The Center for History and New Media's Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research with Text-Mining and Analysis Tools project has been awarded a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Here's an excerpt from "Enhancing Historical Research with Text-Mining and Analysis Tools":

We will first conduct a survey of historians to examine closely their use of digital resources and prospect for particularly helpful uses of digital technology. We will then explore three main areas where text mining might help in the research process: locating documents of interest in the sea of texts online; extracting and synthesizing information from these texts; and analyzing large-scale patterns across these texts. A focus group of historians will be used to assess the efficacy of different methods of text mining and analysis in real-world research situations in order to offer recommendations, and even some tools, for the most promising approaches.

At the recent State of the Net conference, Tom Tauke, Verizon's Executive Vice President, told participants that Verizon did not intend to filter the Internet to enforce copyright compliance.

Here's an excerpt from "Verizon: No Thank You on Copyright Filtering":

He [Tauke] said that it would be 1) a bad business decision "to assume the role of being police on the Internet;" 2) a likely invasion of privacy; and 3) would open the door to requests from others to filter out other objectionable material, like indecency and online gambling.

Read more about it at "Verizon: We Don't Want to Play Copyright Cop on Our Network."

Previously ("Book to Be Published by MIT Press Undergoing Blog-Based Open Peer Review"), DigitalKoans reported on an open-peer-review experiment on the Grand Text Auto Weblog.

Now, if:book has published a dialog between its staff, the book's author, and Donald J. Waters, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Program Officer for scholarly communications, about the experiment.

Here's an excerpt from the posting:

[Waters] As I understand the explanations, there is a sense in which the experiment is not aimed at "peer review" at all in the sense that peer review assesses the qualities of a work to help the publisher determine whether or not to publish it. What the exposure of the work-in-progress to the community does, besides the extremely useful community-building activity, is provide a mechanism for a function that is now all but lost in scholarly publishing, namely "developmental editing." It is a side benefit of current peer review practice that an author gets some feedback on the work that might improve it, but what really helps an author is close, careful reading by friends who offer substantive criticism and editorial comments. . . . The software that facilitates annotation and the use of the network, as demonstrated in this experiment, promise to extend this informal practice to authors more generally.

Statsbiblioteket is developing Summa, a federated search system.

Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, Director of Development, discusses Summa and other topics in a new podcast (CNI Podcast: An Interview with Birte Christensen-Dalsgaard, Director of Development at the State and University Library, Denmark).

Here's an excerpt from the podcast abstract:

Summa is an open source system implementing modular, service-based architecture. It is based on the fundamental idea "free the content from the proprietary library systems," where the discovery layer is separated from the business layer. In doing so, any Internet technology can be used without the limitations traditionally set by proprietary library systems, and there is the flexibility to integrate or to be integrated into other systems. A first version of a Fedora—Summa integration has been developed.

A white paper is available that examines the system in more detail.

JISC has released DISC-UK DataShare: Web 2.0 Data Visualisation Tools: Part 1—Numeric Data.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

Part 1 of this briefing paper will highlight some examples of new collaborative web services using Web 2.0 technologies which venture into the numeric data visualisation arena. These mashups allow researchers to upload and analyse their own data in ‘open’ and dynamic environments. Broadly speaking the numeric data being referred to could be micro-data (data about the individual), macro-data2 or country-level data, derived or summary data.

The University of Michigan Library has digitized and made available one million books from its collection.

Here's an excerpt from "One Million Digitized Books":

One million is a big number, but this is just the beginning. Michigan is on track to digitize its entire collection of over 7.5 million bound volumes by early in the next decade. So far we have only glimpsed the kinds of new and innovative uses that can be made of large bodies of digitized books, and it is thrilling to imagine what will be possible when nearly all the holdings of a leading research library are digitized and searchable from any computer in the world.

The CLOCKSS dark digital archive has gone light for Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation, which SAGE Publications has discontinued. As planned, the discontinued journal has been exported from the dark archive and been made publicly and freely available on two servers.

Read more about it "CLOCKSS Works."

Library Technology Reports has published The Preservation of Digital Materials, written by noted digital preservation expert Priscilla Caplan (Assistant Director for Digital Library Services at the Florida Center for Library Automation), as its volume 4, number 2 issue.

Research Blogging is a new service that identifies, indexes, and presents new Weblog posts about peer-reviewed literature.

Here's an excerpt from its About page:

• Bloggers—often experts in their field—find exciting new peer-reviewed research they'd like to share. They write thoughtful posts about the research for their blogs.
• Bloggers register with us and use a simple one-line form to create a snippet of code to place in their posts. This snippet not only notifies our site about their post, it also creates a properly formatted research citation for their blog.
• Our software automatically scans registered blogs for posts containing our code snippet. When it finds them, it indexes them and displays them on our front page—thousands of posts from hundreds of blogs, in one convenient place, organized by topic.
• The quality of the posts listed on our site is monitored by the member bloggers. If a post doesn't follow our guidelines, it is removed from our database. Borderline cases may be discussed in our forums.