The VERSIONS (Versions of Eprints—A User Requirements Study and Investigation Of the Need for Standards) project has released the VERSIONS Toolkit.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

If you are an experienced researcher you are likely to be disseminating your work on a personal website, in a subject archive, or in an institutional repository already. This toolkit aims to:

• provide peer-to-peer advice about managing personal versions and revisions in order to keep your options open for future use of your work
• clarify areas of uncertainty among researchers about agreements with publishers and how these relate to different versions of research outputs
• suggest ways to identify your work clearly when placing it on the web in order to guide your readers to the latest and best versions of your work
• direct you to further resources about making versions of your work openly accessible

The toolkit draws on the results of a survey of researchers’ attitudes and current practice when creating, storing and disseminating different versions of their research. As such the guidance in the toolkit represents the views of active researchers. Survey respondents were predominantly from economics and related disciplines.

In 2006-2007, there were only 8,021 computer science bachelors degree graduates in the U.S., down from the decade peak of 14,185 in 2003-2004; however, new enrollments edged up slightly to 7,915 for the 2007 fall semester.

Read more about it at "'Chic Geek': Computer Science Major Rebounds" and "Computer Science Graduating Class of 2007 Smallest This Decade."

At a March 3rd meeting at the Johns Hopkins University, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) introduced the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specifications. The ORE Specification and User Guide was released the prior day.

Here's an excerpt from the press release about the meeting:

The ORE specifications are developed in response to a significant challenge that has emerged in eScholarship. In contrast to the paper publications of traditional scholarship, or even their digital counterparts, the artifacts of eScholarship are complex aggregations. These aggregations consist of multiple resources with varying media types, semantics types, network locations, and intra- and inter-relationships. The future scholarly communication, research, and higher education infrastructure requires standardized approaches to identify, describe, and exchange these new outputs of scholarship.

The ORE specifications address this challenge with the ORE data model that defines how to associate an identifier, a URI, with aggregations of web resources. By referring to these identifiers, aggregations can then be linked to, cited, and described with metadata, in the same manner as any web resource. The ORE data model also makes it possible to describe the structure and semantics of these aggregations. The ORE specifications define how these descriptions can then be packaged in the XML-based Atom syndication format or in RDF/XML, making them available to a variety of applications.

In addition to their utility in eScholarship, the ORE specifications also apply to our everyday web use where we often encounter aggregations such as multi-page HTML documents, and collections of multi-format images on sites like flickr. OAI-ORE descriptions of these aggregations can be used to improve search engine behavior, provide input for browser-based navigation tools, and develop automated web services to analyze and preserve this information.

Read more about it at "The Vision of ORE."

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "The ARROW Project: A Consortial Institutional Repository Solution, Combining Open Source and Proprietary Software"; "Collecting Metadata from Institutional Repositories"; Developing Open Access Journals: A Practical Guide; "ePrints@IISc: India's First and Fastest Growing Institutional Repository"; "Institutional Repositories and E-Journal Archiving: What Are We Learning?"; "The Open Access Mandate at Harvard"; A Review and Analysis of Academic Publishing Agreements and Open Access Policies; "SWORD: Simple Web-Service Offering Repository Deposit"; "Talk about Talking about New Models of Scholarly Communication"; and "Version Identification: A Growing Problem."

First Random House, now the Penguin Group have said that they will drop DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection from digital audio books and use the popular MP3 format instead.

Read more about it at "Penguin Audiobooks to Be Copyright-Free" and "Publishers Phase Out Piracy Protection on Audio Books."

The Library of Congress will begin to publish the Newsletter of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program this month. You can subscribe to the digital publication now.

Read more about it at the press release.

Warrick is an open source software tool from the Old Dominion University Computer Science Department for recovering or reconstructing Websites using composite data from Google, Internet Archive, Live Search, and Yahoo. It can used at the Warrick Website or downloaded.

Read more about it at "About Warrick" and "Warrick."

Sun Microsystems has announced that it is partnering with the University of Alberta Libraries and the Alberta Library to create the Sun Centre of Excellence for Libraries.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc., the University of Alberta Libraries (UAL) and The Alberta Library (TAL) today announced the creation of a new Sun Centre of Excellence for Libraries (COE). The initiative will enhance and support respective organizational projects, as well as an extensive, province-wide, multi-faceted digital library. As part of the COE the participants intend to provide a seamless search and retrieval experience resulting in unprecedented access to information for students, faculty and the public, as well as creating an enduring preservation environment.

"This initiative will facilitate new levels of access to a tremendous amount of unique information that hasn’t been widely available," said Ernie Ingles, Vice Provost and Chief Librarian, University of Alberta. "It will further our goal to act as a trusted regional repository for digital materials by facilitating approaches to the discovery, storage, and archival preservation of digital resources that will benefit all Canadians." The University of Alberta Libraries, the second largest academic library system in Canada, has more than one million unique digitized pages of content in four major collections to contribute to the new digital library.

Using a range of Sun systems, software and thin client technologies, The Alberta Library (TAL) will integrate current digital collections and electronic information resources from the Lois Hole Campus Alberta Digital Library, an Alberta Government initiative that is providing post-secondary students, faculty and researchers in every corner of the province with access to vast holdings of digital resources. The digital library currently contains more than 4.5 million licensed items, including academic journals, encyclopedias, magazine and newspaper articles, literary criticisms and video clips from 35 post-secondary institutions. The COE will also help TAL improve province-wide access to library catalogues and secure information-sharing. . . .

The COE will support distance learning and research within e-learning environments by providing access to digital collections preserved by Alberta university libraries, archives and museums. It will also yield solutions for long-term archiving of digital resources, and digital rights management. The support and technology provided by Sun will ensure the infrastructure can evolve to meet future needs and continue to support research, collaborative learning and general discovery. . . .

The Centre of Excellence for Libraries is expected to be operational by summer 2008.

Version 1.3.0 of the open source Web Curator Tool has been released by the Web Curator Tool Project, whose participants include the National Library of New Zealand and the British Library.

Read more about it at "Web Curator Tool 1.3.0," "Web Curator Tool System Administrator Guide," and "Web Curator Tool User Manual."

Version 71 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,250 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2006 Annual Edition is also available from Digital Scholarship. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

The DSpace Foundation has published the Provider Grid, which lists vetted companies that can provide DSpace customization, design, development, hosting, integration, installation/configuration, metadata import/export, training and analysis, and other services.

The University of Michigan Library has launched MTagger, which allows users to tag library web pages, online catalog pages, image pages, and locally published e-journal articles and to utilize tag clouds for these resources.

Read more about it at "New Tagging Tool at University of Michigan Library."