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.

The Open Archives Initiative—Object Reuse and Exchange has released Compound Information Objects: An OAI-ORE Perspective by Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel.

Here’s an excerpt from the document’s "Introduction and Motivation" section:

In summary, the web architecture expresses the notion of linked URI-identified resources. Information systems can leverage this architecture to publish the components of a compound object and thereby make them available to web clients and services. But due to the absence of commonly accepted standards, the notion of an identified compound object with a distinct boundary and typed relationships among its component resources is lost.

The absence of these standards affects the functionality of a number of existing and possible web services and applications. Crawler-based search engines might be more useful if the granularity of their result sets corresponded to compound objects (a book or chapter, in this example) rather than individual resources (single pages). The ranking algorithms of these search engines might improve if the links among the components of a compound object were treated differently than links to the object as a whole, or if the number of in-links to the various component resources was accumulated to the level of the compound object instead of counted separately. Citation analysis systems would also benefit from a mechanism for citing the compound object itself, rather than arbitrary parts of the object. Finally, a standard for representing compound objects might enable a new class of "whole object" services such as "preserve a compound object".

The Library of Congress’ Network Development and MARC Standards Office unit has released Implementing the PREMIS Data Dictionary: A Survey of Approaches.

Here is an excerpt from the report’s preface:

The Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) Working Group developed the Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata, which is a specification containing a set of "core" preservation metadata elements that has broad applicability within the digital preservation community. The PREMIS Data Dictionary (PDD) was released in May 2005 along with a set of XML schemas to support its implementation. Since that time, institutions have begun to implement preservation metadata by providing content for semantic units expressed in the data dictionary or comparing it with planned or existing systems for long-term preservation. . . .

The Library of Congress, as part of the PREMIS maintenance activity, commissioned Deborah Woodyard-Robinson to provide this study to explore how institutions have implemented the PREMIS semantic units. . . . In this study sixteen repositories have been surveyed about their interpretation and application of the PDD, with an analysis then made on how the PREMIS core fits with the functions of a preservation repository and which PDD semantic units will be most relevant to certain types of repositories.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has announced that the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set has been renewed and updated as ANSI/NISO standard Z39.85-2007.

In other Dublin Core news, the DCMI Abstract Model has been approved as a DCMI Recommendation and a new DCMI Task Group has been established for collaborative work on Resource Description and Access (RDA).

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR) has made a podcast of Susan Gibbons’s "Repositories as Platforms for Researchers e-Portfolios" presentation at the Adaptable Repository workshop at the University of Sydney.

Powerpoints from the workshop’s presentations are also available.

According to an article in Network World, McGraw-Hill uses Google Book Search on its Web site in spite of the fact that it is suing Google over the product.

How can this be? McGraw-Hill participates in the Google Book Search Partner Program, which gives publishers control over access to their digitized books, but, at the same time, it objects to Google’s efforts to scan and make available copies of its books in libraries without its permission.

Source: Perez, Juan Carlos. "Google’s Book Search Available in Publisher Sites." Network World, 1 June 2007.