Month: May 2011

Web Applications Developer, NYPL Labs

The New York Public Library is recruiting a Web Applications Developer, NYPL Labs .

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The New York Public Library seeks a talented web applications developer to join the Library's new research and development unit, NYPL Labs. We are looking for someone who is willing to experiment, able to build, test and debug in rapid iterations, and excited to join the intellectual life of NYPL and the wider digital humanities and creative tech community.

Work will be situated in midtown Manhattan within NYPL's larger web group, but will be focused on projects that break new ground in digital humanities research and/or facilitate new forms of networked participation in library activity. Projects may range from building crowdsourcing tools for enhancing library collections, rethinking established genres such as archival finding aids, or developing multi-modal (potentially cross-institutional) digital archives of special collections material. Some projects will be proof-of-concept prototypes aimed at hatching ideas that might eventually be applied more broadly across the Library. Others will be fully realized applications that become staple resources in the NYPL web environment. All will place you at the intersection of scholarly, library and technological innovation taking place at one of the worlds great public research institutions. Tapped into one of the worlds largest and most creatively dynamic urban populations.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Presentations from the CNI Spring 2011 Membership Meeting

Presentations and handouts from the CNI Spring 2011 Membership Meeting are now available.

Here's a brief selection of presentations:

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 |

"Preserving Repository Content: Practical Tools for Repository Managers"

Miggie Pickton, Debra Morris, Stephanie Meece, Simon Coles, and Steve Hitchcock have published "Preserving Repository Content: Practical Tools for Repository Managers" in the latest issue of the Journal of Digital Information.

Here's an excerpt:

The stated aim of many repositories is to provide permanent open access to their content. However, relatively few repositories have implemented practical action plans towards permanence. Repository managers often lack time and confidence to tackle the important but scary problem of preservation.

Written by, and aimed at, repository managers, this paper describes how the JISC-funded KeepIt project has been bringing together existing preservation tools and services with appropriate training and advice to enable repository managers to formulate practical and achievable preservation plans.

Three elements of the KeepIt project are described:

  1. The initial, exploratory phase in which repository managers and a preservation specialist established the current status of each repository and its preservation objectives;
  2. The repository-specific KeepIt preservation training course which covered the organisational and financial framework of repository preservation; metadata; the new preservation tools; and issues of trust between repository, users and services;
  3. The application of tools and lessons learned from the training course to four exemplar repositories and the impact that this has made.

The paper concludes by recommending practical steps that all repository managers may take to ensure their repositories are preservation-ready.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Institutional Repository Bibliography |

Metadata and Digital Resources Developer, University Libraries at Ball State University Libraries

The Ball State University Libraries are recruiting a Metadata and Digital Resources Developer.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Professional position available immediately. Responsibilities: create page-level metadata, analyze, create, develop and adapt metadata schemes and codes for the University Libraries’ content management systems, including developing digital resources for specialized projects; provide training and supervision as necessary and maintain quality standards to support the University Libraries’ ongoing transition from print to a predominately digital environment.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

"Tragedy of the Data Commons"

Jane Yakowitz has self-archived "Tragedy of the Data Commons" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

Accurate data is vital to enlightened research and policymaking, particularly publicly available data that are redacted to protect the identity of individuals. Legal academics, however, are campaigning against data anonymization as a means to protect privacy, contending that wealth of information available on the Internet enables malfeasors to reverse-engineer the data and identify individuals within them. Privacy scholars advocate for new legal restrictions on the collection and dissemination of research data. This Article challenges the dominant wisdom, arguing that properly de-identified data is not only safe, but of extraordinary social utility. It makes three core claims. First, legal scholars have misinterpreted the relevant literature from computer science and statistics, and thus have significantly overstated the futility of anonymizing data. Second, the available evidence demonstrates that the risks from anonymized data are theoretical – they rarely, if ever, materialize. Finally, anonymized data is crucial to beneficial social research, and constitutes a public resource – a commons – under threat of depletion. The Article concludes with a radical proposal: since current privacy policies overtax valuable research without reducing any realistic risks, law should provide a safe harbor for the dissemination of research data.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 |

Current News: Twitter Updates for 5/1/11

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Digital Repository Coordinator at Emory University Libraries

The Emory University Libraries are recruiting a Digital Repository Coordinator.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Emory Libraries seek applications for a new Digital Repository Coordinator to provide leadership, project management, and work in the development of repository services to promote access to the scholarship of the Emory community. In March 2011, the Emory Faculty passed an Open Access Policy calling upon the Libraries, partnering with a faculty advisory committee, to develop an open access repository (see http://guides.main.library.emory.edu/OA for more details). The open access repository will be the first project for this innovative and energetic individual, who will work collaboratively with colleagues on the faculty and in the libraries to develop and implement an open access repository in support of the Open Access Policy, including policies, procedures, workflows, metadata, recruiting and harvesting content, and marketing and outreach to the University community advocating for best practices in open access. Future projects may include data, multi-media content or learning objects. This is an exciting opportunity to work with multiple stakeholders employing a user-driven approach to launch new services for the Emory community.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Reviews of Digital Scholarship Publications |

Subject Repositories: "arXiv Business Planning Update"

The Cornell University Library has released "arXiv Business Planning Update."

Here's an excerpt:

It has been 15 months since we announced the collaborative arXiv business model. As we reported in our previous update, for 2010 we were pleased to receive support from 123 institutions, totaling to $360,000 in contributions and representing 11 countries. We are encouraged with the contributions for 2011 as we already have support from 101 institutions, totaling to $275,000 in pledges from 8 countries.

We are grateful for the coordinated international support from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Collections in the UK, SPARC-Japan, German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB), Helmholtz-Alliance Physics (Germany), and Denmark's Electronic Research Library (DEFF). We are currently contacting additional international library consortia for their possible leadership in coordinating support within some other countries. . . .

As part of our sustainability planning, we took a critical look at arXiv's technology infrastructure and prepared a high-level plan, which includes a major change to the discovery and access component of the platform. After having the proposal reviewed by four external colleagues with expertise in repository architectures, we decided to implement Invenio as the basis of a new display and access system. The move to Invenio will facilitate improved collaboration with our partners at NASA ADS and INSPIRE, and reduce the maintenance burden of in-house code. We anticipate the transition, which will include a number of user interface enhancements, to be completed by mid-2012. . . .

In collaboration with the NSF Data Conservancy project we have launched a pilot data upload interface for data associated with arXiv articles. Submission is unified through small extensions to arXiv's submission interface. While the article is announced and stored on arXiv, data is automatically deposited in the Data Conservancy repository and linked from the article (see http://arxiv.org/help/data_conservancy for more information). This is a pilot project, which will be re-evaluated in collaboration with the Data Conservancy by the end of this year.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |