The Copyright Clearance Center now offers blanket copyright licenses to large institutions. The University of Texas at Austin has signed up.
Read more about it at: "Copyright Clearance Center Expands Blanket Pricing Offer," "University of Texas at Austin Adopts CCC's Annual Copyright License," and "UT Austin and the CCC's Annual Subscription License."
Google has announced a newspaper digitization project that will "make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives."
Read more about it at "Bringing History Online, One Newspaper at a Time."
DigitalPreservationEurope has published a new briefing paper: Interoperability: A Key Concept for Large Scale, Persistent Digital Libraries.
Here's an excerpt:
Interoperability is an essential feature for federated information architectures to work in heterogeneous settings and over time! However, use and understanding of the concept still are very heterogeneous: interoperability is conceived in an object-related or in a functional perspective, from a user's or an institutional perspective, in terms of multilingualism or of technical means and protocols. Moreover, interoperability is conceived on different abstraction levels: from the bitstream layer up to semantic interoperability. The briefing summarises some of the relevant vectors of thought, indicates related conceptual frameworks and places the issue in the strategic context of Europeana.
The Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property of the House of Representatives' Committee on the Judiciary will hold a hearing on "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" on 9/11/2008.
Andrew Albanese has written an article about this upcoming hearing ("NIH Public Access Policy to Face Copyright Challenge in Congress?"), and Peter Suber has made extensive comments about the article and issued a call for action ("Publishers Go to Congress to Undo the NIH Policy").
Here's an excerpt from Suber's post:
Update. Alert to US Citizens: If your representative is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, please contact him/her before the end of business on Tuesday, September 9, and express your support for the NIH policy. There are committee members from AL, AZ, CA, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, MA, MI, MN, NC, NY, OH, TN, TX, UT, WI, and VA. Some members know nothing about the policy but what the publishing lobby has told them. Explain why the policy matters to you and make it personal. Send copies of your message to the committee leadership (John Conyers, Chairman, D-MI, and Lamar Smith, Ranking Member, R-TX). If your representative is not a member of the committee, then you can send a message to the committee leadership alone. For the contact info on any member, see Congress Merge. If you can address copyright issues, do. This committee has jurisdiction over copyright issues, and copyright is the hook publishers used to get the committee's attention. It's tiring to mobilize all over again, but it's necessary. Please write and spread the word. Keep a copy of your message. You may need it again.
Here is a list of members of the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, with each name linked to the Representative's contact page:
Version 73 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,350 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.
The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2007 Annual Edition (PDF file) is also available.
The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):
1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:
Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards
An article about the bibliography ("Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography") has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.
Talis has released a podcast of an interview with Herbert van de Sompel, Digital Library Researcher at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, about SFX, OAI, and digital repositories.
Joan A. Smith has been appointed the Chief Technology Strategist in the office of the Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at Emory University (Richard E. Luce holds that position).
Smith holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Old Dominion University. Her 2008 dissertation was on "Integrating Preservation Functions into the Web Server." She also holds an M.A. in Computer Education from Hampton University, a B.A. in Natural Science from the University of the State of New York, and a Ph.B. (Bachelor of Philosophy) from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Smith has held a variety of technical positions since 1988 at Owenworks, Blue-I Technology, Northrop Grumman, the Inter-National Research Institute, and the Electronic Institute of Technology.
Ingrid Mason, Digital Research Repository Coordinator at the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre of the Victoria University of Wellington’s University Library, has deposited a report (Technical Report: Doctoral Theses Digitisation) about that library's doctoral theses digitization project in its institutional repository.
Here's an excerpt:
Doctoral theses (~1200) in the University Library’s collection have been digitised and uploaded into the Library’s two research repositories: RestrictedArchive@Victoria and ResearchArchive@Victoria. With a view to sharing learning and useful information key considerations for other tertiary institutions undertaking a similar project are:
- digital file sizes and server storage space
- purpose of and standards of digitisation for access
- data matching from library system and alumni database
- database listing and tracking of theses and allied tasks
- inventory listing and batching of theses into boxes
- costs for digitisation, transportation and short term assistance
The Digital Curation Centre has released "Planets Testbed" as part of its Technology Watch Papers series. The document provides a concise introduction to the EU Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services) project's testbed.
Noted digital historian Edward L. Ayers, whose The Valley of the Shadow project has been very influential, became the President of the University of Richmond last July, and now the innovative History Engine project has moved with him from the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia to Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab.
Here's an excerpt from the "What is the History Engine?" page:
The History Engine project aims to enhance historical education and research for teachers, students, and scholars alike. The Engine allows undergraduate professors to introduce a more collaborative and creative approach to history into their classrooms, while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The core of the HE project is student-written episodes—individual snippets of daily life throughout American history from the broadest national event to the simplest local occurrence. Students construct these episodes from one or more primary sources found in university and local archives, using historical context gleaned from secondary sources to round out their analysis. Students then post their entries in our cumulative database, giving their classmates and fellow participants around the country the opportunity to read and engage with their work.
Read more about it at "The Little Engine That Can."
JISC CETIS has published Open Educational Resources—Opportunities and Challenges for Higher Education.
Here's an excerpt:
This briefing paper provides the background to the current development of and future trends around OER aimed at adding to our understanding, stimulating ongoing debate among the JISC community and developing a research agenda. The briefing is structured in three sections:
- Discussion on the conceptual and contextual issues of Open Educational Resources.
- A review of current OER initiatives: their scale, approaches, main issues and challenges.
- Discussion on trends emerging in Open Educational Resources, with respect to future research and activities.
SHERPA/RoMEO has announced the availability of a new list of Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access. The initial version of the list has 414 entries.
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.
The Digital Curation Centre and DigitalPreservationEurope have announced that an updated version of the DRAMBORA Online Interactive Toolkit is now available.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Based on practical research and recognizing current approaches and standards, DRAMBORA provides a method for self-assessment for digital curation professionals. It facilitates internal audit by providing repository administrators with a means to assess their capabilities, identify their weaknesses, and recognise their strengths, complementing other emerging work on attributes and criteria for Trustworthy Digital Repositories. DRAMBORA can be utilised by a broad range of digital repositories, digital libraries and digital archives, including those repositories whose mandates do not yet include responsibility for long-term digital preservation.
Dartmouth University has appointed Mary Flanagan as the first endowed chair holder of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanities.
Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Before joining Dartmouth's faculty, Flanagan was a professor of contemporary digital arts, culture and technology at Hunter College in New York City. . . .
Flanagan has published two co-edited books with MIT Press, Reload: rethinking women + cyberculture (2002) and Re:skin (2007) and is the author of the forthcoming book Critical Play. She is also the founder and director of the Tiltfactor Laboratory, which researches and develops computer games and software systems focused on science, math, applied computer programming, literacy and social values.
Flanagan received an MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa in 1994 and a PhD in Computational Media and Game Design from the University of the Arts, London in 2006. She was named a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2007, a Fulbright Scholar in 2000 and twice received the City University of New York's Outstanding Scholar award in 2004 and 2007.
With the completion of phase two of the project, the JISC Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory project has cataloged 3,707 free digital collections. The phase two records will be added to the JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR), which already contains the phase one records.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The brief of the inventory was to identify all the repositories and achives in the UK that are relevant to UK higher education and are free at point of use. For the purposes of this project a very loose definition of repositories and archives was used. The only sites that were excluded were those that restricted access and those with little or no structure.
Phase 1 of the project discovered 1,924 resources and phase 2 discovered 1,783. The records from phase 1 are already in the IESR and records from phase 2 will be added soon.
Phase 2 also enriched the metadata collected about all the resources and contacted resource owners to approve or extend the data collected about their resources. This produced a very positive response with approximately 800 resource owners providing extra information about their collections.
The project has released its final report, JISC Final Report—Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory Project.
John Wilbanks has released a video about the Scholars Copyright Project.
Kete 1.1 has been released. Kete is a Ruby on Rails application. Source code can be obtained from the Downloads page.
Here'e an excerpt from the 9/1/08 ITSIG announcement:
Kete combines features from Knowledge and Content Management Systems as well as collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs, tags, and online forums to make it easy to add and relate content on a Kete site.
A more complete description can be found on Katipo’s Web site (Katipo provides fee-based support for Kete).
The Kete 1.1 Features and Bug Fixes page lists new features in this version.
