.

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science opened the conference with a videotaped message, while the conference focused on the following topics through dedicated sessions:

• The implementation of national policies for open access to scientific information with a focus on Mediterranean Europe and open access and its role in the European Research Area (ERA)
• The implementation of open access policies for Research Funders, best practices and experiences
• The implementation of open access among research performing organizations.

The project culminates with the MedOANet Guidelines for implementing open access policies. They provide concise and targeted advice for coordinated policy development and are directed to RPO and RFO policymakers. More specifically, the guidelines present the main concepts and issues with respect to open access, discuss the major steps that are necessary in the process of policy development, present the important components of an institutional and funder policy, model policies for RPOS and RFOs, as well as best practices in policy development. The guidelines are publishes in all six languages of the six countries and English.

The MedOANet Guidelines recommend:

• Immediate self-archiving in repositories to be required upon acceptance for publication (author final version or publisher version)
• Immediate open access to metadata and to full-text research outputs if possible
• Immediate open access to full-text outputs with up to 6 months embargo periods (12 for SSH) for research funders
• Peer-reviewed research covered by the policy, especially journal articles, conference proceedings books/monographs
• Mandatory character of policy, with compliance checked. Authoritative publication lists from institutions derived only from repositories
• Minimally recommend that researchers deposit research data that underpin publications in repositories and formulate separate policies.

All project outcomes, documents and resources discussed here are available at the project website http://www.medoanet.eu.

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CrossRef Members add over a quarter million CrossMark records; Researchers click on CrossMark logos 50K times per month

November 13, 2013 — "CrossRef announced today that more than 270,000 documents now have CrossMark version status information, and most display the distinctive logo that provides researchers information both about existing changes to scholarly articles and about important publication record information. More than 100,000 of these records were added in the month of October alone. Scholars click on CrossMark records displayed on PDF and HTML articles an average of 50,000 times a month."

"CrossRef accepted its first CrossMark data from publishers eighteen months ago. In that time, the number of participating publishers has grown to 24 from the small group that led the two-year pilot. The publishers with the highest number of CrossMark records include those from the original pilot, such as Elsevier Science, the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr), the American Institute of Physics, The Royal Society, and Wiley. Wiley currently has the highest number of reader views (or clicks) per CrossMark record."

"Participants who have joined since the original pilot are also contributing large numbers of CrossMark records. For example Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), deposited almost 50,000 CrossMark records since mid-October. Another publisher that joined the program this year, F1000 Research, uses the optional CrossMark record tab to deposit and display reviewer reports."

For more information please see the full press release.

George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Preservation Award

Deadline December 1, 2013

November 2, 2013 announcement from Julie Mosbo, Chair, Cunha/Swartzburg Jury, Texas A&M University — "The George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Preservation Award was established by the Preservation and Reformatting Section (PARS) to honor the memory of George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg, early leaders in cooperative preservation programming and strong advocates for collaboration in the field of preservation."

"The award acknowledges and supports cooperative preservation projects and/or rewards individuals or groups that foster collaboration for preservation goals. Recipients of the George Cunha and Susan Swartzburg Award demonstrate vision, endorse cooperation and advocate for the preservation of published and primary source resources that capture the richness of our cultural patrimony. The award recognizes the leadership and initiative required to build collaborative networks designed to achieve specific preservation goals. Any person or group is eligible for this award; membership in ALA is not required. The Cunha/Swartzburg Award is sponsored by Hollinger Metal Edge and includes a $1,250 grant and citation."

"Visit the Cunha Swartzburg page (http://www.ala.org/alcts/awards/profrecognition/lbicunhaswartz) for more information."

Planning for Preservation Storage

October 30, 2013 blog posting by Leslie Johnston, Library of Congress — "Every year the Library of Congress hosts a meeting on Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections, aka the Preservation Storage Meeting. The 2013 meeting was held September 23-24, and featured an impressive array of presentations and discussions."

"The theme this year was standards. The term applies not just to media or to hardware, but to interfaces as well. In preservation, it is the interfaces – the software and operating system mechanisms through which users and tools interact with stored files – that disappear the most quickly. Or change the least to keep up with changing needs. The quote of the meeting for me was from Henry Newman of Instrumental, Inc: 'These are not new problems, only new engineers solving old problems.'"

"Library of Congress staff kicked off the meeting by discussing some of the Library's infrastructure and needs. The Library is recording its files in its inventory service, which includes fixities for future auditing. We have a wide range of needs, though, which vary with the type of content. The data center where preservation and access copies of text and images are primarily stored manages millions of files in 10s of petabytes. The data center where preservation and access copies of video and audio are primarily stored manages approximately 700k files in 10s of PB. The different scales of file numbers and sizes mean different requirements for the hardware needed to stage and deliver this content. In terms of the Library's storage purchases, 30% is purely for capacity expansion, and 70% is for the ongoing refresh of technology, which often also includes adding capacity...."

"...You should really check out the agenda and presentations, which are available online."

To see the full report, see the blog posting by Leslie Johnston on The Signal.

"Wither Collecting? New Visions for Special Collections in the 21st Century," a Panel Discussion at NYU Fales Library, Nov. 20

October 28, 2013 — "New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections, a leader in envisioning new types of collecting to support new categories of research, presents a panel discussion, 'Wither Collecting? New Visions for Special Collections in the 21st Century,' on November 20, 2013 at 6:30pm, Fales Library, third floor, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South, (at LaGuardia Place). [Subways A,C,E, B,D,M to West 4th Street; 6 line to Astor Place; R train to 8th Street.]."

"The panel, composed of leading thinkers in the field of special collections, will share their thoughts about how special collections are and can be developed in the 21st century, as librarians look at new kinds of collecting to support new kinds of research, especially in area studies, post-structuralism, institutional critique, the death of the author, and other postmodern modes of criticism."

For more information please see the full press release.

UNC and State Library of North Carolina to bring treasures to National Digital Library

October 25, 2013 — "Treasures from libraries and archives across North Carolina will soon be at the fingertips of researchers worldwide."

"The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (NCDHC) in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Wilson Library will be the state hub and conduit to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) -- an organization that provides a single point of access for millions of books, photographs, documents, sound recordings and moving images from some of the leading libraries and archives across the country. Through a partnership announced Thursday, the center will compile and provide information about North Carolina's digital collections to the DPLA."

"The NCDHC is supported by the State Library of North Carolina with funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library and Services and Technology Act, and by the UNC-Chapel Hill University Library."

"The Digital Public Library of America (http://dp.la) debuted in April."

For more information please see the full press release.

New NDSA Report on Geospatial Data

October 24, 2013 blog posting by Butch Lazorchak, Library of Congress — "Digital mapping information is an essential part of the backbone of our economy through the now-widespread consumer applications that allow us to track our location, find a nearby restaurant or guide us on a journey. While largely invisible to the casual user, the geospatial data that underpins these applications allows us to know what our landscape looks like at this instant, and increasingly, to see where we've been at a level of previously unimagined detail."

"While these tools are clearly incredibly valuable, it's not entirely clear how we manage and preserve the equally valuable geospatial data that underpins the applications to ensure that we have the ability to analyze changes to our landscape over time."

"With that in mind, we are pleased to announce the release of a new National Digital Stewardship Alliance report, "Issues in the Appraisal and Selection of Geospatial Data"...."

"...The report provides an illuminating background on the problem area, then suggests ways to establish criteria for appraisal and selection decisions for geospatial data. It then proposes some models and processes for appraisal and selection, including tools for the identification and evaluation of data resources and triggers for appraisal and selection, and finishes with further questions for the community to explore."

For more information please see the full blog posting by Butch Lazorchak on The Signal.

Publishing in Open Access increases usage and has no effect on book sales

October 23, 2013 — "Open Access publishing has no negative effect on book sales, and increases online usage and discovery considerably. One of the conclusions of OAPEN-NL, a project exploring Open Access monograph publishing in the Netherlands. OAPEN-NL's final report, published yesterday, gives recommendations for research funders, libraries, publishers and authors."

"OAPEN-NL builds on the European OAPEN-project which was set up to gain experience with Open Access publishing of academic books. OAPEN-NL was supported by NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and the Ministry of OCW via the National PRIMA-subsidy program. The project was conducted by OAPEN Foundation, in collaboration with NWO, SURF and nine academic publishers."

"In total 50 academic books were published in Open Access with subsidy from NWO. For every Open Access title, the publishers provided a similar title that was published in the conventional way for comparison. Research showed that publishing in Open Access had no effect whatever on the sale of books. The publisher's fear that book sales would decline if publications would be available in Open Access, was unfounded. However, online usage of books in Open Access increased considerably as did online discovery of these books. Although online usage increased, this did not (yet) lead to an increase of citations in the research timeframe."

For more information please see the full press release.

DOI Outreach Meetings

October 22, 2013 — "DOI outreach meetings are being held in Asia in December 2013, following the DOI Foundation Members Meeting which will be held in Taipei. DOI outreach meetings will be held on December 4 in Taipei and December 6 in Beijing. These are one day meetings and will be organised by local RAs (Airiti in Taipei; ICSTI and CNKI in Beijing); the meetings are open to anyone to attend through invitation."

"The meeting theme is 'Open Meeting: Innovative Content Applications Driven by DOI'. If you would like to receive an invitation please contact info@doi.org stating your affiliation and area of interest. Note that places are limited and attendance is at the discretion of the organisers."

"The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) was conceived as a generic framework for managing identification of content over digital networks, recognising the trend towards digital convergence and multimedia availability. Its key features include persistence, network accessibility, interoperability with other identifiers, shared fault-tolerant infrastructure, and the ability to resolve the identifiers in multiple forms. DOI is standardized as ISO 26324."

For more information please see the full press release.

CLIR Receives Mellon Grant for Postdoctoral Fellowships in Data Curation for Early Modern Studies

October 21, 2013 — "The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) $916,000 to support a program of Postdoctoral Fellowships in Data Curation for Early Modern Studies. The program will fund a cohort of five fellows for two years at five institutions of higher learning, starting in September 2014."

"The fellowships are designed to help build the professional capacity needed for sound data management practice in Early Modern Studies. Fellows will be scholarly practitioners who not only understand the nature and processes of the disciplines broadly defined as the humanities, but also how research data are organized, transmitted, manipulated, reused, and sustained."

"For this program, Early Modern Studies encompasses the historical period from about 1450 to 1800, focusing on humanistic research in literary studies, history, art and architectural history, philosophy, religion, music and other performing arts, languages and linguistics, and related fields of study...."

"...This program complements the CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences, launched in 2012 with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Postdoctoral Fellowships in Data Curation for Medieval Studies, initiated last year with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."

For more information please see the full press release.

Preserving.exe Report: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software

October 21, 2013 blog posting by Trevor Owens, Library of Congress — "Our world increasingly runs on software. From operating streetlights and financial markets, to producing music and film, to conducting research and scholarship in the sciences and the humanities, software shapes and structures our lives."

"Software is simultaneously a baseline infrastructure and a mode of creative expression. It is both the key to accessing and making sense of digital objects and an increasingly important historical artifact in its own right. When historians write the social, political, economic and cultural history of the 21st century they will need to consult the software of the times."

"I am thrilled to announce the release of a new National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program report, Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software, including perspectives from individuals working to ensure long term access to software."

For more information please see the full blog posting by Trevor Owens on The Signal.

Registration for E-Science Institute Now Open

October 21, 2013 — "Registration for the 2014 DuraSpace/DLF E-Science Institute is now open. The E-Science Institute is designed to help academic and research libraries develop a strategic agenda for e-research support, with a particular focus on the sciences...."

"...The upcoming E-Science Institute will run December 2013 through April 2014. Registration is limited to 25 institutions. Visit http://duraspace.org/e-science-institute for more details and to register."

For more information please see the full press release.

New SPIE open access publishing program wins strong participation

An author-choice option for optics and photonics research in SPIE journals is meeting an increased need for open access publication

October 18, 2013 — "An author-choice open access publishing program for journals launched this year by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, is gaining strong participation from authors and increasing the volume of freely accessible, peer-reviewed optics and photonics research literature as a result."

"'More than six times as many authors are choosing open-access publication in SPIE journals since the launch of our 'gold' open access program at the beginning of this year,' said Eric Pepper, SPIE Director of Publications. 'In less than 10 months, we have seen the number rise from 5% to more than 30% of all new articles published in SPIE journals.'"

"The SPIE program allows authors to have their journal articles open access immediately on publication in the SPIE Digital Library, with payment of modest voluntary page charges, Pepper explained. In addition, authors choosing this program retain copyright through a Creative Commons CC-BY license."

For more information please see the full press release.

The University of Illinois Library acquires archives of acclaimed writer Gwendolyn Brooks

October 17, 2013 — "The extensive literary manuscripts and archives of Gwendolyn E. Brooks (1917-2000), Illinois Poet Laureate and the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, are now part of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

"The archive, spans more than six decades, and includes some of Brooks's earliest surviving poetry and prose written when she was a teenager, as well as early scrapbooks and clippings of pieces she published as a young woman in The Chicago Defender. In addition, the archive contains extensive correspondence, manuscripts, and informal jottings, annotations, and observations. The largest portion of Brooks's archive documents her career after leaving mainstream commercial publishing to produce her works with small presses and black-owned imprints, including her own imprint The David Company."

"Brooks preserved drafts and notes for her outgoing letters alongside the letters she received. The list of her regular correspondents includes a significant roster of mid-century African-American writers and poets. A lifelong Chicagoan, her circle also includes many important figures associated with that city."

For more information please see a full press release about the collection.

CrossRef discloses FundRef participation statistics; announces eJournalPress integration

October 8, 2013 — "CrossRef announced today the results of early participation in FundRef, its new funder identification service."

"The number of publishers signed up to participate in FundRef as of the first of October was 19. These publishers have already deposited 28,000 bibliographic records containing funding data, 18,000 of which include at least one FundRef Funder ID."

"The FundRef deposits include many funder names that are not already in the FundRef Registry, an openly available taxonomy of more than 4000 funder names contributed by Elsevier for the FundRef service. FundRef personnel are evaluating these new names to determine if they are variations of names already in the taxonomy, or new additions. The first revision to the taxonomy is due to be released this month, and will incorporate changes that better reflect the hierarchy of some funding bodies. Future revisions will add additional funding bodies."

For more information please see the full press release.

Jisc signs framework agreement with Google Apps for Education

October 8, 2013 — "Landmark agreement makes it easier for colleges and universities to sign up to Google's free cloud services such as Gmail, docs and spreadsheets."

"Janet, part of the Jisc group, whose primary purpose is to provide network infrastructure and related services for schools, colleges and universities in the UK, is today announcing a major framework agreement with Google Apps for Education. The agreement will make it easier for colleges and universities to make the move to Google Apps for Education and open up the free online collaboration and communication benefits it offers to more staff and students."

"The framework agreement will mean that colleges and universities in the UK are now eligible to sign up to Google Apps for Education using a contract approved by Janet, as meeting UK legal requirements. This Cloud Services for Education Agreement will give colleges and universities peace of mind in relation to security, resilience, legal and data compliance, cost and functionality...."

"...There are more than 25 million Google Apps for Education users worldwide and many different use cases. Students working on group projects can work simultaneously in real-time in documents, spreadsheets and presentations, no matter where they are based, making it easier to share ideas and preventing the difficulty of version control."

For more information please see the full press release.

ALA to establish a Center for the Future of Libraries

October 8, 2013 — "The American Library Association (ALA) has been awarded a Librarians for the 21st Century Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to establish a Center for the Future of Libraries."

"The goal of the project will be to provide library planners and community leaders with information resources and tools that will help them better understand the trends reshaping their libraries and communities and help them incorporate foresight into their planning processes...."

"...The one-year, $50,000 planning grant project will be coordinated by ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels. During the project, ALA will develop a Center for the Future of Libraries website; establish a 'futures' discussion group and blog; present interactive programming at the ALA Midwinter Meeting and Annual Conference and convene a summit of thought leaders to help shape the future direction of the center. In creating the Center for the Future of Libraries, ALA will also collaborate with the American Alliance of Museums, which established a Center for the Future of Museums in 2008."

For more information please see the full press release.

Oxford University Press joins OAPEN-UK project

September 30, 2013 — "Oxford University Press (OUP) is joining OAPEN-UK, a collaborative research project exploring open access (OA) scholarly monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences."

"OAPEN-UK is co-funded by Jisc and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and is gathering data in order to help funders, authors, publishers and institutions make informed decisions on the future of OA monographs. The project is working in an area where little research exists, and is working to connect with all the key stakeholders to identify and discuss concerns, challenges, perceptions and opportunities relating to a transition to open access monographs."

"OAPEN-UK recognises that open access will require changes to current working practices as well as cultural change, and that resistance to change is inevitable. By working with each stakeholder and sharing findings between them, the project promotes understanding and knowledge, and enables stakeholders to make informed decisions based on evidence, rather than assumptions."

"OAPEN-UK marks OUP's first move into the developing world of open access scholarly monographs."

For more information please see the full press release.

More than $14.6 Million in Federal Grants Awarded to U.S. Libraries

September 26, 2013 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) today announced grants for 42 library projects totaling $14,670,662. The projects were selected from more than 285 applications requesting a total of $37,977,530 and were awarded through three IMLS programs: the Native American Library Services Enhancement program, the Laura Bush 21 st Century Librarian Program, and the National Leadership Grants for Libraries program.Grantees are matching these awards with a total of $10,546,376 in non-federal funds."

"Grantees are planning a variety of projects and initiatives, including the following:

• The American Library Association will research the effect of early literacy library programming on parent behavior and engagement.
• A tribal library will offer six hands-on genealogy workshops, making it possible for participants to explore their family histories with historic photographs and documents and share family stories and oral traditions with tribal members.
• Two university libraries will collaborate with a Chinese library to test the use of Machine Translation - technology for digital collections.
• A state school library association will create a distance learning Masters Degree program to prepare school librarians to teach student digital literacy skills.
• A university library will create a plan that would establish a central access point for digital resources in American Sign Language.
• A university library and its partners, building on the free, open-source digital archiving platform called Mukurtu, will provide training and resources to Native American Tribes for planning their digitization and preservation activities."

"A complete list of the library recipients is available on the IMLS website at http://www.idevmail.net/link.aspx?l=6&d=73&mid=333844&m=1733. For more information about IMLS library grant programs, see http://www.idevmail.net/link.aspx?l=7&d=73&mid=333844&m=1733."

For more information please see the full press release.

2014 SLA Board of Directors Election Closes

Jill Strand to be 2014 President-Elect

September 26, 2013 — "The election for the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Board of Directors drew to a close on Wednesday, 25 September, with 25.47% of SLA members casting votes. The voting resulted in 5 members being elected to the association's 2014 Board of Directors:

• President-Elect: Jill Strand
• Chapter Cabinet Chair-Elect: James King
• Division Cabinet Chair-Elect: Juliane Schneider
• Director: Moy McIntosh
• Director: Bethan Ruddock"

"The 5 new Board members begin their terms on 1January 2014, and will attend their first in-person Board meeting at the http://www.sla.org/attend/leadership-summit-2014/ SLA Leadership Summit , 15-17 January, in Memphis, Tennessee. They will join 10 current members of the http://www.sla.org/governance/board-of-directors/ SLA Board of Directors whose terms continue through 2014."

For more information please see the full press release.

CLIR Receives IMLS Grant to Identify Needs in Continuing Education for Managing Cultural Heritage Data

September 26, 2013 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant of $164,243 to examine the federally mandated plans for open access and their implications for continuing education needs for libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions...."

"...Under this one-year grant, CLIR will conduct research in three areas. Part 1 involves a highly structured content analysis of select federal agency plans for supporting open access to data and publications, identifying the commonalities and differences among the plans with emphasis on access to data. Part 2 takes the results of the content analysis and traces its implications for IMLS program areas and the cultural heritage institutions they serve. Part 3 identifies the gaps in current continuing education opportunities and approaches for cultural heritage professionals, assessing the readiness of the current professional workforce and identifying how best to address the needs and close the gaps in the immediate and longer term."

For more information please see the full press release.

Development underway for shared national library services in Scotland and Wales

September 23, 2013 — "Scotland and Wales have started to undergo work to develop shared library IT systems across their higher education institutions thanks to initial funding and support from Jisc."

"Ultimately, this will provide students access to information hosted at all institutions, opening up a wealth of teaching and learning materials. There will also be cost saving opportunities."

"Higher education institutions in Wales are currently joining with the National Library of Wales to start development of a joint procurement process for a shared library management system. The shared system will open up potential opportunities for collaboration on other levels – including the possibility of reciprocal borrowing across the libraries and shared cataloguing of collections. They are looking to have these systems in place by summer 2015 - 2016 and a tender for the work will be going out in the New Year."

For more information please see the full press release.

Academy Award for Europeana

September 20, 2013 — "The Europeana Foundation, responsible for Europe's pioneering online museum, library and archive, has been presented with this year's European Museum Academy Award."

"The 2013 EMA was given to Europeana by the EMA Board after wide consultation with museum experts, specialists and directors from different backgrounds and from all over Europe. It recognises the outstanding organisation that has contributed most to the development of museum practice at the international level over the year."

"In its statement, the Academy says that: 'Europeana is projecting itself into the cultural landscape of tomorrow...using new tools, finding new partners and experimenting with innovative models of participation. The very idea of a 'virtual museum' has been better defined and enriched by the results achieved by Europeana'."

For more information please see the full press release.

Planning for data management enables sound handling of research data

September 13, 2013 — "Researchers have gained first-hand experience of making a data management plan (DMP) to properly manage their research data. Working with research support staff and SURF, they have come up with plans that can serve as examples for others. DMPs are increasingly required by funders as part of grant applications."

"The data management plans (DMPs) were set up by research groups at four universities, one university of applied sciences, and a research institute. Three organisations recently released their DMP and made it available as an example. Two of these data management plans (DMPs) are a template for gathering researchers' requirements on how to manage their data. The third DMP is an example of descriptions in accordance with the standards of the database used...."

"...A template or sample DMP can be useful when writing a data management plan. Previous experience and expertise in making a DMP also speed up the process. Researchers are advised to start thinking about how to handle research data from the start of a research project. Writing a DMP provides structure to that thought process."

For more information please see the full press release.

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