DigitalKoans

KRUU has a series of digital audio interviews with copyright and other activists in the "open" movement. Here's a sample:

• Cory Doctorow, Sci-Fi Author, Copyright Reform Activist
• David Lipman, National Institutes of Health
• John Wilbanks, Science Commons
• Mark Patterson, Virginia Barbour, Public Library of Science
• Mike Linksvayer, CTO CreativeCommons.org
• Melissa Hagemann, Open Society Institute
• Mike Linksvayer, Vice President, CreativeCommons.org
• Prayas Abhinav, Creative Commons India
• Richard Poynder
• Ronaldo Lemos, Lead of CreativeCommons Brazil
• Siva Vaidhyanathan, Author and Historian
• Vera Franz, OSI
• Wendy Seltzer, OpenLaw.org

John A. Kunze has announced on DC-GENERAL that the RFC for Dublin Core (RFC 5013) has just been published.

He notes that it "contains the same element definitions as the recently revised NISO standard, Z39.85-2007, but is freely accessible in one click via a global set of mirrored repositories used by the highly technical audiences that support and define Internet infrastructure."

The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library has released a CommentPress version of University Publishing in a Digital Age.

Using this CommentPress version, you can provide paragraph-level commentary on this provocative report.

BookRenter.com has officially launched its text book rental service. Students will be able to rent textbooks for up to 125 days (there is a 30 day minimum).

Source: Kimberly, Maul. "BookRenter.com Allows Students to Rent Textbooks." The Book Standard, 21 August 2007.

The University of Minnesota has launched its institutional repository, the Digital Conservancy. It utilizes DSpace.

Here's a description from the University Digital Conservancy FAQ page:

The University Digital Conservancy is a program of the University of Minnesota, administered by the University Libraries. The program provides stewardship, reliable long-term open access, and broad dissemination of the digital scholarly and administrative works of University of Minnesota faculty, departments, centers and offices. Materials in the Conservancy are freely available online to the University community and to the public.

Here are selected web pages about the Digital Conservancy:

• Best Practice and Guidelines for Managing Digital Information
• Copyright Policy
• University Digital Conservancy Preservation Policy
• University Digital Conservancy Services

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: "The Changing Landscape of Serials: Open Access Journals in the Public Catalog"; "DRIVER: Seven Items on a European Agenda for Digital Repositories"; "EThOSnet: Building a UK e-Theses Community"; "Incentivizing the Open Access Research Web Publication-Archiving, Data-Archiving and Scientometrics"; "Institutional Repositories and Their 'Other' Users: Usability Beyond Authors"; "Interoperability for the Discovery, Use, and Re-Use of Units of Scholarly Communication"; "Next-Generation Implications of Open Access"; "The PubMed Central Archive and the Back Issue Scanning Project"; and "The State of Scholarly Communications: An Environmental Scan of Emerging Issues, Pitfalls, and Possibilities."

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.

Of late, an air of discouragement has begun to permeate discussions about institutional repositories. Of course, this is understandable. E-print deposit rates have been disappointing, deposit mandates hard to come by, and real operational costs have been higher than some imagined.

Are institutional repositories dead on arrival?

The answer is determined by our expectations.

If we expect swift, easy, rapid progress with university administrators and faculty enthusiastically rallying behind institutional repositories, the answer is "yes." The thrill of putting up the repository software and seeing the initial inflow of e-prints is, for many, gone; the experiment has failed; and it's time to cut our losses and move on.

On the other hand, if we expect that the establishment of fully functional institutional repositories will be a complex, lengthy, and expensive venture, we are on target, and remarkable progress has been made worldwide in a short period of time.

I'm in the latter camp. I cannot say this enough: successful institutional repositories are not primarily determined by technical factors, rather they are determined by attitudinal factors. In other words, faculty, especially key faculty such as holders of endowed chairs and journal editors, and university administrators, especially provosts and presidents, must be convinced that institutional repositories are essential infrastructure for the 21st century. For the most part, the argument rests on the scholarly communication crisis theme, with institutional repositories portrayed as part of the remedy. However, institutional prestige, institutional visibility, and improved citation impact factors are important themes as well. The successful, relentless communication of these themes to key constituencies is essential to the successful establishment of institutional repositories.

In my view, the best strategy for a institution without a repository is to start a vigorous scholarly communication outreach program first. The next best strategy is to do so in parallel with putting up an institutional repository. Next is to implement a scholarly communication program after the repository is up. The worst strategy is to put up a repository with no scholarly communication program—this is a recipe for failure.

So, chin up. It will take slow, steady effort to succeed, but it will be worth it in the end.

If you were writing a strategic plan for a major academic research library in 2007, what would it look like?

Here are two answers to that question:

• Strategic Plan 2007-2011 (Georgia Tech Library and Information Center)
• UK Libraries Strategic Plan, 2007-2009 (University of Kentucky Libraries)

The DSpace UK & Ireland User Group has put up a list of DSpace Installations in the UK and Ireland on the DSpace Wiki.

In a move that could change the $5 billion legal publishing marketplace, Carl Malamud, who established public.resource.org earlier this year, plans on making more than ten million court decisions freely available on the Internet.

Here's an excerpt from "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free":

Mr. Malamud has a significant track record in battling publishers over public information. In 1994 he began a crusade that ultimately persuaded the federal government to make records from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Patent and Trademark Office available online to the public at no cost.

He said the free availability of that digital information did not undercut the businesses that were making money from the information at the time. . . .

The Public Resource effort is one of several attempts to make the nation's laws more accessible. One project, AltLaw (altlaw.org) is a joint effort by Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons program at the University of Colorado Law School to permit free full-text searches of the last decade of federal appellate and Supreme Court opinions.

Source: Markoff, John. "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free." The New York Times, 20 August 2007, B6.