Australian National Data Service Launches Two Research Data Services

The Australian National Data Service has launched two research data services: Identify My Data and Register My Data.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Register My Data services allow you to register descriptions of your research data. These descriptions are then published in a number of discovery environments. The first of these is the Research Data Australia gateway (to be launched by ANDS in July) which aspires to include any Australian publicly funded data relevant to research and enable innovative cross-disciplinary re-use. Data descriptions registered with ANDS are also fed into other data discovery portals in Australia and internationally, including the big search engines such as Google. The Identify My Data services allocate persistent identifiers to data. These identifiers enable continuity of access even when the location of the data on the internet changes.

The Internet in Britain 2009

The Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford has released The Internet in Britain 2009.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

One of the main challenges in creating a Digital Britain will be to change the perceptions of the third of the British population who choose not to use the internet, according to the latest in a series of Oxford University Surveys.

The Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) 2009, published on 22 June 2009, shows that while most British internet users (84%) are extremely confident about using new technology and see the Internet as central to many activities, over half of non-users of the internet (57%) now distrust new technology more than they did before.

The survey, conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute, questioned 2000 people in 2009 and found that cost, a lack of access and a lack of interest were the main reasons that led to people deciding to stop using the Internet. OxIS 2009 provides a detailed breakdown of where the digital divide lies: twice as many people from higher than lower socio-economic groups use the Internet. Age too has a dramatic impact on digital choices with the proportion of Internet users between 25-54 increasing considerably since 2003, but not changing significantly for other age groups. The proportion of retired people going online has inched forward from 30% in 2005 to 34% in 2009. However, the gap between male and female users has nearly closed with 71% of men and 68% women now using the Internet; gaps in self-confidence between men and women, however, remain. 100% of students and 88% of households with children said they had access to the Internet.

OxIS 2009 concludes that the Internet is a valuable resource for people to find information, communicate with others, and find entertainment 'in ways that could well give advantages to them over those who choose not to use the Internet'. The 'Digital Britain Report' (published by the UK Government on 16 June 2009) contains pledges to provide universal access to a broadband connection, but according to OxIS Principal Investigator, Professor William Dutton, the heart of the matter is about persuading those who choose to exclude themselves. . . .

While users opt for the Internet as their most trusted medium, non-users or people who have stopped said they trusted television and radio the most. Non-users were most concerned about the negative aspects of online communication, with 86% agreeing that people can find personal information too easily online, as compared with only half of users. Over two-thirds (68%) of non-users said that there was too much immoral material online and nearly three quarters (71%) of non-users wanted greater government regulation of the Internet, as compared with 57% of users.

See also "Digital Britain: The Final Report."

Omeka Image Annotation Plugin 1.0 Beta

The Center for History and New Media, George Mason University has released the Image Annotation Plugin 1.0 beta for Omeka.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Have you ever wanted to annotate your images on Omeka like you can on Flickr?

Now you can with the beta release of Omeka's Image Annotation plugin! Using an adaptation of Chris Woods' jQuery plugin, jquery-image-annotate, Omeka's new Image Annotation plugin allows users to add textual annotations to images. To add an image annotation, users select a region of the image and then attach a textual description.

Arizona’s SIRLS Gets $900,000+ IMLS Grant for Online Digital Information Management Graduate Certificate Program

The University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science has received a grant of over $900,000 from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services for its Digital Information Management (DigIn) online graduate certificate program. The grant will primarily be used to fund scholarships.

Here's the press release:

The DigIn curriculum combines intensive, hands-on technology learning with a thorough grounding in the theoretical principles needed to manage large and complex digital collections.

The program takes a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to managing digital information and is designed to support a wide range of career paths, especially involving libraries, museums, archives, and records management.

Graduate certificates are increasingly being recognized as a means for professionals with advanced degrees to update their knowledge and skills. DigIn also offers a path for those with undergraduate degrees who are interested in digital collections but who may not yet be ready to commit to a full degree program.

The grant will also greatly boost DigIn's mission to foster disciplinary, institutional, geographic, and cultural diversity in the management of digital collections and services.

Thus, DigIn strongly encourages scholarship applicants representing historically underserved institutions, regions, and communities, as well as students expressing interest in working with digital collections in culturally diverse settings.

DigIn is now accepting applications for admission and financial aid for the Fall 2009 semester. The application deadline has just been extended to July 10.

Late applications will be accepted, though Fall admission cannot be guaranteed once the July 10 deadline has passed. Late applicants will also be considered for admission in the Spring 2010 semester.

The program is delivered entirely online and does not require students to reside in or travel to Tucson. Students generally complete the certificate in 4-6 semesters (15-27 months).

DigIn was founded in 2007 with major funding from Institute of Museum and Library Services, the primary source of federal support for the nation?s 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas.

Our current partners also include the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Sedona Conference.

Additional details on the program including course descriptions, admissions requirements and application forms may be found on the program website:

digin.arizona.edu

Prospective applicants are also welcome to contact the DigIn staff at:

digin@email.arizona.edu

Read more about it at "SIRLS Earns Federal Grant to Train More Tech Savvy Librarians ."

SWORD PHP Library Version 0.7

Stuart Lewis has released the SWORD PHP Library Version 0.7.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This latest version adds two new features:

  • When performing a deposit, the client now sets the 'Content-Disposition:filename' header so that the SWORD server knows what to name the file. . . .
  • When performing a deposit, the optional X-No-Op (pretend to perform the deposit) and X-Verbose (provide a verbose response) headers can now be sent (as per http://www.swordapp.org/docs/sword-profile-1.3.html#b.9.2)

Leslie Carr Identifies “Hard Working” UK and U.S. Digital Repositories

Leslie Carr has identified the top 10 "hard working" UK and U.S. digital repositories based on "the number of days deposit activity that they achieved in the last year according to ROAR."

The number one U.S. repository was the RIT Digital Media Library and the number one UK repository was the University of Kent.

Read more about it at "Hard Working Repositories" and "Hardworking Repositories: Comparing UK & US."

CLIR Gets Mellon Foundation Grant to Explore Use of Intelligence Community Tools in Digital Humanities

The Council on Library and Information Resources has been awarded a $28,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the potential use of declassified intelligence community tools in digital humanities research.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The confluence of digital conversion activities and technological advances allows researchers in the humanities to examine questions that require scale and computational power. Intelligence-gathering agencies are a potentially excellent source for tools, resources, and methodologies that have direct bearing on and applicability to contemporary digital humanities research because of the similarity in the methodological challenges, namely, dealing with diverse source material at a scale that exceeds the capacity of humans.

Blogs, wikis, email, radio and television broadcasts, conference proceedings, folksonomies, and Web sites are just a few of the publicly accessible resources of potential interest to scholars. The analytical tools applied to these sources enable searching for patterns (linguistic and imagistic) against very large data sets, data mining, and semantic analysis, among other functions; in some instances they have already been used in the business community to navigate heterogeneous information.

The grant will support a literature search and evaluation of tool findability, a meeting to discuss how scholars might use such tools and how access to the tools could advance humanities scholarship, and publication of results.

"This award, and the research focus it will support, represents a new, vibrant, and potentially significant area of interest for CLIR, and one that may over time greatly benefit our constituency," said CLIR President Chuck Henry.

CoOL Moves to American Institute for Conservation

Conservation OnLine (CoOL) and the Conservation DistList are moving from the Stanford University Libraries to the American Institute for Conservation.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) announced that they will now host Conservation OnLine (CoOL) after 22 years of its being hosted by Stanford University Libraries. CoOL is a web-based library of conservation information, covering a wide spectrum of topics of interest to those involved with the conservation of library, archives, and museum materials. It contains approximately 120,000 documents, including an online archive of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation. It also includes the Conservation DistList, with 9,969 subscribers from at least 91 countries. CoOL serves as both an important resource for information and as a forum for conservation professionals all over the world.

AIC’s first priority is to make the DistList operational as soon as possible. Further announcements will be made as to the resumption of activity on the DistList and where other CoOL resources will be located in the future. We are continuing discussions with allied and affiliate organizations in order to make CoOL’s transition as seamless as possible.

Hindawi’s Open Access Journals’ Impact Factor Up over 27%

Hindawi's open access journals' average impact factor is up over 27% in the last year.

Here's an excerpt from the press release on liblicense-l:

Hindawi Publishing Corporation is pleased to announce that it has seen very strong growth in the Impact Factors of its journals in the recently released 2008 Journal Citation Report published by Thomson Scientific. This most recent Journal Citation Report shows the average Impact Factor of Hindawi's journals increasing by more than 27% over the past year, with two of Hindawi's largest journals, EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing and Mathematical Problems in Engineering, rising by 70% and 45% respectively. . . .

In addition to the 14 journals that were included in the 2007 Journal Citation Report, three of Hindawi's journals received Impact Factors for the first time this year: Clinical and Developmental Immunology, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, and Journal of Nanomaterials.

Elsevier Fails to Block Release of Its Licensing Contract with Washington State University

Elsevier's injunction to block the release of its licensing contract with Washington State University to researchers has been denied by Whitman County Superior Court.

Here's an excerpt from the ARL press release :

Whitman County Superior Court, State of Washington, ruled Friday, June 19, 2009, in favor of full disclosure for a public-records request submitted to Washington State University by Ted Bergstrom, Paul Courant, and Preston McAfee for license information regarding the WSU-Elsevier contract. On June 9, Elsevier had filed a Motion for Injunction against release of the data. According to court papers, the plaintiff argued that disclosure of the Elsevier-WSU contracts would "disclose aspects of Elsevier's pricing methods and formula so as to produce private gain and public loss. Such disclosure would violate Elsevier's rights under Washington statutes. . .to preserve the confidentiality of its proprietary pricing methods and formulae."

"We could see no reason why the open-records request should not be fulfilled in this case,” said Jay Starratt, Dean of Libraries, Washington State University. "As a member of ARL's Scholarly Communication Committee, I am interested in the results of the data analysis being conducted by the researchers."

Researchers Ted Bergstrom, Professor of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara, and Paul Courant, University Librarian, Dean of Libraries, and Professor of Public Policy, Economics, and Information, University of Michigan, said, "We believe that state open-access laws serve the public interest by requiring full transparency of contracts that involve millions of taxpayer dollars. We will continue to collect and analyze the terms of 'Big Deal' contracts signed by a large number of universities and to share this information with the library community. We appreciate the efforts of university librarians who have helped us to collect contract information and we are grateful for ARL's support and encouragement."

“Scholarly Presses Discuss What It Takes to Survive”

In "Scholarly Presses Discuss What It Takes to Survive," Jennifer Howard of The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the Association of American University Presses 2009 Annual Meeting (restricted access URL).

Here's an excerpt:

"As we know, the crisis in scholarly communication is now in its fifth decade," joked Mr. Armato of the University of Minnesota Press. . . .

The comment got a laugh, but it also set up an assault on what Mr. Armato called the "polarizing and self-serving rhetoric" that fills the debate over open access and scholarly publishing. Yes, we have to learn to live with and through "the transformation that lies not ahead of us but all around us," he advised. Nobody wants to be the ancien régime, Mr. Armato said—look what happened when the tumbrels rolled—but he pointed out that "revolutions often begin without much consideration" of what's lost on the road to utopia. Revolutionary rhetoric has done more to harm scholarly communication than to advance it, as revolutions tend to ignore "the human, social, and cultural consequences of those steps and what is destroyed along the way," he warned.

Read more about it at "Academic Publishing in the Humanities" and “Change or Die?

Springer Launches MyCopy: E-Book Users Can Order Fixed-Price Paperback Copies

Following a pilot project, Springer Science+Business Media has launched its MyCopy service, which allows Canadian and U.S. academic users of Springer eBook Collections to order fixed-price paperback copies of e-books.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

All registered library patrons will be able to order a softcover copy of a Springer eBook for their personal use by clicking on a button on the Springer platform www.springerlink.com.

The MyCopy offer is currently valid for more than 11,000 electronic Springer books published since 2005. The new softcover format is branded as a MyCopy book with a color cover and black and white book content. MyCopy books can only be ordered by registered patrons of those academic libraries that have purchased the corresponding eBook Collection. The entire ordering and shipping process will be handled by Springer in cooperation with a print-on-demand (POD) provider. All books will be sold at the same price, US$ 24.95. This price includes shipping and handling within the USA and Canada.

“Publisher ‘Threat’ to Open Access”

In "Publisher 'Threat' to Open Access," Zoë Corbyn of Times Higher Education reports that in the UK:

Elsevier is thought to be mooting a new idea that could undermine universities' own open-access repositories. It would see Elsevier take over the job of archiving papers and making them available more widely as PDF files. . . .

Shira Tabachnikoff, director of corporate communications at Elsevier, confirmed that preliminary discussions had taken place with some institutions but would not go into detail on their nature.

Google Book Search Settlement: Interview with Michael Healy, Expected Executive Director of the Book Rights Registry

The Copyright Clearance Center has released an interview with Michael Healy, expected Executive Director of the Book Rights Registry (digital audio of the interview is also available). The Book Rights Registry will be established as part of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement.

Here's an excerpt:

And let’s be clear, what we’ll be building here is a remarkable and unique resource, the like of which has not been seen in the industry before, which is a very comprehensive data set, which links publications back to works around which those publications are clustered. And then, you’ll have those works and publications linked for the very first time to comprehensive metadata records about rights holders, who owns what. Then, layer on top of that again, the opportunity that the settlement gives authors and publishers to express what Google and others do with these digitized books, the display rights, the pricing, etc. Then, you have a very complex mix of data sets, which need to interoperate successfully for the Registry to succeed. And I think that highlights an important point of this settlement, which we may come on and talk about later when we discuss the benefits, but it is important to emphasize that the Registry will be a vehicle through which—and the settlement document underpins this—the Registry will be a vehicle through which rights holders can exercise control on the use made by Google and others of these digitized works.

Read more about it at "Authors Guild/AAP/Google Settlement Gives Authors, Publishers 'Unprecedented. . . Control' Over Their Copyrights."

Enabling Open Scholarship Organization Launched

Professor Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Lige, and Dr. Alma Swan of Key Perspectives have launched Enabling Open Scholarship.

Here's an excerpt from the 6/11/09 American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum announcement:

Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS) is a membership organisation for universities and research institutions. The organisation is a forum for raising and discussing issues around the mission of modern universities, particularly with regard to the creation, dissemination and preservation of research findings.

Anyone who is interested in enrolling their institution as a member, or in attending an EOS meeting or briefing session, is invited to email the convenor of the group, Dr Alma Swan . . .

Contact information for Dr. Swan can be found on the Key Perspectives Contact Us page.

Texas Conference on Digital Libraries 2009 Presentations

Presentations from the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries 2009 are now available.

Here's those by Texas Digital Library staff:

“File-Sharing and Copyright”

Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf of the Harvard Business School have released "File-Sharing and Copyright" as a working paper.

Here's an excerpt:

As our survey indicates, the empirical evidence on sales displacement is mixed. While some studies find evidence of a substitution effect, other findings, in particular the papers using actual file-sharing data, suggest that piracy and music sales are largely unrelated. In contrast, there is clear evidence that income from complements has risen in recent years. For example, concert sales have increased more than music sales have fallen. Similarly, a fraction of consumer electronics purchases and internet-related expenditures are due to file sharing. Unfortunately, we know little about the distribution of these impacts. How markets for complimentary goods have responded to file sharing remains an area of inquiry that is largely unexplored in academic research.

Library IT Jobs: Systems & Electronic Services Librarian at Genesee Community College

The Alfred C. O’Connell Library at Genesee Community College is recruiting a Systems & Electronic Services Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

Manages, configures and maintains the library's electronic resources, on and off campus, including electronic databases, internet resources, the library web site, remote patron authentication software and system (proxy), Open URL link resolving software, and other applications.

Develops, implements, enhances and assesses integrated library system and web OPAC, including upgrades and updates, in collaboration with the LMS Administrator. . . .

Responsible for technical support of library electronic equipment: PC workstations, printers, scanners, fax machines, electronic classroom management system equipment, etc. Troubleshoots and performs maintenance as necessary.