Month: April 2008

Repositories Support Project Releases Briefing Papers: Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and Workflows

The Repositories Support Project has released two briefing papers: Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and Workflows (i.e., digital repository submission workflows). Both briefing papers provide succinct introductions to the topic at hand.

Two JISC Debates: E-Textbooks and the Library of the Future

A series of postings on the JISC Libraries of the Future Weblog document two debates: Revolution or Evolution: The JISC National E Textbook Debate and From eLib to the Library of the Future.

Here are the postings in chronological order:

California Digital Library Puts Up Mass Digitization Projects Page

The California Digital Library has added a UC Libraries Mass Digitization Projects page to its Inside CDL Web site.

The Web site includes links to Frequently Asked Questions, contracts with digitization partners, and other information.

Of special interest in the FAQ are the questions "What rights to the digitized content does UC have in the projects; will access be limited in any way?" and "How will our patrons be able to access these texts, i.e. through MELVYL, or local catalogs, or a webpage, any search engine, or….?"

Metadata for Digital Libraries: State of the Art and Future Directions Published

JISC has published Metadata for Digital Libraries: State of the Art and Future Directions.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

At a time when digitization technology has become well established in library operations, the need for a degree of standardization of metadata practices has become more acute, in order to ensure digital libraries the degree of interoperability long established in traditional libraries. The complex metadata requirements of digital objects, which include descriptive, administrative and structural metadata, have so far mitigated against the emergence of a single standard. However, a set of already existing standards, all based on XML architectures, can be combined to produce a coherent, integrated metadata strategy.

An overall framework for a digital object's metadata can be provided by either METS or DIDL, although the wider acceptance of the former within the library community makes it the preferred choice. Descriptive metadata can be handled by either Dublin Core or the more sophisticated MODS standard. Technical metadata, which is contingent on the type of files that make up a digital object, is covered by such standards as MIX (still images), AUDIOMD (audio files), VIDEOMD or PBCORE (video) and TEI Headers (texts). Rights management may be handled by the METS Rights schema or by more complex schemes such as XrML or ODRL. Preservation metadata is best handled by the four schemas that make up the PREMIS standard.

Integrating these standards using the XML namespace mechanism is straightforward technically although some problems can arise with namespaces that are defined with different URIs, or as a result of duplications and consequent redundancies between schemas: these are best resolved by best practice guidelines, several of which are currently under construction.

The next ten years are likely to see further degrees of metadata integration, probably with the consolidation of these multiple standards into a single schema. The digital library community will also work towards firmer standards for metadata content (analogous to AACR2), and software developers will increasingly adopt these standards. The digital library user will benefit from developments in enhanced federated searching and consolidated digital collections. The same developments are likely to take place in the archives and museums sectors, although the different metadata traditions that apply here are likely to make the form they take somewhat different.

Harold Varmus on the NIH Public Access Policy

NPR has released a digital audio interview with Harold Varmus (Noble Prize winner, President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former Director of the National Institutes of Health, and co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science) about the NIH Public Access Policy and open access.

Two JISC Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange Projects

JISC is funding two projects to do small-scale OAI-ORE tests:

TheOREM (Theses with ORE Metadata), at the University of Cambridge, aims to:

  • Test the applicability of the ORE standard in a realistic scholarly setting—thesis description, submission and publication.
  • Demonstrate the advantages of the ORE approach in complex object publication, by combining it with existing web-standards compliant technologies.
  • Provide examples to fully exercise the ORE specifications in order to provide validation and future direction.

FORESITE (Functional Object Reuse and Exchange: Supporting Information Topology Experiments) will create Resource Map descriptions of JSTOR's holdings, and then ingest them into the DSpace institutional repository system via the SWORD protocol, creating external references back to the original files. The description work will be automated, and the system for achieving this implemented at the University of Liverpool. The SWORD protocol will be implemented within DSpace by HP Labs along with other extensions necessary.

For further information, see the FORESITE proposal, A Preview of the TheOREM Project, and the TheOREM proposal.

Kate Wittenberg to Leave EPIC (Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia)

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Kate Wittenberg, Director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), will leave that post on June 30. Wittenberg says that she was told that Columbia University plans to shut down its electronic publishing operation.

Read more about it at "Is E-Publishing at Columbia U. on the Ropes?"

Cornell University Library and Duke University Press to Collaborate on Project Euclid

The Cornell University Library and Duke University Press have announced that they will collaborate on the future development of Project Euclid.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Effective July 2008, Duke will provide publishing expertise in marketing, sales, and order fulfillment to Project Euclid's participating publishers and institutional subscribers. Duke will work to broaden and deepen Project Euclid's subscriber base, resulting in greater global exposure for 54 journals and a growing number of monographs and conference proceedings. Cornell will continue to provide and support the vital IT infrastructure for Project Euclid and assume responsibility for archiving and preservation activities, ensuring robust and reliable access to the content deposited with Project Euclid for future scholars, researchers, and students.

Now home to 93,000 journal articles (75% of which are open access), along with 60 monographs and conference proceedings, Project Euclid and its partner publishers will benefit from Duke's commitment to Project Euclid's mission and from the Press's publishing proficiency, reputation for quality consciousness, and university-based value system. Duke's recent initiative to expand its journals publishing program into science, technology and medicine further ensures that together the Cornell Library and Duke University Press will achieve Project Euclid's goal to become a primary destination site for mathematicians and statisticians. . . .

This joint venture was undertaken in cooperation with the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations, created by the Association of Research Libraries.

Leadership for Project Euclid will be assumed by management at both Cornell and Duke.

reSearcher: Open Source Citation Management, Federated Searching, Link Resolution, and Serials Management

Simon Fraser University Library's Linux-based reSearcher, which is widely used in Canada, is an open source software suite that includes:

  • Citation Manager: "Citation Manager allows faculty, students and staff to quickly and accurately capture citations or references from library resources into their own personal, online database."
  • CUFTS (serials management): "As a knowledgebase of over 375 fulltext resources, CUFTS provides Electronic Resource Management services, an integrated serials database, link resolving, and MARC records for your library."
  • dbWIZ (federated searching): "dbWiz provides library users with a single interface for searching a wide range of library resources, and returns records in an integrated result listing."
  • GODOT (link resolution): "Launched from a link embedded in your library's citation databases or other resources, GODOT provides direct links to your fulltext collections, using the CUFTS knowledge base, and also reveals holdings in your catalogue or in other locations."

Isilon's IQ Clustered Storage System Chosen by Michigan and Rice for Digital Repository Storage

Isilon Systems has announced that its IQ Clustered Storage System will be used to support the Michigan Digitization Project and the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive.

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

Isilon Systems . . . today announced that the University of Michigan (U-M) has selected Isilon's IQ clustered storage system as the primary repository for its Michigan Digitization Project. In partnership with Google, the University of Michigan and its Michigan Digitization Project are digitizing more than 7.5 million books, ensuring these valuable resources are available to the public into perpetuity. This enormous undertaking includes the storage of digital copies of all unique books within the libraries of the entire Big-Ten Conference and directly supports Google Book Search, which aims to create a single, comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages. The University of Michigan, in partnership with Indiana University (IU), is leveraging Isilon's IQ clustered storage system to create a Shared Digital Repository (SDR) of the universities' published library materials. Using Isilon IQ, U-M and IU are able consolidate digital copies of millions of books into one, single, shared pool of storage to meet the rapidly growing storage demand of its massive book digitization project. . . .

In conjunction with the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC), an academic partnership formed by the universities of the Big-Ten Conference and the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and Indiana University are working to create a Shared Digital Repository (SDR) which will mirror the content from U-M and the CIC libraries found in Google Book Search. Using Isilon IQ clustered storage, featuring its OneFS® operating system software, U-M has eliminated disparate data silos to create a shared pool of storage for the digitization efforts of these partner institutions. Each digitized book is approximately 55 MB in size, downloading at a rate of 3 MB/second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the entire six year duration of the project. Isilon IQ reduces storage management time, enabling U-M to accelerate the book scanning process, preserve valuable materials, and ultimately expand the research and learning capabilities for millions of users across the globe.

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

Isilon . . . today announced that Rice University has selected Isilon's IQ clustered storage system as its central repository for digital multimedia, including video of selected speeches by international dignitaries and musical performances from the Shepherd School of Music. In an effort to preserve the many historic events held at these prestigious venues and ensure the productions are available to the public into perpetuity, Rice has deployed Isilon clustered storage to consolidate hundreds of recorded musical performances and keynote speeches into a single, highly scalable and reliable shared pool of storage for the Rice Digital Scholarship Archive, an institutional repository based on the DSpace software platform. . . .

Through a cooperative effort between Rice University's Digital Library Initiative, Fondren Library and Central IT department, the university has created a central repository for all its critical multi-media content, enabling a variety of departments to execute on vital, content-driven projects simultaneously, activity that was impossible with traditional storage. Prior to using Isilon IQ, Rice's storage management for the Digital Scholarship archiving system was unable to effectively support management of large digital video and audio files that required streaming for delivery. These assets, therefore, were stored on a variety of streaming servers by various groups across campus, creating multiple access bottlenecks that led to inefficient storage management and undue IT cost and complexity. By unifying all of its digital content onto one, easy to use, "pay as you grow" clustered storage system, Rice University has removed costly data access and management barriers and dramatically simplified its storage architecture. Additionally, using Isilon's SmartQuotas provisioning and quota management software application, Rice is also storing its Language Center's multi-media course work and its Central IT department's webcasts on Isilon IQ, delivering immediate, concurrent data access to multiple users and user groups, further reducing storage management costs to maximize system efficiency.

Rice University will stream its collection of musical performances from the Shepherd School, as well as its video library of the many world leaders and dignitaries that have spoken at the Baker Institute, to thousands of users online. This operation necessitates the use of multiple media servers, using Windows, Quicktime and Real Player formats. Isilon clustered storage communicates natively over CIFS, NFS FTP, and HTTP, as well as interoperating with Windows, Mac and Linux environments, enabling seamless integration with Rice's variety of server formats and enabling all content to be streamed from one, central, easily and immediately accessible storage system. With Isilon IQ, Rice's entire collection of multi-media is accessible to all its servers 24x7x365, ensuring that the media streaming operations are not only efficient and cost-effective, but prepared to meet high user demand.

Summary of Experiences with E-Journal Publishing Software and Institutional Repositories

Sunny Yoon, Digital Resources Coordinator at the City University of New York, posted a query on the CODE4LIB list about the use of e-journal publishing software and its integration into institutional repositories.

She has now posted an interesting summary of responses to her query.

You can also read the replies that were posted to the list under the heading "e-journal publishing software."

Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives: Results from an Online Questionnaire Survey

The RIOJA project has released Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives: Results from an Online Questionnaire Survey.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

The Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA) project (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja) is an international partnership of members of academic staff, librarians and technologists from UCL (University College London), the University of Cambridge, the University of Glasgow, Imperial College London and Cornell University. It aims to address some of the issues around the development and implementation of a new publishing model, that of the overlay journal – defined, for the purposes of the project, as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more open access repositories. The project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) and runs from April 2007 to June 2008.

The RIOJA project will create an interoperability toolkit to enable the overlay of certification onto papers housed in subject repositories. The intention is that the tool will be generic, helping any repository to realise its potential to act as a more complete scholarly resource. The project will also create a demonstrator overlay journal, using the arXiv repository and OJS software, with interaction between the two facilitated by the RIOJA toolkit.

To inform and shape the project, a survey of Astrophysics and Cosmology researchers has been conducted. The findings from that survey form the basis of this report.

The project team will also undertake formal and informal discussion with publishers and with academic and managing members of editorial boards. The survey and supplementary discussions will help to ensure that the RIOJA outputs address the needs and expectations of the research community. Finally, the overall long-term sustainability of a repository-overlay journal will be assessed. The project will examine the costs of adding peer review to arXiv deposits, of implementing and maintaining the functionality which the survey shows to be most valued by researchers, and of providing long-term preservation of content, and will aim to identify and appraise possible cost-recovery business models.

Digital Library Federation and 10 Vendors/Developers Reach Accord about ILS Basic Discovery Interfaces

Ten vendors and application developers have agreed to support standard ILS interfaces that will permit integration and interoperability with emerging discovery services. These interfaces will be developed by the Digital Library Federation's ILS-Discovery Interface Committee. The participants are AquaBrowser, BiblioCommons, California Digital Library, Ex Libris, LibLime, OCLC, Polaris Library Systems, SirsiDynix, Talis, and VTLS.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

On March 6, representatives of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), academic libraries, and major library application vendors met in Berkeley, California to discuss a draft recommendation from the DLF for standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

At the meeting, participants agreed to support a set of essential functions through open protocols and technologies by deploying specific recommended standards.

These functions are:

  1. Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.
  2. Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.
  3. Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.

Selected Publisher Policies about the NIH Public Access Policy

The Edward G. Miner Library of the University of Rochester Medical Center has a very useful page (Publishers' Policies on the NIH Public Access Policy) that includes excerpts from selected publisher's policies about the NIH Public Access Policy. However, this page does not include the URLs for the policies.

I've identified the URL's (listed below in the same order as in the original document), provided updates where appropriate, and included the publisher's fee-based open access option if available.

BioOne Model Author Agreement Released

BioOne has released its Model Author Agreement. An Informational Sheet is also available.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

BioOne (www.bioone.org) is pleased to announce the release of a model publication agreement that addresses current trends in copyright assignment and requirements by NIH and other funding agencies for digital repository deposits. While the Agreement was developed at the request of several BioOne publishers, it may be of interest to any scholarly publishing organization that is seeking a clear, concise, and legally vetted publication agreement.

In March 2007, the legal firm Morrison & Foerster LLC (www.mofo.com) generously agreed to provide pro bono legal assistance to BioOne in drafting a Model Publication Agreement. Ms. Pamela Pasti, Of Counsel in the Technology Transactions Group of Morrison & Foerster's San Francisco office, was assigned to the project. Over the course of the following year, Ms. Pasti worked with BioOne to review existing publication agreements, notable author's addenda, and articles describing emerging trends in copyright law as it relates to academic publishing.

The resulting agreement allows author(s) to retain copyright, while granting the publisher both a temporally limited and exclusive right to first publish, and a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish, distribute, and sublicense. In response to NIH's Public Access Policy (passed by Congress in December 2007) and other institutional and subject repository deposit mandates, the Agreement allows authors to deposit their work in digital repositories directly, or permits the publisher to deposit to the National Library of Medicine on their behalf.

Vast Majority of Respondents in British Library Survey Support Digital Fair Use

In a survey conducted by the British Library, 87% of respondents supported copyright use exceptions and fair use (called fair dealing in UK) for digital materials. (Thanks to the ResourceShelf.)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

87% of respondents stated they should be able to use exceptions and fair dealing in the digital age. Fair dealing is the 'right' to make a copy from an in-copyright work without permission from, or remuneration to, the rights holder for non-commercial research, private study, criticism, review and news reporting. For example, most individual copying by researchers at university for academic purposes is done under the fair dealing provision in UK law. 68% of the survey respondents are opposed to having different fair dealing laws for material in paper or electronic format. The British Library will be putting these points, on behalf of researchers, to the UK Intellectual Property Office in the current consultation on copyright exceptions. . . .

The British Library's position in the IP debate has been guided by five principles:

1. Public Interest

Public interest policy formation must consider the impact on the creator, the citizen, the economy, the education system and our culture—for today, and for future generations to come.

2. Balance

Creativity, innovation and a democratic civil society requires copyright law to strike a balance between the private interest of the creator being recognised and remunerated for their work, and the interest of the citizen in ensuring access to information and ideas.

3. Digital is Not Different

Copyright law should enshrine the principles of creativity, access, recognition and remuneration as it always has done. Exceptions should apply to all formats including digital formats.

4. Law Aligned with Realities

Rationalisation and simplification of the law will lead to understanding and respect for copyright.

5. Technology Neutral

Copyright law must be informed by technological advances, but must be kept generic as opposed to specific technologies being enshrined in law.

The British Library will be submitting its response to the UK Intellectual Property Office's consultation on copyright exceptions on 8 April 2008.