Laine Farley has been named as the Executive Director of the California Digital Library. Farley has served as the Interim Executive Director since July 2006.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"What we needed was not just a great leader for the CDL, but also a strategy for building the next generation of digital libraries," said Daniel Greenstein, UC vice provost for academic information and strategic services. "It was equally clear that the best way forward in envisioning this new world would be to draw upon the creativity, leadership and talent already within UC and the CDL, and to ramp up our planning efforts. Laine's vision and leadership, which she has demonstrated during challenging times, will take the CDL in new and exciting directions."

As part of ongoing planning with the University of California libraries, Farley will work closely with the university librarians on the 10 campuses and others throughout the UC system to ensure that systemwide library services continue to evolve to better support libraries and scholars.

Previously, Farley's roles at the CDL have included positions as director of digital library services and deputy university librarian. In addition, she was the user services coordinator and the coordinator of bibliographic policy and services at the UC Division of Library Automation. She has also been a reference librarian and coordinator of bibliographic instruction at UC Riverside, and head of the humanities department at the Steen Library at Stephen F. Austin State University. Farley holds a B.A. in liberal arts (Plan II) and an M.L.S. from the University of Texas at Austin.

SAGE has released Meeting the Challenges: Societies and Scholarly Communication (Thanks to Adrian K. Ho's Digital & Scholarly: News about Research and Scholarship in the Digital Age.)

Here's an excerpt:

The survey was supported by the Association for Learned Professional and Scholarly Publishers; the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers; the International Association for Science, Technical and Medical Publishers, and the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, and made available to the 600+ members of these organizations.

The online survey of 30 questions was available for response from 2 September, 2008 – 23 September, 2008.

118 responses were completed during this time—reflecting approximately 19% of the organizations contacted.

Societies cited the major challenges facing them as international presence for their organization; membership retention and growth; provision of online services; resources (funding and income); and Open Access. International presence was the most highly-ranked attribute for societies (49%), with particular importance placed on sales representation on a global scale.

White papers used in the Promoting Digital Scholarship: Formulating Research Challenges in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Computation symposium are now available.

A draft of a symposium summary is also available.

The University of Borås' Swedish School of Library and Information Science is offering a limited residency (two 7-10 day sessions per year) distance education Master's degree program LIS, Digital Library and Information Services. Tuition is free, and instruction is conducted in English.

See Tom Wilson's Web4lib message for more details.

Springer Science+Business Media has announced that its digital publications will be archived in the dark CLOCKSS archive.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The CLOCKSS archive allows research libraries and scholarly publishers, who launched CLOCKSS as a pilot program, to preserve and store its electronic content. Once ingested, the econtent is kept safe and secure in a dark archive until it is triggered and the CLOCKSS Board determines that the content should be copied from the archive and made freely available to all, regardless of prior subscription. Due to the success of the pilot program, the founding members unanimously agreed to incorporate and invite others to participate in CLOCKSS.

Participating CLOCKSS libraries and publishers govern the archive themselves via three tiers of governance—an executive board, a board of directors, and an advisory council. Research libraries working alongside publishers like Springer are able to help shape policy and practice in their communities.

"In a great show of confidence, Springer has joined the CLOCKSS initiatives, putting its complete trust in an archive they helped build," says Gordon Tibbitts, Co-Chair of CLOCKSS. "Springer is helping to shoulder the responsibility, alongside its publishing peers and research library customers, of keeping their scholarly assets safe and protected for future generations of scholars." . . .

In addition to storing Springer’s journal content with CLOCKSS, the publisher has submitted a proposal to the CLOCKSS Board outlining a pilot project to test the feasibility and legal issues surrounding preservation of eBook content. Because eBook contracts differ from journal contracts, Springer can only deposit eBook files when its authors' rights are protected.

CLOCKSS is a joint venture between the world’s leading scholarly publishers and research libraries. Its mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community. Governing Libraries include the Australian National University, EDINA at the University of Edinburgh, Indiana University, New York Public Library, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Rice University, Stanford University, the University of Alberta, the University of Hong Kong and the University of Virginia. Governing Publishers include the American Medical Association, the American Physiological Society, bepress, Elsevier, IOP Publishing, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, SAGE Publications, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley-Blackwell.

Noted intellectual property expert James Boyle has published a new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind.

It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License, and the PDF can be freely downloaded. It is available in print form from the Yale University Press.

Here's an excerpt from the book's home page:

Our music, our culture, our science, and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press) James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception. . . .

With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, from Internet file sharing and genetic engineering to patented peanut butter sandwiches, this articulate and charming book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates, including what Boyle calls the "range wars of the information age": today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Intellectual property rights have been viewed as geeky, technical and inaccessible. Boyle shows that, as a culture, we can no longer afford the luxury of this kind of willed ignorance.

Søren Sandfeld Jakobsen et al. have deposited "Comments on the Commission's Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy" in SSRN.

Here's the abstract:

This paper is a reaction to the [European] Commission's Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy. It discusses issues concerning the three step test model licenses, digitization and orphan works, disability discrimination and access to digital content, dissemination for teaching and research, dissemination through libraries and user created content.

Bepress surveyed 110 participants at the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 about repository trends, and Jean-Gabriel Bankier, bepress President, has now released the results of this survey ("Perceptions of Developing Trends in Repositories").

Stuart Lewis has released a PHP library for the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) software.

Here's an excerpt from his post:

There are many web applications that could deposit into repositories using SWORD, and many of these are written in PHP. Examples might include open source Content Management Systems, Blogs or Wikis. By using this library you can easily retrieve service documents and make deposits by using the API provided. There are two simple method calls (one to retrieve a service document and one to deposit a file). In addition there is a packager included that can package a file and metadata together into a package format supported by both DSpace and EPrints. This is the same code which is used to power the Facebook SWORD deposit tool (http://fb.swordapp.org/).

With the addition of a backfile 1884 article, "Dermatitis Herpetiformis," in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, hit the five million article mark. Over two million of those articles are freely available.

Read more about it at "5 Million Articles Online at HighWire: The Evolution of an e-Publishing Platform."

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, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "The aDORe Federation Architecture: Digital Repositories at Scale"; "Copyright Angst, Lust for Prestige and Cost Control: What Institutions Can Do to Ease Open Access"; Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication; "Digital Preservation and Copyright: An International Study"; "Electronic Journals and Changes in Scholarly Article Seeking and Reading Patterns,"; "From Advocacy to Implementation: The NIH Public Access Policy and Its Impact"; "FRPAA and NIH Mandate: A Blessing in Disguise for Scientific Society Publishers?"; "The Future of Repositories? Patterns for (Cross-)Repository Architectures"; A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries & the Google Library Project Settlement; The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008: A Lateral Look; "Predictions for 2009"; and "A Study of Institutional Repository Holdings by Academic Discipline."