Digital Repository for the Arts: Kultur: Final Report

JISC has released Kultur: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

The Kultur project has developed a model for repository start-up that addresses the needs of the UK Higher Education Arts Sector. Institutional repositories have traditionally been tailored towards text-based outputs and have been less proficient at accommodating the more complex multimedia outputs associated with practice-led research. The project has addressed the need for IRs to expand their capacity to manage non-text outputs effectively. At the same time, it has also responded to a disciplinary need for a more robust information infrastructure for practice-led research, which is particularly important for art and design as a relatively new but expanding research discipline. . . .

Using EPrints software, the project developed a demonstrator repository tailored to these needs. The demo was populated with over 300 records of events and artefacts, and was continually refined in response to community feedback. This formed the basis of two new institutional repositories for University of the Arts London and University for the Creative Arts, and enhanced the University of Southampton’s existing institutional repository. The project also investigated policy for the effective management and population of a repository specialising in creative material, with particular attention to rights issues. As well as local benefits to the project partners, the outcomes of the project have a broader application for other institutions seeking a framework for the management of practice-led research outputs.

Read more about it at "Creative Repositories for the Arts."

Position Statement From University Press Directors on Free Access to Scholarly Journal Articles

Ten university press directors have issued a statement about free access to scholarly journal articles.

Here's an excerpt:

  1. The undersigned university press directors support the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.
  2. We support the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication. We understand that the length of time before free release of journal articles will by necessity vary for other disciplines.
  3. We support the principle that scholarly research fully funded by governmental entities is a public good and should be treated as such. We support legislation that strengthens this principle and oppose legislation designed to weaken it.
  4. We support the archiving and free release of the final, published version of scholarly journal articles to ensure accuracy and citation reliability.
  5. We will work directly with academic libraries, governmental entities, scholarly societies, and faculty to determine appropriate strategies concerning dissemination options, including institutional repositories and national scholarly archives.

Read more about it at "10 University-Press Directors Back Free Access to Scholarly Articles."

EmeraldView Front-End to Greenstone Digital Library Software

A beta release of the EmeraldView front-end to the Greenstone digital library software is near completion. The current code is available via a Subversion checkout. A demo is available.

Here's an excerpt from the project home page:

We are aiming to solve several key weaknesses of the stock front-end:

  • Greenstone's cryptic URLs of unusual size are a fail for user comprehensibility, search engine crawlers, bookmarking, etc. . .
  • Though extensive customization of the display is possible, there are some stopping points where modification of the C++ source is required.
  • The customization that is supported is via a system of micro-templates referred to as macros. This system is so heavily nested and cross-referenced that it is very difficult to conceptualize how any given page is generated.

Japanese Institutional Repositories: IRDB Contents Analysis System Enhanced

The NII Institutional Repositories DataBase Contents Analysis has been enhanced with new features.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We have made the following improvements:

  1. The default in "Content growth" has been changed to "Full text". . .
  2. "Breakdown of content by resource type (ratio)" has been added. . .
  3. The details of data have been hidden. . .
  4. The analysis of content has been added. . .

Welsh Journals Online: Final Report

JISC has released Welsh Journals Online: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt:

Welsh Journals Online is the most challenging digitisation project ever undertaken by the National Library of Wales. It aimed to create a website giving free searchable and browsable access to the contents of back-numbers of the major journals relating to Wales or the Welsh language. These journals form the core of the Library’s collection of printed books and are its most-used resource.

The journals were chosen to represent the diversity of material available, and cover English- and Welsh-language titles including scholarly articles on topics from archaeology to zoology, poetry, fiction, reviews and obituaries. The project publishes 400,000 pages of text, from 52 titles; the 180,000 pages of Welsh content represents the single largest corpus of text in the language available on the web. Some of the titles are well-known and widely used as sources (eg Archaeologia Cambrensis), while others have been overlooked or are difficult to access (Yr Arloeswr). . . .

The website is fully exposed to Google and it is likely that many new users will find the resource through general searching of the web. For those who are unfamiliar with the journal literature of Wales some contextual help is provided in the form of factsheets; lesson plans based upon these have also been created to assists teachers wishing to use the Welsh Journals Online website to discuss the questions of copyright, searching, or referencing.

The majority of the material is covered by copyright, and licensing and rights management formed a significant part of the project. The need to control display at page level (so that where necessary a single article or photograph could be blanked) required detailed metadata to record permission, gathered in cooperation with the publishers. Of the titles included, the proportion of blanked pages is very low (less than 0.1%), but rights issues led to the exclusion of some titles completely. The Library did not offer any payment for permission and works by Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, and R S Thomas are therefore not shown. Given that the cost-per-page of web publication is approximately £2, the payment of even minimal fees would transform the economics of mass-digitisation.

EFF Launches Teaching Copyright Curriculum

The EFF has launched Teaching Copyright.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Last week, after months of work, EFF launched Teaching Copyright, a balanced, fact-based curriculum for high school educators looking to discuss copyright issues in the classroom. We decided the time was right to unveil the project after the debut of the Copyright Alliance Education Foundation (CAEF), which is offering a variety of educational materials assembled by the film, music and software industries. After reviewing those materials, we thought it was crucial that educators have a real alternative.

Center for Intellectual Property to Launch CIP Member Community

The Center for Intellectual Property at the University of Maryland University College will launch the fee-based CIP Member Community in August.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

A Community Built for Clarification
Exclusive access to members-only Q&A sessions, guides, forums, teaching resources, newsletters and legislative alerts—plus discounts on online workshops and conferences.

A Community Built for Connection
Exclusive information sharing, career networking opportunities . . . and more.

A Community Built for Certification
Copyright Leadership in Higher Education, a new, renewable professional certification offered through CIP and UMUC.

Digital Exhibit Software: Omeka 1.0

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka 1.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This production-grade release marks the completion of Omeka’s basic requirement set. Maintaining our commitment to serious web publishing for scholarship and cultural heritage, Omeka 1.0 incorporates unqualified Dublin Core metadata for organizing and displaying collections; support for extensible element sets; robust, flexible theme and plugin APIs; and plugins for Zotero compatibility, static page creation, and building sophisticated online exhibitions.

Mobile Libraries: M-Libraries: Information Use on the Move

The Arcadia Programme at the Cambridge University Library has released M-Libraries: Information Use on the Move.

Here's an excerpt:

Developing m-library services is usually expensive and resource intensive, requiring expertise that existing library staff may not have. Before committing funding and staff time to such projects, it is important to try and ensure, as far as possible, that such investments are targeted at meeting actual needs, and are adding value to existing library services.

The Information Use on the Move project was undertaken in that spirit—to scope the information requirements of academic library users on the move in order to inform future development of library services to mobile devices. The aim was to identify trends in the way people currently interact with information using their mobile phones, and then extrapolate ways that libraries could support those mobile information needs.

A Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0

The UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities has released A Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (Thanks to HASTAC.).

Here's an excerpt:

Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which: a) print is no longer the exclusive or the normative medium in which knowledge is produced and/or disseminated; instead, print finds itself absorbed into new, multimedia configurations; and b) digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the production and dissemination of knowledge in the arts, human and social sciences. The Digital Humanities seeks to play an inaugural role with respect to a world in which, no longer the sole producers, stewards, and disseminators of knowledge or culture, universities are called upon to shape natively digital models of scholarly discourse for the newly emergent public spheres of the present era (the www, the blogosphere, digital libraries, etc.), to model excellence and innovation in these domains, and to facilitate the formation of networks of knowledge production, exchange, and dissemination that are, at once, global and local.