Month: October 2008

Presentations from the Oxford Institutional and National Services for Research Data Management Workshop

Presentations from the Institutional and National Services for Research Data Management Workshop at the Oxford Said Business School are now available.

Here's a selection:

JISC Digital Preservation Policies Study

JISC has released a two-part study of digital preservation policies: Digital Preservation Policies Study and Digital Preservation Policies Study, Part 2: Appendices—Mappings of Core University Strategies and Analysis of Their Links to Digital Preservation.

Here's an excerpt:

This JISC funded study aims to provide an outline model for digital preservation policies and to analyse the role that digital preservation can play in supporting and delivering key strategies for Higher and Further Education Institutions. Although focussing on the UK Higher and Further Education sectors, the study draws widely on policy and implementations from other sectors and countries and will be of interest to those wishing to develop policy and justify investment in digital preservation within a wide range of institutions. We have created two tools in this study: 1) a model/framework for digital preservation policy and implementation clauses based on examination of existing digital preservation policies; 2) a series of mappings of digital preservation links to other key institutional strategies in UK universities and colleges. Our aim has been to help institutions and their staff develop appropriate digital preservation policies and clauses set in the context of broader institutional strategies.

Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowships Available

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities has announced the availability of 2009 Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowships. The fellowship is:

Intended for students whose dissertations engage the intersections between new media and the traditional concerns of the Arts and Humanities, the Winnemore Fellowship will provide a stipend of $9,570, plus full benefits and tuition remission up to five credits.

Presentations from Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future

Presentations (usually digital audio and PowerPoint slides) about data curation, e-science, virtual organizations and other topics from the ARL/CNI Fall Forum on Reinventing Science Librarianship: Models for the Future are now available.

Speakers included Sayeed Choudhury, Ron Larsen, Liz Lyon, Richard Luce, and others.

PALINET to Digitize 20 Million Textual Pages

With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, PALINET's Mass Digitization Collaborative plans to digitize 20 million textual pages of public domain material from participating member libraries. The scanned digital texts will be freely available from the Internet Archive.

Read more about at "PALINET's Mass Digitization Collaborative Underway."

George Mason University Responds to Zotero Lawsuit

George Mason University has issued a statement regarding the Thomson Reuters Zotero lawsuit.

Here's an excerpt from the statement:

The Thomson Reuters Corporation has sued the Commonwealth of Virginia over Zotero, a project based at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). A free and open-source software initiative, Zotero aims to create the world’s best research tool and has already been adopted by hundreds of thousands of users at countless colleges and research universities. CHNM announces that it has re-released the full functionality of Zotero 1.5 Sync Preview to its users and the open source community.

As part of its formal response to this legal action, Mason will also not renew its site license for EndNote. As academics themselves, the creators of the Zotero project strive to serve the scholarly community and to respond to its needs in an age of digital research. In line with that simple goal, they maintain that anything created by users of Zotero belongs to those users, and that it should be as easy as possible for Zotero users to move to and from the software as they wish, without friction. CHNM concurs with the journal Nature, which recently editorialized about this matter: "The virtues of interoperability and easy data-sharing among researchers are worth restating."

CHNM remains committed to the openness it has promoted since its founding at Mason in 1994 and to the freedoms of users of its websites and software. Its ambitious development cycle and plans for Zotero’s future remain unchanged.

Read more about it at "Company's Lawsuit Over Free Scholarly Organization Tool Generates Buzz" and "Reuters Says George Mason University Is Handing Out Its Proprietary Software."

New Book from EDUCAUSE: The Tower and the Cloud

EDUCAUSE has published a new book, The Tower and the Cloud, which is freely available in digital form (a print version is also available).

The book is a wide-ranging overview of major information technology trends and their impacts on higher education, with essays written by prominent authors such as Clifford A. Lynch ("A Matter of Mission: Information Technology and the Future of Higher Education"), Paul N. Courant ("Scholarship: The Wave of the Future in the Digital Age"), and John Unsworth ("University 2.0").

U-SKIS: Open Source Institutional Repository Workflow Software for CONTENTdm

The University of Utah's Marriott Library has developed the open source University Scholarly Knowledge Inventory System (U-SKIS) for institutional repository workflow control with the CONTENTdm software. U-SKIS is written in Perl 5.5 and utilizes MySQL.

Read more about it at "University of Utah's Open Source Software Extends Power of CONTENTdm for Institutional Repositories."

Author's Rights, Tout de Suite

Author's Rights, Tout de Suite, the latest Digital Scholarship publication, is designed to give journal article authors a quick introduction to key aspects of author's rights and to foster further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent Web sites.

It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose, including derivative works, in accordance with the license.

The prior publication in the Tout de Suite series, Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite, is also available.

Six New Open Access Books Available from Michigan's digitalculturebooks

The University of Michigan's digitalculturebooks, a joint imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, has published six open access books: The Best of Technology Writing 2008; This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities; The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age; Broadcasting, Voice, and Accountability: A Public Interest Approach to Policy Law, and Regulation; Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age; and Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China.

The books are also available for purchase in print form.

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2008

Presentations from the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference are available.

Here's a brief selection:

Cross-Disciplinary Data Tools Development: Cornell Establishes DISCOVER Research Service Group

Cornell University has launched its DISCOVER Research Service Group to support its data-driven science efforts.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Cornell University announced today the establishment of the DISCOVER Research Service Group (DRSG) to facilitate data-driven science at Cornell by developing cross-disciplinary data archival and discovery tools. DISCOVER will conduct pilot projects in selected strategic areas such as the development of data discovery portals using access-layer protocols now under development at Fedora Commons and the Virtual Observatory. . . .

Cornell's Department of Astronomy and the University Library, in partnership with the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, will work closely with DISCOVER, which is comprised of research groups from multiple disciplines and core data management and curation staff. . . .

The overarching goal of the DISCOVER Research Service Group is to provide accessible paths for the curation, preservation, and mining of scientific data. Systems are needed to make data sets accessible physically over both space (over a wide network) and time (for the indefinite future) and also transparently, using modern Web-based tools that are expected to evolve.

Embracing the Future: Embedding Digital Repositories in the University of London

The RAND Corporation has released Embracing the Future: Embedding Digital Repositories in the University of London. (Thanks to Resource Shelf.)

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This study informs a consortium of thirteen London institutions with an assessment of current awareness and attitudes of stakeholders regarding digital repositories in three case study institutions. The report identifies drivers for, and barriers to, the embedding of digital repositories in institutional strategy. The findings therefore should be of use to decision-makers involved in the development of digital repositories. Our approach was entirely based on consultations with specific groups of stakeholders in three institutions through interviews with specific individuals.

JISC Releases Report on Book Scanners

JISC has released Public Exhibition of Automated Book Scanners Hosted at the Bayerische StaatsBibliothek—Munich 18th-20th June 2008.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Julian Ball, the author of the report, attended an event at the Munich Digitisation Centre (18-10 June 2008) where four vendors exhibited and demonstrated their scanners: Qidenus, Kirtas, Treventus and 4DigitalBooks.

The report lists basic specifications for each scanner, contact details and personal observations on the various products.

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008 Published

EDUCAUSE has published The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008.

Here's an excerpt:

This 2008 ECAR research study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 ECAR studies of students and information technology. The study is based on quantitative data from a spring 2008 survey of 27,317 freshmen and seniors at 90 four-year institutions and eight two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 75 students at four institutions; and analysis of qualitative data from 5,877 written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to studying student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, the 2008 study also includes a special focus on student participation in social networking sites.

ARL Annual Salary Survey 2007–08 Published

The Association of Research Libraries has published the ARL Annual Salary Survey 2007–08.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The 2007–08 data show that ARL librarians’ salaries outperformed inflation for the fourth consecutive year. The combined median professional salary in US and Canadian ARL university libraries was $61,833—a 3.7% increase from the previous year. Over the same period, the Consumer Price Index rose 2.4% in the US and 2.5% in Canada.

The ARL Annual Salary Survey 2007–08 analyzes salary data from a number of different perspectives, including race, ethnicity, and gender. Minority librarians make up 14.1% of the professional staff in US ARL university libraries; the percentage of minorities in managerial or administrative positions is lower. Women comprise 69.4% of minority staff members.

Gender-based salary differentials persist in ARL libraries in 2007–08. The overall salary for women in the 113 ARL university libraries is 95.4% of that paid to men; this figure compares to 95.7% in 2006–07. While the data show a marked closure of the gender gap in ARL libraries over the long term—in 1980–81, women in ARL libraries were paid roughly 87% of what men were paid—the data also raise the possibility that the closure has peaked, and that a 5% gap between men’s and women’s salaries may persist.

Catherine Mitchell Named as Director, eScholarship Publishing Group at CDL

Catherine Mitchell, Acting Director of the eScholarship Publishing Group at the California Digital Library, has been named as the permanent occupant of that post. In this capacity, Mitchell is responsible for the eScholarship Repository, eScholarship Editions, the Mark Twain Project Online, and other ventures.

In her statement about the appointment, Laine Farley, CDL Interim Executive Director, said:

Catherine has held the position on an interim basis since November 2007. During that time, she has led the group to develop a new services-oriented vision and to launch an ambitious redesign of the eScholarship interface. She was also the project manager for the Mark Twain project which successfully launched last November. Catherine’s dedication, deep understanding of scholarly communication, publishing issues, and professionalism are admired by all of us who work with her.

How Much Will Large Doctoral Universities Have to Pay to Try to Stop Illegal File Sharing?

A new study says that large doctoral institutions could face costs that "easily exceed half a million dollars annually" as they try to clamp down on illegal file sharing in order to comply with Section 488 of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008.

The Campus Computing Project's The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance report details the findings of its July 2008 higher education compliance cost study, which included responses from 321 two-year and four-year institutions.

Read more about it at "The Costs of Policing Campus Networks."