I N   B R I E F

September/October 2012
Table of Contents

SiteStory Transactional Web Archive Software Released

Contributed by:
Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research & Prototyping Team
Los Alamos National Laboratory
hvdsomp [at] gmail.com

The Research Library Prototyping Team of the Los Alamos National Laboratory has recently announced the open source release of the SiteStory transactional web archiving software that supports fine-grained archiving of Apache servers and makes the archived resources available via the Memento protocol.

From the early days of the Memento "Time Travel for the Web" project, the team has been experimenting with alternative approaches to web archiving. Typically, web content is archived by robots from organizations such as the Internet Archive. Those bots recurrently crawl the web and deposit the retrieved content into a long-term archive. Via the Memento protocol, a straightforward extension of HTTP, resources in these archives are accessible in a uniform manner that leverages the HTTP URI of the originally crawled resource and an archival datetime to obtain a temporally appropriate archived version. Several web archives, including the Internet Archive, have already embraced the Memento approach. Furthermore, versions of resources maintained in content management systems, such as wikis or software version control systems, can be accessed in the same manner using the original URI of the resource and the desired datetime. To demonstrate this, the team developed an add-on for MediaWiki systems that complies with the Memento protocol. Off-the-shelf browsers do not (yet) support the protocol but an add-on for FireFox, named MementoFox, is available. It allows time traveling the web by obtaining archived resources from a variety of systems that comply with the Memento protocol, either natively or via a proxy.

Normally, a site is archived only when visited by an archive's robot: if the bot visits every 6 months, then the changes in between the visits are not archived. In server-side transactional archiving, as implemented by SiteStory, a web server takes an active role in its own archiving: when it receives a request from a browser, it sends the response to that browser as expected, but also pushes it into an associated web archive. As a result, all versions of all resources that are being requested by browsers are also available in the archive. Experiments with SiteStory have shown that this causes negligible extra load on the web server. De-duplication of versions by the archive helps to keep the required archival storage space under control. SiteStory also allows archived content to be offloaded as WARC files, for example, to subsequently be uploaded into a long-term archive.

Sever-side transactional archiving is not perfect either. For example, resources that are not accessed by browsers are not archived. Also, an image from a remote server that is embedded into a page of the server that has an associated transactional archive will not be archived unless that remote server also has its own transactional archive. The latter is demonstrated by an experiment that the team at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Web Science & Digital Library Research Group of Old Dominion University have been conducting since late 2009. In the experiment both parties operate a server with an associated transactional archive and both (http://lanlsource.lanl.gov/hello and http://odusource.cs.odu.edu/hello) serve pages, that embed content from the other site. With MementoFox installed, faithfully reconstructed versions of those pages that leverage archived resources from both transactional archives can be obtained.

The development of SiteStory was a significant endeavor, and the following contributions are gratefully acknowledged:

• Lyudmila Balakireva of the Prototyping Team of the LANL Research Library for the SiteStory design and development;
• Robert Sanderson, Harihar Shankar, Martin Klein, and Herbert Van de Sompel of the Prototyping Team of the LANL Research Library for architectural guidance;
• Michael L. Nelson and Justin Brunelle of the Web Science and Digital Library Research Group at Old Dominion University for input and early testing;
• Patrick Hochstenbach of the Ghent University Library and Dirk Roorda of DANS for early testing;
• The Library of Congress for supporting the development.

Five NDSA Innovation Award Winners

Contributed by:
Trevor Owens
Digital Archivist
Library of Congress
Washington, DC
trow [at] loc.gov

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance, Innovation Working Group, has announced the first set of projects, individuals, and organizations to receive the NDSA Innovation Awards. Almost a year ago, the NDSA Innovation Working Group announced the development of a series of awards to recognize innovative work in digital preservation. Earlier in the year we opened up the nominations, and in June of this year we publicly announced the winners.

From nearly fifty compelling nominations the awards team selected the following five winners. The winners illustrate the diversity of the digital preservation community, including students, educators, media professionals, state partners and representatives from both library and archives communities. Please join us in congratulating these winners for their hard work!

Future Steward: Mat Kelly, Graduate Student at Old Dominion University: Recognized for his work on WARCreate, a Google Chrome extension that allows users to create a Web ARChive (WARC) file from any browseable webpage.

Institution: State Library and State Archives of North Carolina: Recognized for their work educating state employees and information professionals on digital preservation through their website, online tutorials, and digpres411 Twitter account.

Project: AIMS Project (An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship): Recognized for their work developing a framework for stewarding born-digital content and filling the gap between applying standards such as OAIS and the necessary workflows and tools for implementation. You can read their resulting white paper online.

Individual: Peter Krogh, Photographer: Recognized for his work on The DAM Book, the dpBestflow website and as a special advisor to the Shutha project, each of which have helped raise awareness and make information on digital preservation practices accessible to photographers.

Individual: Dr. Anthony Cocciolo, Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute: Recognized for his innovative approaches to teaching digital preservation practices, in particular his work partnering classes with archival institutions to work on the digitization and digital preservation of analog audio collections.

The awards were presented at the DigitalPreservation 2012 conference, held July 24-26, 2012 in Arlington, VA. (Originally posted on The Signal blog).

XTF 3.1 Now Available

Contributed by:
Lisa Schiff
Technical Lead, Access & Publishing Group
California Digital Library, University of California
lisa.schiff [at] ucop.edu

Martin Haye
Publishing Services Architect, Access & Publishing Group
California Digital Library, University of California
martin.haye [at] ucop.edu

Developers of digital content collections will be happy to know that XTF 3.1 is now available for download and use. This latest version of the Extensible Text Framework (XTF) includes significantly improved support for EAD encoded finding aids as well as other enhancements of general interest to those concerned with making their digital materials publically available.

XTF is a powerful, flexible open source platform for providing access to digital content. Developed and maintained by the California Digital Library (CDL) at the University of California, it functions as a primary access technology for the CDL's digital collections and powers access to other digital projects worldwide. Features that end-users now expect from all robust online collections are standard functionality in XTF, including:

• spell checking and suggestions for user-entered search terms
• hierarchical facets to ease winnowing of search results and browsing through large amounts of content
• UTF-8 support (full support for Unicode/BMP)

In contrast to other solutions that implementers may consider, XTF provides many features that significantly ease the work of technologists responsible for making digital collections available, such as:

• sophisticated searching of structured text
• display of search hits in their full context
• a full user interface and running system out-of-the-box
• a globalized front-end
• step-by-step tutorials to walk developers through typical customization tasks

XTF's newly expanded EAD support recognizes the widespread use of this framework for proving robust access to digital collections of finding aids. The Online Archive of California (OAC), developed at the CDL, is among the most well-known online sources of finding aids. With several hundred contributing institutions throughout California, OAC offers free access to richly described primary resources at a range of cultural institutions. EAD collections powered by XTF can also be found at other organizations, including at Indiana University where a wide variety of archival materials are accessible via XTF from a number of different collections curated by the University.

With the 3.1 release XTF not only handles the EAD 2002 DTD, but provides support for search and display of EAD 2002 schema and EAD 2002 RelaxNG finding aids, as well as for output from Archivists' Toolkit and Archon. Now entire suites of tools and technologies can be more easily brought together in one workflow, thereby facilitating the efforts of archivists and technologists who are putting an increasing number of EAD finding aids online.

The improvements in XTF 3.1 are not restricted to the domain of finding aids. Relevant to all online collections are the strengthened OAI-PMH functionality through better OAI 2.0 conformance and out-of-the-box dynamic site maps to support optimal search engine indexing. These new aspects evolved out of enhancements made to XTF-based sites, which were then folded back into the code for the benefit of all XTF users. OAI-PMH improvements were due to the work of XTF implementers at the University of Tennessee where the framework is used to provide access to a number of that university's special collections. The dynamic site-map strategy developed out of CDL's efforts to improve search engine optimization (SEO) for eScholarship, UC's XTF-based open access publishing platform that now hosts over 50 scholarly journals and over 47,000 publications.

Getting started with XTF is easy: the download package contains everything needed to get a basic application running following the simple Quick Start instructions. More extensive tutorials and documentation are all available, as well as a sample implementation demonstrating the default features. For those who have questions beyond these resources, the XTF user community is available.

Record Crowd Participates in DigitalPreservation 2012

Contributed by:
Bill LeFurgy
Digital Initiatives Manager
Library of Congress
Washington, DC
wlef [at] loc.gov

The Library of Congress provided a forum for innovative insights during its annual digital preservation meeting, held during July 24-25. DigitalPreservation 2012 drew record attendance from across the country and around the world.

The Library's National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program organized the event to meet several goals. One was to hear from prominent technologists and thought leaders. Another was to bring together Library partners and others to share learning and best practices. Yet another was to extend collaborative ties to improve digital stewardship in the service of advancing knowledge and creativity.

The gathering opened with Anil Dash, a well-known blogger and tech entrepreneur, who described himself as "a geek interested in the social impacts of technology on culture and government." He stated that archivists and librarians are grappling with issues that the technology community knows little about. Dash warned that proprietary applications lock up content and put it at serious risk of loss or misappropriation. The way around this involves linking apps to the web, which permits copying and preservation. While this is now the exception, there is some hope for optimism. "There is a growing class of apps that want to do the right thing," Dash said.

David Weinberger, best-selling author and senior researcher at the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet & Society, talked about the dramatic change that the web has brought to ideas about information and knowledge. Until recently, he noted, knowledge was constrained and localized in the service of "managing, filtering, reducing and winnowing information to reach definitive answers." With the web, knowledge has been set free to grow and evolve in networks. This compels us to accept the messiness of information on the web, and move away from defined answers. "Messiness is how you scale meaning...disagreement is how you scale knowledge."

Michael Carroll, American University Law Professor and Creative Commons board director, compared digital preservation to environmentalism, in that both entail stewardship of valuable resources as well as long-term planning. Both also call for institutional incentives. Carroll noted that while concerns about intellectual property law can serve as a disincentive for digital stewardship, libraries and archives should feel free to capture as much content as they can right now. Carroll said that such capture could be justified under legal concepts of both fair use and free speech. He urged the preservation community "to organize itself as the voice of tomorrow's users on issues of copyright policy and copyright estate planning."

Bram van der Werf, Executive Director of the Open Planets Foundation, presented on Assuring Future Access, from Infancy to Maturity. He called for more effort into "preventative maintenance for digital collections and the software needed to preserve them." The extent to which an institution is capable of this can be seen as a function of what van der Werf referred to as digital preservation maturity. Immature organizations, for example, generate orphan data and "abandonware" software tools. He stated that the key element was developing capable, well-trained staff to populate a "mature community of merit with many motivated people empowered and rewarded by their organizations."

The day wrapped up with a poster session designed to share information and spur discussion about broadening collaborative efforts. Many of the presenters outlined work in relation to the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, a recent NDIIPP initiative to extend the Library's digital preservation partnership network.

The following day featured plenary sessions on big data, preserving digital art and culture, and perspectives on digital preservation projects from federal grant funders. A series of breakout sessions followed to demonstrate new digital preservation tools. There were also small group discussions on Preserving Electronic Records in the States, Defining Levels of Preservation, and Assessing and Mitigating Bit-Level Preservation Risks.

In association with the meeting, the Library sponsored a CurateCamp on July 26 to focus on two different notions of "processing": archival processing and data processing. Following an unconference model, participants organized into a series of small group discussions to consider issues such as processing digital acquisitions; defining and extracting essential characteristics for digital objects; and options for repository software. (Originally posted on The Signal blog).

I N   T H E   N E W S

IUPUI library captures three major Library Federation awards

August 31, 2012 — "University Library at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and two of the library's employees are recipients of leadership awards from the Indiana Library Federation, one of the largest state library associations in the U.S. The IUPUI library is the only public academic library to earn the association's leadership awards in three categories."

"University Library and the Indianapolis Public Library are co-recipients of the Indiana Library Federation Collaboration Award, which recognizes significant contributions in promoting library services on a community, regional or statewide level."

"The two Indianapolis libraries were honored for their ongoing, innovative collaboration focused on creating digital collections that make unique materials available to the community via the Internet."

For more information please see the full press release.

Wiley Joins the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)

August 30, 2012 — "John Wiley & Sons, Inc., announced today its new membership of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). OASPA represents the interests of open access journal publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines and enables exchange of information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation...."

"...Wiley has had an open access offering for authors since 2004 in the form of OnlineOpen, a hybrid open access model for subscription journals, which last month extended to over 80% of Wiley journals. OnlineOpen is available to authors of primary research articles who wish to make their article available to non-subscribers on publication, or whose funding agency requires grantees to archive the final version of their article."

"In early 2011 Wiley launched Wiley Open Access, a fully open access journal program, which already contains eleven journals. Wiley Open Access provides open access publication in peer-reviewed journals where all published articles are immediately freely available to read, download and share."

For more information please see the full press release.

NISO Publishes New Version of NCIP - NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol

Standard supports greater interoperability for resource sharing

August 22, 2012 — "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the publication of the two-part American National Standard on the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP), ANSI/NISO Z39.83. NCIP addresses the need for interoperability among disparate circulation, interlibrary loan, consortial borrowing, and self-service applications by standardizing the exchange of messages between and among computer-based applications. Part 1 of the standard defines the Protocol and Part 2: Implementation Profile provides a practical implementation structure. The NCIP protocol is widely supported in integrated library systems (ILS) and resource sharing software."

"'This latest edition of NCIP, version 2.02, incorporates implementers' feedback and experience into the standard with changes that improve the usefulness and practicality of the various services,' explained Mike Dicus, Product Manager at Ex Libris Group and Co-chair of the NCIP Standing Committee. 'One of the larger changes in 2.02 is the addition of a Lookup Item Set service. This new service allows an initiator to query with a single request a set of items that may share some kind of relationship, such as multiple volumes of a book set. Additionally, Bibliographic Record Id has been made repeatable within Bibliographic Description. This makes it possible, for example, for an initiator to send an Accept Item message passing both an OCLC number and a Library of Congress Catalog Number. And Request Item has been changed so that it now accepts both Bibliographic Record Id and Item Id, and both elements are repeatable. In earlier versions, Request Item accepted either a single Bibliographic Record Id or a single Item Id.'"

"'In addition to the standard, the NCIP Standing Committee has made available supporting tools and documentation to aid in implementation,' stated Rob Walsh, representative for EnvisionWare, the Maintenance Agency for NCIP...."

For more information please see the full press release.

"The NCIP standard and the supporting tools and documentation are freely available from the NCIP Workroom on the NISO website: www.niso.org/workrooms/ncip/."

NISO Publishes Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) Standard

Provides common XML format for exchanging journal content

August 22, 2012 — "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the publication of a new American National Standard, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite, ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2012. JATS provides a common XML format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content by preserving the intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered. In addition to the element and attribute descriptions, three journal article tag sets (the Archiving and Interchange Tag Set, the Journal Publishing Tag Set, and the Article Authoring Tag Set) are part of the standard. While designed to describe the textual and graphical content of journal articles, it can also be used for some other materials, such as letters, editorials, and book and product reviews...."

"...'Taking JATS through the NISO standardization process will bring awareness of the Tag Suite to a larger and more varied audience,' explained Jeffrey Beck, NCBI Technical Information Specialist at the National Library of Medicine and Co-chair of the NISO JATS Working Group. 'We expect this wider audience will find uses for the Tag Suite in new applications, beyond its traditional uses in journal publishing and archiving.'..."

"...The JATS standard is available as both an online XML document and a freely downloadable PDF from the NISO website (www.niso.org/workrooms/journalmarkup). Supporting documentation and schemas in DTD, RELAX NG, and W3C Schema formats are available at: jats.nlm.nih.gov/."

For more information please see the full press release.

SPIE launches new open access program for all journals

August 22, 2012 — "SPIE has announced a new program that provides Gold Open Access upon publication for a journal article for which authors or their institutions pay voluntary page charges, beginning in January 2013. Authors will retain copyright under the Creative Commons CC-BY license."

"SPIE will continue open access publication at no cost to authors for all review and tutorial articles, and will continue to deposit NIH-funded articles with PubMed Central on the authors' behalf...."

"...SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The Society serves nearly 225,000 constituents from approximately 150 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional growth, and patent precedent. SPIE provided over $2.7 million in support of education and outreach programs in 2011."

For more information please see the full press release.

Survey results indicate salaries for librarians in 2012 flat - and in some cases lower

August 21, 2012 — "According to results of the newly-released 2012 ALA-APA Salary Survey: Librarian - Public and Academic, with a less than 1 percent increase, salaries for librarians are basically flat. Survey responses from public and academic libraries in all 50 states and the District of Columbia indicate that salaries range from a low of $22,000 in public libraries to a high of more than $258,000, with the highest salary earners being library directors in university libraries."

"The Salary Survey shows aggregated data from 11,315 individual salaries of librarians with an ALA-accredited Master's degree from 618 libraries by region and state. Data is shown for public libraries serving populations under 10,000 to more than 500,000, as well as for academic libraries at community colleges, four-year colleges and university libraries, including Association of Research Libraries."

For more information please see the full press release.

CENDI-NFAIS Workshop - Save the Date

August 21, 2012 announcement from Kathryn Simon for CENDI — "This workshop sponsored by CENDI and NFAIS and hosted by FEDLINK is shaping up nicely and we want all to consider attending this timely and thought-provoking event. Mark your calendar for December 11, 2012."

"This one-day workshop will appeal to anyone concerned with effectively managing, analyzing, and using large volumes of structured and/or unstructured content – librarians, publishers, scientists and scholars, technologists, and other information professionals. If you need to know more about the key issues and current trends in handling Big Data, what tools are emerging for data mining and analytics, the new skill sets required for data management and curation, and how some institutions are living up to the challenges presented by the growth of scholarly and scientific data, this meeting is for you. Registration [opened] August 22nd to accommodate those who need to pay before the new fiscal year begins."

"Dr. George Strawn, Director of the National Coordination Office for the U.S. multi-agency Networking and Information Technology Research Development (NITRD) Program, will open the day with a compelling overview of the Big Data landscape – the growth of content, its impact on storage and use capacity, and the many issues that have to be addressed *now* - skill sets, policies, analytic tools, and more. This will be followed by case studies from organizations such as the World Data System and the Earth Science Information Partnership who will discuss how they have been impacted by the growth of data, the challenges they now face in content management, new systems and policy requirements, workflow issues, etc., and how they are adapting to change."

"After lunch (which will be provided), speakers from the research and publishing communities (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the American Chemical Society, and Nature Publishing) will address developments related to data citation, data linking, and the handling of journal article supplemental materials, covering issues of interest to librarians, content providers and users. In addition, there will be a session focused on the emerging skill sets required to handle large volumes of data with a principal of the McKinsey Global Institute discussing the results of a recent study on this issue."

"The day will close with Dennis Gannon, Director, Cloud Research, Microsoft Research Connections, providing an overview of the field of data analytics – successful applications, opportunities, and challenges – along with some new initiatives in this field that you can expect from Microsoft."

Registration is open now at http://cendi.gov/activities/12_11_2012_CENDI_NFAIS_FEDLINK.html.

EUscreen releases Online Exhibitions

August 21, 2012 — "EUscreen makes thousands of items from Europe's television history freely available through its online portal and through Europeana. The project now announces its online exhibitions, a new addition to the portal that helps users, educators and the general audience to get the most out of this exciting collection."

"The EUscreen collection includes thousands of items. To help users get the most from the EUscreen material, researchers, experts and members of its partner broadcasters and audiovisual archives have created a series of online exhibitions. These exhibitions cover historical events, political debates and everyday life in Europe...."

"...The tools designed for these exhibitions allow for the insertion of multimedia materials from all the project's content providers and link back to the original items on the site, where users can find out more about them, share the links or get in touch with the providers themselves. Many more exhibitions will become available over the next couple of months and EUscreen is working hard to get the tools ready for everyone to start creating their own exhibitions."

For more information please see the full press release.

OCLC Research to Develop Semantic Similarity Computing Algorithms with the Europeana Dataset

August 21, 2012 — "OCLC and Europeana are collaborating to investigate ways of creating semantic links between the millions of digital objects that are accessible online through Europeana.eu in order to improve 'similar object' browsing."

"Europeana is Europe's digital library, archive and museum. The Europeana platform and network of experts facilitate research and knowledge exchange between librarians, curators and archivists, and link them with digital innovators and the creative industries. Europeana currently gives people access to over 24 million books, paintings, films, recordings, photographs and archival records from 2,200 partner organisations, through an interface in 29 languages...."

"...The collaboration between Europeana and OCLC Research will benefit both organisations and their partners, offering new opportunities for data enrichment. The outcomes of the research project will feed into the implementation of the Europeana Data Model (EDM), which is devised to improve the browsing experience of the visitors of Europeana.eu. In addition, the piloting of OCLC Research data clustering and enrichment methods and techniques will inform follow-up activities in more innovative directions and opportunities to develop new data services for third parties."

For more information please see the full press release.

Request for comments on the draft version of Minimum Digitization Capture Recommendations

August 16, 2012 announcement from Ian Bogus, University of Pennsylvania Libraries — "In 2011, the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Preservation and Reformatting Section charged a task force to develop guidelines for libraries digitizing content with the objective of producing digital products that will endure. The intent of this document was to build off past works. The authors reviewed previous research, practices at over 50 organizations, and samples of digitized works to determine a recommendation of minimum specifications for sustainable digitized content. The recommendations are not intended to dictate specific technical specifications at any given institution, but rather a floor that should not be dropped below. This draft was the result of the task force's work. It is now up for general comment before it is published in its final version."

"Please take the time to review the document and comment. The comment period will end on December 31, 2012. Comments will then be reviewed, incorporated into the document, and a final version will be published shortly thereafter."

"The document can be found here: http://connect.ala.org/node/185648."

Stanford University Libraries Image Defects Pages and Cropping Guide

August 15, 2012 announcement from Matt Pearson, Image Quality Assurance Specialist, Stanford University Libraries — "Stanford University Libraries is now maintaining Image defects pages as a first step in sharing our digital preservation program's best practices for imaging and quality control. https://lib.stanford.edu/digital-production-services/quality-assurance-image-defects This collaborative resource currently includes just under 100 examples and will continue to grow with support from the library and cultural heritage communities. Examples are described (and sortable) by 'look' and by 'cause'."

"We are also sharing our Cropping Guide poster, which we have hanging in all of our digitization labs and studios. https://lib.stanford.edu/digital-production-services/quality-assurance-cropping-guide."

"Suggestions are welcome and should be directed to me at matp [at] stanford.edu. I'm looking forward to hearing from you and I hope this will prove to be a helpful resource."

CrossRef Joins STM-DataCite Statement

August 10, 2012 — "In June 2012, DataCite and the International Association of STM Publishers (STM) issued a joint statement on the Linkability and Citability of Research Data (http://www.stm-assoc.org/2012_06_14_STM_DataCite_Joint_Statement.pdf). CrossRef is pleased to join and support this statement and the best practices for data it recommends."

"CrossRef, a not-for-profit association of representing 4,000 scholarly publisher with 55 million content items (journal and conference proceeding articles and books and book chapters), is committed to the interoperability of CrossRef and DataCite's services which are based on the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) System, recently approved as an ISO Standard (ISO 26324:2012, Information and documentation — Digital object identifier system)."

"Specifically, CrossRef encourages publishers to use DataCite DOIs to link to data sets referenced in the published literature, and encourages authors of research papers to use CrossRef DOIs to link from data deposited in DataCite repositories to the published articles that draw on that data. CrossRef and DataCite are also collaborating on joint services, such as DOI Content Negotiation (http://crosscite.org/cn/), to enable publishers and data repositories to automatically interlink their content."

For more information please see the full press release.

Ithaka S+R Awarded NEH Grant to expand "Host Institution" Study to the US

August 9, 2012 — "Ithaka S+R has been awarded a Digital Humanities Implementation Grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to study the role of the university or institutional host in supporting digital humanities resources in the United States. The project, Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support Beyond the Start Up Phase, builds on Ithaka S+R's ongoing work in the area of Sustainability, including the now underway JISC-funded project Digital Content and Host Institution Support Strategies that is exploring similar questions in the United Kingdom."

"'Project leaders are quite adept at estimating costs for building digital resources, but they have not always considered the long-term costs for keeping these projects going after the grant funding has expired,' commented Nancy Maron, program director, Ithaka S+R. 'This study will help project managers and their institutions to develop a shared vocabulary, to understand the requirements for ongoing support, and ultimately to formulate a shared plan to sustain the digital resources they are creating for years to come.'"

For more information please see the full press release.

NISO and DAISY Consortium Publish Authoring and Interchange Framework Standard

New standard defines how to create universally accessible electronic publications

August 7, 2012 — "The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the DAISY Consortium announce the publication of the new American National Standard Authoring and Interchange Framework (ANSI/NISO Z39.98-2012). The standard defines how to represent digital information using XML to produce documents suitable for transformation into different universally accessible formats. The standard is a revision, extension, and enhancement of Specifications for the Digital Talking Book (DTB), commonly referred to as the DAISY standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.86-2005(R2012)). The DAISY Consortium is the Maintenance Agency for both standards...."

"...'Although the new A&I Framework standard is intended to replace the Digital Talking Book standard,' explains Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director, 'feedback during trial use of the standard indicated that content providers and device manufacturers would need a transition period of several years due to the significance of the changes in the standard. To meet this need, the existing DTB standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.86) was reaffirmed for another five years and the A&I Framework was assigned a new standard number (ANSI/NISO Z39.98).'"

"Both the A&I Framework standard and the Digital Talking Book standard are available for free download from the NISO website (daisy.niso.org) and the DAISY website (www.daisy.org/daisy-standard)."

For more information please see the full press release.

SAGE Partners with UC Berkeley on SAGE Open

August 6, 2012 — "SAGE and the University of California, Berkeley, have announced a partnership designed to encourage social science and humanities faculty and students at the university to make their work available to all by publishing in SAGE Open. Launched by SAGE in 2011, SAGE Open is the first peer-reviewed, broad-based, 'Gold' open access social science and humanities journal."

"UC Berkeley will subsidize the author fee for 30 accepted papers to SAGE Open at a discounted rate. SAGE will reach out to UC Berkeley faculty and students to let them know about the subsidized fees. Additionally, SAGE will handle the billing and accounting for the fees so that it is a seamless transaction for UC Berkeley authors."

"'UC Berkeley, through its Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII), is proud to partner with SAGE on this latest venture in gold open access publishing,' said Tom Leonard, University Librarian. 'The UC Berkeley library particularly welcomes the opportunity to expand open access publishing in the social sciences and humanities.'"

"The goals of the BRII are to provide support to new and emerging publisher options that both enhance the impact of Berkeley authors' research and show promise in helping research institutions create affordable and sustainable models for scholarly communication."

For more information please see the full press release.

Yearbooks from 51 N.C. colleges, universities archived together online

August 1, 2012 — "Yearbooks from 14 of the 17 UNC system institutions – plus 37 other schools – are now archived together online, thanks to a project based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library."

"History buffs and alumni can glimpse famous grads as young adults....But yearbooks offer more than celebrity photos. The yearbooks also preserve important traditions, such as the selection of queens for classes and majors at many historically black colleges. Genealogists use the yearbooks to identify and learn about ancestors."

"Yearbooks also record what is important to each generation, and how student culture and life change. For example, 1920s yearbooks showed students posing in formal attire and participating in activities such as glee clubs and debating societies, while yearbook highlights in the 1970s and 1980s included political rallies, rock concerts and beer drinking contests. 'The one constant across the years has been sports,' Graham said...."

"...The State Library of North Carolina supports the center with funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library and Services and Technology Act. UNC contributes the technical and administrative infrastructure and the expertise of staff consultants."

For more information please see the full press release.

Grant Awards Announcement: Sparks! Ignition Grants

July 26, 2012 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) today announced 13 awards totaling $304,866 matched with $174,266 of non-federal funds for Sparks! Ignition Grants. IMLS received 69 applications requesting nearly $1.8 million."

"'Sparks! Ignition Grants are designed to help libraries and museums solve challenging problems,' said Susan Hildreth, IMLS Director. 'They promote creativity and innovation by supporting promising new approaches to issues affecting libraries and museums across the country. This grant program has tremendous potential to turn small investments of funds into nationally significant projects.'"

"Click here to view the list of funded projects."

For more information please see the full press release.

VIVO to Join DuraSpace Organization Incubator Initiative

July 25, 2012 — "VIVO Project leaders and the DuraSpace organization announced today the intention for VIVO to join DuraSpace as an Incubator project, the first step towards establishing the VIVO project as part of a sustainable 501(c)(3) organization. DuraSpace leads the development and improvement of open technologies that provide long-term, durable access to digital assets and is an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit born from a vision to help save our shared scholarly, scientific and cultural record. DuraSpace will provide VIVO with infrastructure and guidance to continue support for a diverse array of project efforts while continuing to develop the core VIVO software and expand the VIVO community."

"Research, library and cultural memory communities require efficient methods for describing and linking researchers and research, which is a natural connection point for VIVO, a semantic web-based researcher and research discovery tool that exposes self-describing data via shared ontologies, and DuraSpace, provider of software and services as solutions for open access, institutional repositories, digital libraries, digital archives, data curation and virtual research environments. VIVO will be the first DuraSpace incubated project based on an open source incubator project model that provides access to expanded community affiliations, organizational tools, and mentorship towards adopting open source best practices."

For more information please see the full press release.

Applications Open for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 2013 Access to Learning Award (ATLA)

July 23, 2012 — "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is currently accepting applications to its 2013 Access to Learning Award (ATLA), which recognizes the innovative efforts of public libraries and similar institutions outside the United States to connect people to information and opportunities through free access to computers and the Internet. The award is given by Global Libraries, an initiative of the foundation's Global Development Program. The recipient of the Access to Learning Award will receive $1 million (U.S.)."

"Applications for the 2013 ATLA must be submitted via an online submission process, which may be accessed the website: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/ATLA. The application form is available only in English and must be completed in English to be eligible for consideration. However, while applications must be submitted in English, the foundation does offer informational brochures in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish."

• To be eligible, the applying institution must allow all members of the public to use computers and the Internet free of charge in a community space.
• No U.S. organizations are eligible to apply. That includes U.S. organizations that operate in locations outside of the U.S. If a U.S. organization works through a local organization outside of the U.S., the local organization would be encouraged to apply.
• Organizations that are current or former grantees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (including Global Health grantees) are not eligible to apply.
• Only ONE (1) organization may apply per application. The Foundation does not accept joint applications for the ATLA program.
• If the applicant organization operates multiple computer centers/access points, ALL access points must currently provide free public access to computers and the Internet. The foundation will not accept applications from organizations who charge fees at some, but not all, of their centers/access points.

"If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact the Administrator at atla [at] gatesfoundation.org."

The submission deadline for applications is 30 September 2012.

Grant Awards Announcement: Museums for America

July 19, 2012 — "The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) announced today 152 awards totaling $18,113,376 matched with $34,666,759 of non-federal funds for Museums for America Program Grants. IMLS received 470 applications requesting $52,296,907."

"'Congratulations to the Museums for America grantees,' said IMLS Director Susan Hildreth. 'This year's funded projects reflect the wide array of museum types in the country. In every case IMLS funds are supporting initiatives that advance an institution's strategic plan for the benefit of the community it serves.'"

"Click here to view the list of funded projects."

For more information please see the full press release.

Copyright © 2012 Corporation for National Research Initiatives