Year: 2008

DSpace Version 1.5 Released

Version 1.5 of DSpace, which is a major upgrade, has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The DSpace community is pleased to announce the release of DSpace 1.5! This is an important release of DSpace with many new features, including a completely new theme-able Manakin user interface, SWORD integration, many new configurable options, and scalability improvements. . . .

New Features:

  • Maven DSpace 1.5 introduces a new Maven-based build system. Maven is a software tool from Apache that allows developers to compile and distribute software projects. Maven also enables DSpace to be more modular by arranging the software into sub-components. In addition, it makes customizations easier by giving developers the tools to maintain customizations, and provides the ability to manage new features as DSpace continues its accelerating growth rate. . . .
  • Manakin Customize your repository look-and-feel with the new Manakin theme-able user interface. Manakin introduces a new modular framework, enabling an institution to customize their interface according to the specific needs of the particular repository, community, or collection. . . .
  • Light Network Interface Integrate DSpace with legacy or local systems that need to manage content in the repository through the new Light Network Interface. This interface provides a programmatic mechanism to manage content within the repository through a WebDAV or SOAP based protocol. . . .
  • SWORD Integrate with the new SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol. Based upon the Atom Publishing Protocol, this interface allows for cross-repository deposit of new content. This protocol may enable future tools that will provide for 'one click' deposit. . . .
  • Browsing The browsing system has been completely re-implemented to provide improved scalability and configuration. The new browsing system enables administrators to easily create new browse indexes. . . .
  • Submissions The item submission system is now more configurable by managing the steps a user follows when submitting a new item to the repository. The new submission system allows for these steps to be rearranged, removed, and even allows for new steps to be added. . . .
  • Events Another under-the-hood improvement introduced in DSpace 1.5 is the event system, which improves scalability and modularity by introducing an event model to the architecture. This feature will allow future add-ons to automatically manage content in the repository based upon when an object has been added, modified, or removed from the system.

Recipients of the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants Announced

The new Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities announced the first five recipients of the of the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants yesterday.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The announcement was made by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole during an event at the Folger Shakespeare Library. . . . A total of five projects received over $600,000 in funding. . . .

Inaugurated last year as part of the Endowment’s Digital Humanities Initiative, the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grant program is supported by both the NEH and the Higher Education Funding Council for England acting through the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). These grants provide combined funding of up to $240,000 for one year of development in the following areas: new digitization projects and pilot projects, the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects, or the development of infrastructure (either technical "middleware," tools, or knowledge-sharing) to support U.S.-England digitization work. Each project is sponsored by both an American and an English institution, whose activities will be funded by NEH and JISC respectively.

The formation of the Endowment’s Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) also was announced during the event. In 2006, the NEH launched the Digital Humanities Initiative, a program encouraging and supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology on research, education, preservation, and public programming in the humanities. With the creation of ODH, the initiative is being made permanent as an office within the NEH. ODH will continue the work of the initiative and will help to coordinate the Endowment’s efforts in the area of digital scholarship.

A complete list of the projects announced can be found below:

The Folger Shakespeare Library and the University of Oxford, with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland and the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, plan to create the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a freely-accessible, high-resolution digital collection of the seventy-five quarto editions of William Shakespeare's plays. The project will also develop an interactive interface and toolset for the detailed study of the quartos, with full-functionality applied to all thirty-two copies of one play, Hamlet, held at participating institutions, including the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Library of Scotland. ($119,598)

The Internet Archive in the United States and the Oxford Internet Institute and Hanzo in the United Kingdom plan to develop procedures and tools to improve the effectiveness of humanities research on the Web. This research and development effort promises to yield superior methods for indexing and analyzing the textual parts of larger digital collections, more focused browsing ("crawling") of the Web, and unified access to data resources, i.e., the ability to search for information across multiple digital databases. ($106,395)

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London, plan to launch Concordia, a set of tools and procedures to enable seamless textual searches and the dynamic mapping of a variety of humanities collections. The pilot project would concentrate on large holdings of papyrological and epigraphic texts from North Africa during the Greek and Roman periods. ($129,828)

A team of scholars from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Virginia, the University of Southampton's Nevis Heritage Project, and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool is working together on the St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative. Together, they plan to develop an integrated digital archive of diverse archaeological and historical data related to the experiences of slaves on sugar plantations in the Caribbean by digitizing and delivering on the Web information from two 18th-century plantations. ($132,832)

The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University and the Internet Centre at Imperial College London plan to develop Philogrid, a Web resource for scholars of Classical Antiquity. The project will generate a digital collection of fragmentary writings of Greek historians that is designed to interact with multiple source editions; a repository of philological data about the Greco-Roman world; and set of procedures that draws on the recipient’s experience in processing textual materials from Perseus but that can also be extended to other digital collections. ($119,992)

Supporting Digital Scholarly Editions: A Report on the Conference of January 14, 2008

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities have published Supporting Digital Scholarly Editions: A Report on the Conference of January 14, 2008, which was written by Ithaka staff.

Here'a an excerpt from the "Introduction":

On January 14, 2008, a group of editors, representatives from university presses, and other stakeholders met to discuss the future of scholarly editions and how they might best be supported in the digital age. . . . .

The objectives of the meeting were:

  • To identify services and tools that are critical for supporting digital documentary editions;
  • To assess the need for a service provider to facilitate the production of these editions; and
  • To articulate the key uncertainties involved in creating such a service provider, so that those can be further investigated.

This report documents the workshop, with the goal of providing a reference not only for participants, but also for others in the community who are concerned with the future of scholarly editions. It is divided into three sections that follow the course of the day itself:

  1. Developing a vision for the next generation scholarly edition
  2. How do we get there? Identifying needs and gaps
  3. Creating a service provider for scholarly editions

NYU Libraries and Institute for the Future of the Book Partner to Develop New Digital Scholarly Communication Tools

The New York University Division of Libraries and the Institute for the Future of the Book will work together to develop new digital scholarly communications tools.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"We are constantly watching the unfolding digital landscape for new paths we might want to take," said Carol A. Mandel, dean of the NYU Libraries. "IFB is a thought leader in the future of scholarly communication. We will work together to develop new software and new options that faculty can use to pubish, review, share, and collaborate at NYU and in the larger academic community."

For the past three years, IFB has been researching, prototyping, and sketching out models for how university presses could expand their publishing programs to include digital and networked formats. IFB is best known for its series of "networked book" experiments, which modify popular blogging technologies to create social book formats for the Web. Among these are: "Without Gods" by NYU’s Mitchell Stephens, "The Googlization of Everything" by Siva Vaidhyanathan, "Gamer Theory" by McKenzie Wark (the first fully networked digital monograph), and "Expressive Processing" by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, which is currently undergoing the first blog-based peer review.

Out of these projects, IFB developed CommentPress, an extension for the WordPress blog platform that enables paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. IFB is also at work on a powerful open source digital authoring environment called Sophie, the first version of which has just been released.

"We are thrilled to be working with NYU," said IFB Director Bob Stein. "We now have the benefit not only of the Libraries’ first-rate technical support, but also of working with world-class faculty, many of whom are leading innovators in digital scholarly communications."

In an auspicious start to their partnership, NYU Libraries and IFB have been awarded a start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to design a set of networking tools that will serve as the membership system for MediaCommons, an all-electronic scholarly publishing network in the digital humanities that IFB has been instrumental in developing.

Under the agreement, three of IFB’s leaders will serve as visiting scholars at NYU. They are Bob Stein; Ben Vershbow, IFB editorial director; and researcher Dan Visel. They will work with NYU librarians; with the digital library team, headed by James Bullen; and with Monica McCormick, the Libraries’ program officer for digital scholarly publishing.

Read more about it at "Major News: IFB and NYU Libraries to Collaborate."

Podcast Released: "Transatlantic Collaboration in the Field of Digitisation with UK's JISC and US' NEH"

JISC and the NEH will be awarding grants for US-UK collaborative digitization projects, and a celebration of this joint venture was held at Kings College in January. JISC has released "Transatlantic Collaboration in the Field of Digitisation with UK's JISC and US' NEH," a podcast that includes interviews with the organizers of that celebration and an excerpt from it.

Digital Humanities Grant: Mellon Foundation Funds Bamboo Planning Project

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded the Bamboo Planning Project, a digital humanities project which is headed by Janet Broughton, Dean of Arts and Humanities, University of California, Berkeley and Gregory A. Jackson, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, University of Chicago.

Here's an excerpt from the project home page:

Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:

How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services? . . . .

Bamboo is meant to include liberal arts colleges, community colleges, research universities, national consortia, disciplinary societies, and other organizations internationally who are concerned with advancing the humanities through the development of shared digital technologies. If we move toward a shared services model, any faculty member, scholar, or researcher can use and reuse content, resources, and applications no matter where they reside, what their particular field of interest is, or what support may be available to them. Our goal is to better enable and foster academic innovation through sharing and collaboration.

Read more about it at "Project Bamboo Launches" and the project proposal.

ARL Preservation Statistics 2005–06 Published

The Association of Research Libraries has released a PDF version of ARL Preservation Statistics 2005–06, which is freely available.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

Among the significant developments that took place in research libraries in the 1980s was the emergence of preservation programs as distinct administrative units, separately staffed, funded, and administered. There were 66 such programs reported in 1988, as many as 80 reported in recent years, and 77 in 2005-06.

These rapidly shifting trends have made themselves evident in many categories. Preservation expenditures for ARL’s 111 reporting member libraries were $107,937,836 in 2005-06, which reflects an inflation-adjusted increase of 27% since the survey’s revision in 1996-97.3 Total preservation staff increased to just under 1,800 FTEs in 2005-06, 5.4% more than in 2004-05. Level 1 conservation treatment decreased from 2004-05 levels, while the number of items treated at Levels 2 and 3 increased; total conservation has increased by more than 50,000 volumes in the past year, bringing it higher than it has been in the last four years. . . .

Digitizing bound volumes is gradually emerging as a viable preservation option. In 2005-06, 54 ARL libraries reported more than zero bound volumes digitized. The amount of items digitized varies widely, from one volume at the University of Delaware to 25,121 volumes digitized by the University of Florida.

Microsoft to Unveil Research-Output Repository Platform at Open Repositories 2008

Microsoft will unveil its Windows-based research-output repository platform in early April at Open Repositories 2008. Initially, the software will be used internally to support a repository for Microsoft Research. At a later date, it will be made available for public download, possibly as open-source software.

Here's an excerpt from "Microsoft and 'Research-Output' Repositories":

The platform has a "semantic computing" flavor. The concepts of "resource" and "relationship" are first-class citizens in our platform API. We do offer a number of "research-output"-related entities for those who want to use them (e.g. "technical report", "thesis", "book", "software download", "data", etc.), all of which inherit from "resource". However, new entities can be introduced into the system (even programmatically) while the existing ones can be further extended through the addition of properties. . . .

We are already well into the process of developing a collection of tools and interfaces on top of the platform as tangible examples of how to use it. We already have implementations of OAI-PMH, BibTeX import/export, customized feed syndication service, ASP.NET controls providing access to the repository, and working on Search and a simple Web UI. We are also working on WPF and Silverlight tools for visualizing the relationships between the resources within our repository. . . .

At the Open Repositories 2008 conference, we will formally unveil our work in advance of its official release and initiate interactions/exchanges with the DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, and other players in the repository community. This is crucial to us because—like every other project our group undertakes—we are intensely focused on interoperability.

I want to be very transparent here: our effort is intended to provide a repository option to those institutions/organizations that already license or have access to Microsoft software (including the free versions of the products, like SQL Server Express). Our platform is intended to sit on top of the existing Microsoft "stack". By providing this new research-output repository platform at no cost, we can offer added value for our existing (and future) customers in the academic and research space. It is critical to point out that we are making every effort to ensure our platform is optimized to make the best use of Microsoft technologies AND to also interoperate with all other existing systems and platforms in the repository ecosystem. We are actively seeking engagement and feedback from the community!

Read more about it at “Microsoft Famulus: New IR Software.”

Sound Directions Project Releases FACET, Preservation Analysis Tool for Audio Works

The Sound Directions: Digital Preservation and Access for Global Audio Heritage Project of Indiana University and Harvard University has released FACET (Field Audio Collection Evaluation Tool), an open-source tool for evaluating preservation issues related to audio works.

Here's an excerpt from the FACET web page:

The Field Audio Collection Evaluation Tool (FACET) is a point-based, open-source software tool that ranks audio field collections based on preservation condition, including the level of deterioration they exhibit and the degree of risk they carry. It assesses the characteristics, preservation problems, and modes of deterioration associated with the following formats: open reel tape (polyester, acetate, paper and PVC bases), analog audio cassettes, DAT (Digital Audio Tape), lacquer discs, aluminum discs, and wire recordings. This tool helps collection managers construct a prioritized list of audio collections by condition and risk, enabling informed selection for preservation. Using FACET provides strong justification for preservation dollars.

College & Research Libraries Makes Preprints Available, but Restricts Access

The Association of College and Research Libraries' journal, College & Research Libraries, is now offering access to preprints on its site; however, access is restricted to ACRL members.

According to the C&RL Manuscript Preparation page, the typical post-review publication delay for papers is about one year.

This preprint strategy does not appear to preclude authors from depositing preprints elsewhere after publication. Below is an excerpt from the C&RL Manuscript Preparation page (emphasis added):

The agreement between ACRL and the author is license to publish. The author retains copyright and thus is free to post the article on an institutional or personal web page subsequent to publication in C&RL. All material in the journal may be photocopied for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or educational advancement.

The American Librarian Library Association's author agreement that C&RL uses states (emphasis added):

  1. In consideration of the Publisher’s agreement to publish the Work, Author hereby grants and assigns to Publisher the right to print, publish, reproduce, or distribute the Work throughout the world in all means of expression by any method now known or hereafter developed, including electronic format, and to market or sell the Work or any part of it as it sees fit. Author further grants Publisher the right to use Author’s name in association with the Work in published form and in advertising and promotional materials. Copyright of the Work remains in Author’s name.
  2. Author agrees not to publish the Work in print form prior to publication of the Work by the Publisher. [ALA requests that should you publish the Work elsewhere, you cite the publication in ALA’s Publication, by author, title, and publisher, through a tagline, author bibliography, or similar means.]

The author agreement says nothing about restricting the author's right to distribute digital preprints, yet the Manuscript Preparation page implies that the author is not free to do so prior to publication. Which is it?

If authors are free to distribute their own digital preprints, what good does it do to restrict access to preprints at the ACRL Website? This policy appears to make no sense unless ACRL believes that authors' motivation to distribute their own preprints will be undermined by ACRL making them available or unless ACRL believes that its authors simply have little or no interest in distributing their own preprints.

Perhaps the C&RL Manuscript Preparation page is just poorly worded. If so, it would be helpful if it were corrected.

But even if this is the case, it begs the question: "What is ACRL, which is actively promoting open access on many fronts, doing making C&RL's preprint service restricted?" While ACRL directly providing access to preprints at the C&RL Website is a welcome step forward, restricting access to those preprints is taking two steps back, and, although well intended, it sends the wrong message for an organization that is trying to move the open access agenda forward.

Read more about it at "C&RL Launches Preprints!"

Microsoft Developing Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 with NLM DTD Support

Microsoft is developing an Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007, which will support the NLM DTD. A Technology Preview of the Add-in is available.

Here's an excerpt from the Technical Computing @ Microsoft—Scholarly Publishing page:

In support of the increased emphasis on electronic publishing and archiving of scholarly articles, Microsoft has developed the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007. This add-in will support the XML format from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is commonly used in the scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing market as part of the publishing workflow and as the format used for the archiving of articles. Pre-release versions of this add-in will target the staff at STM journals and publishers, at information repositories, and in-house and commercial software developers supporting the STM market.

The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 will enable or simplify a number of activities that are part of the authoring and scholarly publishing process, such as:

  • gathering information about the authors and article content at the time the article is written;
  • enabling journals to provide authors with templates containing the structure for articles, and information for self-classification of the articles by the authors;
  • enabling access to the authors and article metadata contained in the Word file through the use of the NLM format and OpenXML document structure;
  • enabling the editorial staff to have access to the article and journal metadata directly within Word; and
  • enabling two-way conversion between Office OpenXML and the NLM format.

Greg Tananbaum consulted with Microsoft on the development of the tool.

American Council on Education and the MPAA Spar over College Opportunity and Affordability Act

The American Council on Education has sent a letter to Senators Edward M. Kennedy and Michael B. Enzi regarding copyright infringement provisions in the College Opportunity and Affordability Act.

In it, the ACE states:

Recent investigations and reports to the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities concluded that legitimate online alternatives and technologies designed to deter illegal file sharing are largely ineffective. A widely distributed 2005 study commissioned by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) indicated that 44 percent of its domestic losses due to illegal file sharing were attributable to college students. However, MPAA revealed in January that a re-examination of those data determined that the estimated loss due to college students was in fact 15 percent, not 44 percent. Moreover, since only 20 percent of college students nationwide reside on campus, only 3 percent of MPAA losses can be attributed to college students using campus networks.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has responded with its own letter, refuting the ACE letter. It states:

One filtering product is now deployed at approximately 70 colleges and universities across the country, and it has demonstrated the ability to impede illegal P2P activity on a number of campus networks.

Further, the letter claims that one university has had significant cost savings as a result of filtering.

Meanwhile, an MPAA study revealed that the movie industry experienced record-breaking profits in 2007, casting some doubt on how significant the piracy threat really is.

Read more about it at "Entertainment Industry Urges Congress to Get Tough with Colleges on File-Sharing," "Hollywood's Record Year Shows MPAA's Piracy Folly," and "MPAA to Congress: Filtering Is in Colleges' Best Interests."

Trade Dispute: Antigua Says It May Allow Violations of Copyright Agreements with the U.S.

As a result of a trade dispute over Internet gambling, Antigua may allow violations of copyright agreements with the U.S. by the end of the month. In 2007, the WTO awarded Antigua $21 million from the U.S. (it had wanted $3.4 billion) and backed it to collect those damages via copyright violations if the Internet gambling issue could not be resolved.

Read more about it at "Antigua Says It's Going to Start Ignoring US Copyrights (For Real This Time)" and "Antigua Threatens to Allow Piracy."

ARL Statistics 2005-06 PDF Published

The Association of Research Libraries has published a freely available PDF version of the ARL Statistics 2005-06.

The "Monograph and Serial Expenditures in ARL Libraries, 1986-2006" graph on page 13 shows that serial expenditures continue their sharp upward climb: there has been a 321% 1986-2006 increase. Serial unit cost, which peaked in 2000, has begun to climb again after a multi-year drop to a 180% increase. Monograph expenditures dropped slightly to a 82% increase, while monograph unit cost rose to a 78% increase.

Vertov Plug-in Brings Digital Audio/Video Annotation to Zotero

Concordia University’s Digital History Lab has released Vertov, an open-source Zotero plug-in that allows users to create clips from digital audio or video files, annotate them, and include the annotations in Zotero.

Read more about it at "Vertov: A Media Annotating Plugin for Zotero" and "Vertov Brings Video Annotation to Zotero."

Preserving Mixed Analog/Digital AV Archives: PrestoSpace Project Case Study

The Digital Curation Centre has published DCC Case Study—PrestoSpace: Preservation towards Storage and Access. Standardised Practices for Audiovisual Contents in Europe.

Here's the "Executive Summary":

Explicit strategies are needed to manage 'mixed' audio visual (AV) archives that contain both analogue and digital materials. The PrestoSpace Project brings together industry leaders, research institutes, and other stakeholders at a European level, to provide products and services for effective automated preservation and access solutions for diverse AV collections. The Project’s main objective is to develop and promote flexible, integrated and affordable services for AV preservation, restoration, and storage with a view to enabling migration to digital formats in AV archives.

Alternative File Formats for Storing Master Images of Digitisation Projects

Koninklijke Bibliotheek has published Alternative File Formats for Storing Master Images of Digitisation Projects.

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

The main conclusions of this study are as follows:

Reason 1: Substitution

JPEG 2000 lossless and PNG are the best alternatives for the uncompressed TIFF file format from the perspective of long-term sustainability. When the storage savings (PNG 40%, JPEG 2000 lossless 53%) and the functionality are factored in, the scale tips in favour of JPEG 2000 lossless.

Reason 2: Redigitisation Is Not Desirable

JPEG 2000 and JPEG are the best alternatives for the uncompressed TIFF file format. If no image information may be lost, then JPEG 2000 lossless and PNG are the two recommended options.

Reason 3: Master File is the Access File

JPEG 2000 lossy and JPEG with greater compression are the most suitable formats.

Berman May Introduce Orphan Works Legislation

Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, may introduce legislation about orphan works in the next few months. Berman held a Subcommittee hearing about orphan works on March 13th to gather further information. One outcome of that hearing was the need to pay special attention to the problem that photographs and other visual works may not have information that identifies copyright owners.

Read more about it at "Hearing on Promoting the Use of Orphan Works: Balancing the Interests of Copyright Owners and Users," Library Copyright Alliance statement, and "Orphan Works Are Back on Congress’s Radar Screen."

Purdue Faculty Affairs Committee Endorses Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors

The Purdue Faculty Affairs Committee has endorsed the Committee on Institutional Cooperation's Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors.

Here's an excerpt from the Addendum:

  1. The Author shall, without limitation, have the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, and create derivative works including update, perform, and display publicly, the Article in electronic, digital or print form in connection with the Author’s teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and for all of Author’s academic and professional activities.
  2. After a period of six (6) months from the date of publication of the article, the Author shall also have all the non-exclusive rights necessary to make, or to authorize others to make, the final published version of the Article available in digital form over the Internet, including but not limited to a website under the control of the Author or the Author’s employer or through digital repositories including, but not limited to, those maintained by CIC institutions, scholarly societies or funding agencies.
  3. The Author further retains all non-exclusive rights necessary to grant to the Author’s employing institution the non-exclusive right to use, reproduce, distribute, display, publicly perform, and make copies of the work in electronic, digital or in print form in connection with teaching, conference presentations, lectures, other scholarly works, and all academic and professional activities conducted at the Author’s employing institution.

Read more about it at "Purdue University Senate Passes CIC Author's Copyright Contract Addendum."

Italian Agency Says Tracking File Sharing Activity without Permission Violates Privacy Rights

The Italian agency in charge of protecting personal data has ruled that Logistep violated the privacy rights of Italian file sharers by tracking their activity and ordered that these tracking records be destroyed. Previously, the Swiss data protection commissioner made a similar ruling against Logistep.

Read more about it at "Anti-Piracy Company Breaches Privacy, Ordered to Shut Down"; "Anti-Piracy Company Illegally Spied on P2P Users"; and "Italian File-Sharers Let Off The Hook."

Presentations from the Open Access Collections Workshop Now Available

Presentations from the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories' Open Access Collections workshop are now available. Presentations are in HTML/PDF, MP3, and digital video formats. The workshop was held in association with the Queensland University Libraries Office of Cooperation and the University of Queensland Library.

Verizon Wants to Improve Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Performance with P4P

As other ISPs try to reduce and shape P2P traffic, Verizon has taken a different tack: investigating how to improve throughput with the new Proactive network Provider Participation for P2P (P4P) protocol. In tests with file sharing company Pando, use of P4P boosted performance between 200 and 600 percent.

Read more about it at: "Goodbye, P2P! P4P is Coming" "Verizon Embraces P4P, a More Efficient Peer-to-Peer Tech" and "With Eyes Open, Verizon Peers into the Future."