Public Knowledge has released a podcast of James Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University, discussing electronic reserves copyright, fair use, and licensing issues.
The JISC-funded Rights and Rewards Project at Loughborough University has made its proof-of-concept PEDESTAL system public, which uses Web 2.0 concepts in a learning repository.
Here’s an excerpt from the About: PEDESTAL page:
PEDESTAL is a demonstrator teaching and learning material repository. PEDESTAL is a service, which has been developed by the Engineering Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (EngCETL), for Loughborough staff to share their teaching material and expertise with other peers. . . .
PEDESTAL is not just about the sharing content, each user has their own blog which can be used to capture user’s thoughts and interests. Links to useful documents or webpage’s can be recorded, which also may be of interest to many others.PEDESTAL boasts a search mechanism. Within PEDESTAL, a search may retrieve more than just content. For example, a search using the term ‘Digital Photography’ may return;
- Items to embed in to teaching (textual resources, diagrams, images etc)
- Items to inform the teaching and learning process (teaching exemplars, how to guides)
- A list of people who are interested in ‘Digital Photography’
- A list of blog postings that have the term ‘Digital Photography’ within them
PEDESTAL is much different than a Virtual Learning Environment (Learn). The latter is structured around course modules and is a mechanism which delivers teaching material (usually specific to a course or module) to students. PEDESTAL is structured around people—i.e. the users. Each user is given a personal profile page which can be customised to show their teaching and research interests.
For further information, see the About: 10 Things About PEDESTAL page.
A cross-institutional team has built a a simulation of Rome as it was in 320 A.D. called Rome Reborn 1.0.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
Rome’s Mayor Walter Veltroni will officiate at the first public viewing of "Rome Reborn 1.0," a 10-year project based at the University of Virginia and begun at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to use advanced technology to digitally rebuild ancient Rome. The event will take place at 2 p.m. in the Palazzo Senatorio on the Campidoglio. An international team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists from Italy, the United States, Britain and Germany employed the same high-tech tools used for simulating contemporary cities such as laser scanners and virtual reality to build the biggest, most complete simulation of an historic city ever created. "Rome Reborn 1.0" shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time Rome was the multicultural capital of the western world and had reached the peak of its development with an estimated population of one million.
"Rome Reborn 1.0" is a true 3D model that runs in real time. Users can navigate through the model with complete freedom, moving up, down, left and right at will. They can enter important public buildings such as the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, or the Temple of Venus and Rome, the ancient city’s largest place of worship.
As new discoveries are made, "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. In future releases, the "Rome Reborn" project will include other phases in the evolution of the city from the late Bronze Age in the 10th century B.C. to the Gothic Wars in the 6th century A.D. Video clips and still images of "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be viewed at www.romereborn.virginia.edu. . . .
The "Rome Reborn" project was begun at UCLA in 1996 by professors Favro and Frischer. They collaborated with UCLA students from classics, architecture and urban design who fashioned the digital models with continuous advice from expert archaeologists. As the project evolved, it became collaborative at an international scale. In 2004, the project moved its administrative home to the University of Virginia, while work in progress continued at UCLA. In the same year, a cooperative research agreement was signed with the Politecnico di Milano. . . .
Many individuals and institutions contributed to "Rome Reborn" including the Politecnico di Milano (http://www.polimi.it), UCLA (http://www.etc.ucla.edu/), and the University of Virginia (www.iath.virginia.edu). The advisors of the project included scholars from the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Roman Civilization (Rome), Bath University, Bryn Mawr College, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, the German Archaeological Institute, Ohio University, UCLA, the University of Florence, the University of Lecce, the University of Rome ("La Sapienza"), the University of Virginia and the Vatican Museums.
JISC has released Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.
Here’s an excerpt from the report’s introduction:
In the main report, we provide a discussion of Web 2.0 together with a compilation of the more commonly used systems for education. We then examine progress at four universities which have taken a strategic approach and implemented Web 2.0 services in different ways at the institutional level. This is followed by a discussion of Web 2.0 content and its creation and use, together with an identification of issues affecting content creation and use. The next section considers the ways in which Web 2.0 is being used in learning, teaching and assessment, and important issues associated with pedagogy and assessment. We then turn to institutional policy and strategy and consider ways in which Web 2.0 impacts them.
Because of the relative immaturity of the technology and experimentation with its use, it is too early to make specific recommendations in most of the areas above. Consequently we make various recommendations to the JISC as to actions to guide and help the UK HE community in its ongoing exploration, adoption and adaptation of Web 2.0 systems.
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued an action alert regarding a change in the NIH Public Access Policy that would mandate deposit of articles resulting from NIH-funded research. Peter Suber has discussed this issue in relation to a call by ACRL for an NIH mandate.
Here is the alert:
The NIH Public Access Policy is currently under consideration by Congress, as part of the larger FY08 Labor/HHS, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill. The House is expected to mark up the FY08 Labor/HHS Appropriations Bill on Thursday, June 7th.
Please take action now to express your support for a shift to mandatory policy Fax your House Representative a letter as soon as possible.
Visit http://www.house.gov for contact information. Constituents of the House Appropriations Labor/HHS Subcommittee are especially encouraged to write. (http://appropriations.house.gov/Subcommittees/sub_lhhse.shtml)
For talking points and background on the NIH Public Access Policy and recent legislative measures, please see the ATA Web site at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/nih.html.
NIH Policy Status
The House is expected to mark up the FY08 Labor/HHS Appropriations Bill within the week. The bill will then move to the full Appropriations committee. Please stand by for an announcement about House activities from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access in the coming days.
The Senate Appropriations Committee—Labor/HHS Subcommittee is expected to review their versions of appropriations bills later this month.
Emory University’s Woodruff Library will use a Kirtas robotic book scanner to digitize rare books and to create PDF files that will be made available on the Internet and sold as print-on-demand books on Amazon.
Here’s an excerpt from the press release:
"We believe that mass digitization and print-on-demand publishing is an important new model for digital scholarship that is going to revolutionize the management of academic materials," said Martin Halbert, director for digital programs and systems at Emory’s Woodruff Library. "Information will no longer be lost in the mists of time when books go out of print. This is a way of opening up the past to the future."
Emory’s Woodruff Library is one of the premier research libraries in the United States, with extensive holdings in the humanities, including many rare and special collections. To increase accessibility to these aging materials, and ensure their preservation, the university purchased a Kirtas robotic book scanner, which can digitize as many as 50 books per day, transforming the pages from each volume into an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). The PDF files will be uploaded to a Web site where scholars can access them. If a scholar wishes to order a bound, printed copy of a digitized book, they can go to Amazon.com and order the book on line.
Emory will receive compensation from the sale of digitized copies, although Halbert stressed that the print-on-demand feature is not intended to generate a profit, but simply help the library recoup some of its costs in making out-of-print materials available.
The Google Book Search Library Project has an important new participant—the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). The CIC members are the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As many as 10 million volumes will be digitized from the collections of these major research libraries.
Here’s an excerpt from the CIC press release:
This partnership between our 12 member universities and Google is unprecedented. What makes this work so exciting is that we will literally open the pages of millions of books that have been assembled on our library shelves over more than a century. In literally seconds, we’ll be able browse across the content of thousands of volumes, searching for words or phrases, and making links across those texts that would have taken weeks or months or years of dedicated and scrupulous analysis. It is an extraordinary effort, blending the efforts and aspirations of librarians, university administrators, and scholars from across 12 world-class research universities. And our corporate partner possesses unparalleled expertise in creating and opening the digital world to coherent and comprehensive searching.
The effort is not entirely without controversy—no great undertaking ever is. But our universities believe strongly in the power of information to change the world, and in preserving, protecting and extending access to information. We have carefully weighed and considered the intellectual property issues and believe that our effort is firmly within the guidelines of current copyright law, while providing some flexibility as those laws are tested in the new digital environment in the coming years.
The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new scholarly literature and resources related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.
Especially interesting are: "ALADIN Research Commons: A Consortial Institutional Repository"; "Archiving Challenges of Scholarly Electronic Journals: How Do Publishers Manage Them?"; "Archiving Web Sites for Preservation and Access: MODS, METS and MINERVA"; "Assessing the Value of a Journal Beyond the Impact Factor"; "Backlinks: Alternatives to the Citation Index for Determining Impact"; "Balancing Author and Publisher Rights"; "Digital Archiving and Preservation: Technologies and Processes for a Trusted Repository"; "Factors to Assess Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories"; "Herding Cats: Designing DigitalCommons @ The Texas Medical Center, a Multi-institutional Repository"; "The Missing Link: Journal Usage Metrics"; "A Multifaceted Approach to Promote a University Repository: The University of Kansas’ Experience"; "The RepoMMan project: Automating Workflow and Metadata for an Institutional Repository"; "SHERPA-LEAP: A Consortial Model for the Creation and Support of Academic Institutional Repositories"; and "Technologically Enhanced Archival Collections: Using the Buddy System."
For weekly updates about news articles, Weblog postings, and other resources related to digital culture (e.g., copyright, digital privacy, digital rights management, and Net neutrality), digital libraries, and scholarly electronic publishing, see the latest DigitalKoans Flashback posting.