The Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries' Data Conservancy project has been funded by a $20 million NSF grant.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries have been awarded $20 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build a data research infrastructure for the management of the ever-increasing amounts of digital information created for teaching and research. The five-year award, announced this week, was one of two for what is being called "data curation."

The project, known as the Data Conservancy, involves individuals from several institutions, with Johns Hopkins University serving as the lead and Sayeed Choudhury, Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center and associate dean of university libraries, as the principal investigator. In addition, seven Johns Hopkins faculty members are associated with the Data Conservancy, including School of Arts and Sciences professors Alexander Szalay, Bruce Marsh, and Katalin Szlavecz; School of Engineering professors Randal Burns, Charles Meneveau, and Andreas Terzis; and School of Medicine professor Jef Boeke. The Hopkins-led project is part of a larger $100 million NSF effort to ensure preservation and curation of engineering and science data.

Beginning with the life, earth, and social sciences, project members will develop a framework to more fully understand data practices currently in use and arrive at a model for curation that allows ease of access both within and across disciplines.

"Data curation is not an end but a means," said Choudhury. "Science and engineering research and education are increasingly digital and data-intensive, which means that new management structures and technologies will be critical to accommodate the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and streams. Our ultimate goal is to support new ways of inquiry and learning. The potential for the sharing and application of data across disciplines is incredible. But it’s not enough to simply discover data; you need to be able to access it and be assured it will remain available."

The Data Conservancy grant represents one of the first awards related to the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES), a collaboration between the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the Whiting School of Engineering, and the Sheridan Libraries. . . .

In addition to the $20 million grant announced today, the Libraries received a $300,000 grant from NSF to study the feasibility of developing, operating and sustaining an open access repository of articles from NSF-sponsored research. Libraries staff will work with colleagues from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and the University of Michigan Libraries to explore the potential for the development of a repository (or set of repositories) similar to PubMedCentral, the open-access repository that features articles from NIH-sponsored research. This grant for the feasibility study will allow Choudhury's group to evaluate how to integrate activities under the framework of the Data Conservancy and will result in a set of recommendations for NSF regarding an open access repository.

Indiana University Bloomington has released its Media Preservation Survey.

Here's an excerpt:

The survey task force recommends a number of actions to facilitate the time-critical process of rescuing IUB’s audio, video, and film media.

• Appoint a campus-wide taskforce to advise
• • the development of priorities for preservation action
  • the development of a campus-wide preservation plan
  • how units can leverage resources for the future
• Create a centralized media preservation and digitization center that will serve the entire campus, using international standards for preservation transfer. As part of the planning for this center, hire a
• • media preservation specialist
  • film archivist
• Develop special funding for the massive and rapid digitization of the treasures of IU over the next 10 years.
• Create a centralized physical storage space appropriate for film, video, and audio.
• Provide archival appraisal and control across campus to
• • assure quality of digitization for preservation
  • oversee plans for maintaining original media
• Develop cataloging services for special collections to improve intellectual control to
• • accelerate research opportunities
  • improve access.

The Centre for e-Research at King's College London is recruiting a Software Developer (C++/C and Linux/Unix) to work on the OCRopodium project, which is "investigating the use of the open source OCRopus software (http://sites.google.com/site/ocropus/) for applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to historical and archival material" (fixed-term contract for 18 months).

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The successful applicant will be the key technical staff member for the project, and will be responsible for:

• Carrying out technical investigations into the functionality and architecture of OCRopus. As OCRopus is an actively growing open source project and thus imperfectly documented, this will in itself require an ability to understand the source code and debug the software.
• Developing and integrating software components for OCRing historical material, and enhancing existing components.
• Contributing new and enhanced components to the OCRopus open source project.
• Benchmarking and evaluation of OCRopus, in collaboration with our project partners at Queen's University, Belfast (QUB).
• Integrating OCR within broader digitisation and digital library workflows.

The Publishing and the Ecology of European Research project has released PEER Annual Report—Year 1.

Here's an excerpt:

PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research), supported by the EC eContentplus programme, is investigating the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors' final peer reviewed manuscripts (so called Green Open Access or stage-two research output) on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research.

Peer-reviewed journals play a key role in scholarly communication and are essential for scientific progress and European competitiveness. The publishing and research communities share the view that increased access to the results of EU-funded research is necessary to maximise their use and impact. However, they hold different views on whether mandated deposit in open access repositories will achieve greater use and impact. There are also differences of opinion as to the most appropriate embargo periods. No consensus has been reached on a way forward so far.

The lack of consensus on these key issues stems from a lack of clear evidence of what impact the broad and systematic archiving of research outputs in open access repositories might be, but PEER aims to change this through building a substantial body of evidence, via the development of an "observatory" to monitor the effects of systematic archiving over time.

The New York Public Library and Kirtas Technologies are making a half-million public domain books available for sale as digitized or printed copies.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Readers and researchers looking for hard-to-find books now have the opportunity to dip into the collections of one of the world's most comprehensive libraries to purchase digitized copies of public domain titles. Through their Digitize-on-Demand program, Kirtas Technologies has partnered with The New York Public Library to make 500,000 public domain works from the Library's collections available (to anyone in the world).

"New technology has allowed the Library to greatly expand access to its collections," said Paul LeClerc, President of The New York Public Library. "Now, for the first time, library users are able to order copies of specific items from our vast public domain collections that are useful to them. Additionally the program creates a digital legacy for future users of the same item and a revenue stream to support our operations. We are very pleased to participate in a program that is so beneficial to everyone involved."

Using existing information from NYPL's catalog records, Kirtas will make the library's public domain books available for sale through its retail site before they are ever digitized. Customers can search for a desired title on www.kirtasbooks.com and place an order for that book. When the order is placed, only then is it pulled from the shelf, digitized and made available as a high-quality reprint or digital file.

What makes this approach to digitization unique is that NYPL incurs no up-front printing, production or storage costs. It also provides the library with a self-funding, commercial model helping it to sustain its digitization programs in the future. Unlike other free or low-cost digitization programs, the library retains the rights and ownership to their own digitized content.

Greater Western Library Alliance member universities have sent a letter supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009 to members of the U.S. Senate.

Here's an excerpt:

Timely, barrier-free access to the results of federally funded research supports the core mission of our academic institutions and is essential to fully utilize our collective investment in science. FRPAA will help us maximize this investment by increasing the sharing research results, advancing the pace of discovery, and applying this knowledge for the benefit of our communities.

The FRPAA bill also expands on the success of the public access policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the first U.S. agency to require public access to taxpayer-funded research. More than 450,000 unique users access material from the NIH repository each day. Under S.1373, we envision researchers and students working in fields of equal importance—from climate change to renewable energy—having the same access to federally funded research to advance their critical work.

This bill is a crucial step in realizing this goal and we look forward to working with you to secure the bill’s passage.