Month: October 2009

"Repository Metadata: Approaches and Challenges"

John W. Chapman, David Reynolds, and Sarah L. Shreeves have self-archived "Repository Metadata: Approaches and Challenges" in IDEALS.

Here's an excerpt:

Many institutional repositories have pursued a mixed metadata environment, relying on description by multiple workflows. Strategies may include metadata converted from other systems, metadata elicited from the document creator or manager, and metadata created by library or repository staff. Additional editing or proofing may or may not occur. The mixed environment brings challenges of creation, management, and access. In this article, repository efforts at three major universities are discussed. All three repositories run on the DSpace software package, and the opportunities and limitations of that system will be examined. The authors discuss local strategies in light of current thinking on metadata creation, user behavior, and the aggregation of heterogeneous metadata. The contrasts between the mission of each repository effort will show the importance of local customization, while the experience of all three institutions forms the basis for recommendations on strategies of benefit to a wide range of librarians and repository planners.

Manager, GALILEO Knowledge Repository at Georgia Tech

The Georgia Tech Library and Information Center is recruiting a Manager, GALILEO Knowledge Repository (three-year position).

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The Galileo Knowledge Repository (GKR) Manager is a repository professional responsible for the daily project management and overall development of the GKR as a service in Georgia. It is a three-year, IMLS-funded position residing at the Georgia Tech Library and Information Center, reporting to its Associate Director for Technology and Resource Services. The Manager will work closely with the grant project PIs (2), the liaisons at each partner institution (6), and the GKR committees. S/he will perform promotion and outreach activities as well as train and advise institutions with hosted IRs on metadata standards, submission to DSpace, copyright issues, and identifying and creating digital content. Partner training sessions will be conducted by the GKR Manager, with assistance by members of the GKR committees; they will be conducted virtually and onsite at the partner institutions. The GKR Manager also will provide guidance to the GKR Content Submission Service. These activities will be targeted at groups of partner institutions' faculty, librarians, and archivists at the seven GKR partner sites. The Manager will be a resource and lead the training program offered to others involved or interested in statewide and consortial IR initiatives. S/he will serve on the GKR committees — Steering, Technical, Content and Metadata, Outreach and Evaluation, and the Symposium and Workshop Committee. The GKR Manager will chair the Symposium and Workshop committee.

Columbia University Libraries and Cornell University Library Awarded Grant for 2CUL Partnership

The Columbia University Libraries and the Cornell University Library have received a grant to fund their 2CUL partnership project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $385,000 to the libraries at Columbia University in New York City and Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., to support the development of an innovative partnership dubbed "2CUL." This new relationship has the potential to become the most expansive collaboration to date between major research libraries.

Starting this fall, Cornell and Columbia will plan significant partnerships in collaborative collection development, acquisitions and processing. The two universities will form a separate service entity to facilitate the collaboration. Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization that assists research libraries and the academic community to leverage advancing information technologies, will provide project management and assist in the planning. Initial work will focus on several global collecting areas, as well as collaborative funding and support of technical infrastructure in various areas.

2CUL — pronounced "too cool" — stands for the acronyms of both Columbia University Library and Cornell University Library. The partnership is not a merger, and the two libraries remain separate institutions.

"2CUL represents a new, radical form of collaboration that pairs two leading research libraries in a voluntary, equal partnership," said James G. Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University. "Columbia University Libraries and Cornell University Library are committed to developing an enduring and transformative partnership that will enable us to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness and to address new challenges through combined forces."

"2CUL will ameliorate the impact of budget cuts while building our librarie' ability to innovate," said Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell University. "This partnership is predicated on Cornell and Columbia’s shared commitment to reinvigorate our libraries in response to and in anticipation of changes in digital access, interdisciplinary research and scholarly communication. It also allows us to provide the best possible experience for our users."

Over the next two years, 2CUL will explore ways to improve the quality of collections and services offered to campus constituencies, redirect resources to emerging needs, and make each institution more competitive in securing government and foundation support. The relationship could also provide a new blueprint for broad, non-exclusive partnerships between other academic libraries and other parts of the academy.

Yale University Library Gets Two Grants to Digitize Middle Eastern Materials

The Yale University Library has been awarded two grants totaling $890,000 to digitize Middle Eastern materials.

Here's an excerpt from "Yale Digitizes Documents":

The Yale University Library has received a $650,000 four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education to digitize Syrian and Palestinian government records, and a $240,000 joint grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joint Information Systems Committee to digitize Middle Eastern scholarly materials, according to a press release Thursday. The library will use advanced technology to translate the digitized text into searchable text, which will be available online.

Librarians and Archivists at York University Libraries Adopt Open Access Policy

Librarians and archivists at the York University Libraries have adopted an open access policy. (Thanks to Confessions of a Science Librarian.)

Here's an excerpt from the policy:

Academic librarians and archivists at York University commit to making the best possible effort to publish in venues providing unrestricted public access to their works. They will endeavour to secure the right to self-archive their published materials, and will deposit these works in YorkSpace.

The York University academic librarian and archivist complement grant York University Libraries the non-exclusive right to make their scholarly publications accessible through self-archiving in the YorkSpace institutional repository subject to copyright restrictions. . . .

This policy applies to all scholarly and professional work produced as a member of York University academic staff produced as of the date of the adoption of this policy. Retrospective deposit is encouraged. Co-authored works should be included with the permission of the other author(s). Examples of works include:

  • Scholarly and professional articles
  • Substantive presentations, including slides and text
  • Books/book chapters
  • Reports
  • Substantive pedagogical materials such as online tutorials

Works should be deposited in YorkSpace as soon as is possible, recognizing that some publishers may impose an embargo period. This policy is effective as of 01/10/2009 and will be assessed a year after implementation.

Digital Archivist, Digital Curation Services at University of Virginia

The University of Virginia Library is recruiting a Digital Archivist, Digital Curation Services (two-year position).

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The University of Virginia Library seeks a talented and dynamic individual to serve as Digital Archivist to a two-year grant funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This position will provide key leadership to a cohort of digital archivists from partner institutions (national and international) on this exciting initiative entitled: Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship (AIMS). Reporting to the Director of Digital Curation Services, this position will provide the methodology and integration of archival practices to an ever-growing corpus of materials used by scholars, authors, and other notables: namely, born digital content. This is a collaborative project that will require the coordination of complex activities across several other institutions. The Digital Archivist will participate in the creation of a best practices manual for archivists and stewards of born-digital collections. This is an exciting opportunity to work at the crossroads of special collections materials and new technologies.

Harvard College Library and the National Library of China to Digitize 51,500-Volume Chinese Rare Book Collection

The Harvard College Library and the National Library of China will collaborate to digitize and make freely available the 51,500-volume Chinese rare book collection of Harvard-Yenching Library.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Among the largest cooperative projects of its kind ever undertaken between China and US libraries, the project will digitize Harvard-Yenching Library's entire 51,500-volume Chinese rare book collection. One of the libraries which make up the Harvard College Library system, Harvard-Yenching is the largest university library for East Asian research in the Western world. When completed, the project will have a transformative affect on scholarship involving rare Chinese texts, Harvard-Yenching Librarian James Cheng predicted. . . .

The six-year project will be done in two three-year phases. The first phase, beginning in January 2010, will digitize books from the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, which date from about 960 AD to 1644. The second phase, starting in January 2013, will digitize books from the Qing Dynasty, which date from 1644 until 1795. The collection includes materials which cover an extensive range of subjects, including history, philosophy, drama, belles letters and classics.

All of the rare books will have to be examined carefully to identify those that are fragile, damaged, or are sewn in a way that hides text along the binding margin. To determine which volumes may need conservation treatment, project manager Sharon Li-Shiuan Yang, head of access services at Harvard-Yenching Library, and her team will receive training in basic condition assessment from the Weissman Preservation Center, which treats Harvard's rare library materials. Items needing repair will be sent to the Weissman for treatment by conservators before being digitized.

The digitization work will be performed by HCL Imaging Services group in its state-of-the-art lab in Widener Library, where staff members have been working to design new equipment and workflows in preparation for the huge project, said Imaging Services head Bill Comstock.

The scale of the project will present HCL and the National Library of China with many organizational and technical challenges," Comstock said. "We look forward to partnering with NLC staff, led by Dr. Zhi-geng Wang, the Director of the NLC's Department for Digital Resources and Services, to build innovative new tools and procedures that will make our work on this and other projects more robust and efficient."

University of Michigan Press Partners with HathiTrust to Provide Free Access to Over 1,000 Books

The University of Michigan Press is working with HathiTrust Digital Library to provide free access to over 1,000 books by the end of 2009.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust is a digital preservation repository and research management tool for the world's great research libraries, focused on providing scholars in the digital age with the largest collection of electronic research material this side of Google Book Search and large-scale, full-text searching and archiving tools to manage it.

"Presses have had online previews and PDFs of sample chapters, tables of contents, and sometimes entire books on their Web sites for years," said Phil Pochoda, director of the U-M Press. "The HathiTrust partnership is something entirely new that takes into account the actual pursuit of broad dissemination of scholarly information.

"Security restrictions are in place to protect the integrity of the product, but with HathiTrust, a full view of the material is there. It's searchable and it's available to anyone with access. If you want to either search for or happen to come across Michigan Press books, you can look through them onscreen anywhere, anytime."

In keeping with the U-M's leadership role in the use of digitization and print-on-demand technology, U-M Press seeks to push the boundaries of the rapidly changing publishing world to position its resources where many different kinds of audiences can find them, Pochoda said.

Utilizing the latest technology, readers and researchers will find multiple ways to find what they are looking for. HathiTrust links to the U-M Press site allow for fast online purchasing.

In addition to a partnership with HathiTrust, content on Amazon and hundreds of U-M Press books in Google Book Search (in which the U-M Library was one of the original participants), U-M Press has had a "Look Inside" feature on its own book Web pages for several years.

With text search ability powered by Google, the "Look Inside" feature on the U-M Press Web site is another tool for viewing each title without damaging the integrity of the product. It currently contains thousands of table-of-contents and sample chapter views, with more than 100 complete titles available for full viewing and hundreds more complete titles planned for full view by the end of 2009.

Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice

SPARC has released Income Models for Open Access: An Overview of Current Practice.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Who pays for Open Access?" is a key question faced by publishers, authors, and libraries as awareness and interest in free, immediate, online access to scholarly research increases. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) examines the issue of sustainability for current and prospective open-access publishers in a timely new guide, "Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice," by Raym Crow.

"Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice" examines the use of supply-side revenue streams (such as article processing fees, advertising) and demand-side models (including versioning, use-triggered fees). The guide provides an overview of income models currently in use to support open-access journals, including a description of each model along with examples of journals currently employing it. . . .

Developing a sound business model is a critical concern for all publishers and the process can be especially challenging for those considering open-access distribution. The guide recognizes that the needs of individual journals differ, and that publishers will apply a variety of income models to support open-access distribution. The right model must take into account not only the publisher's need to cover expenses, but also the organization's mission objectives, size, business management resources, and other factors. . . .

"Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice" is available for free to read or download online. The guide is supplemented by an extensive Web resource, which invites community discussion on models described as well as contributions related to new and other models. The resource is online at http://www.arl.org/sparc/publisher/incomemodels/.

Stevan Harnad on "Integrating Universities' Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates"

Stevan Harnad has self-archived the text of his "Integrating Universities' Thesis and Research Deposit Mandates" presentation in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

A growing number of universities are beginning to require the digital deposit of their thesis and dissertation output in their institutional repositories. At the same time, a growing number of universities as well as research funders are beginning to mandate that all refereed research must be deposited too. This makes for a timely synergy between the practices of the younger and older generation of researchers as the Open Access era unfolds. It also maximizes the uptake, usage and impact of university research input at all stages, as well as providing rich and powerful new metrics to monitor and reward research productivity and impact. It is important to integrate universities' ETD and research output repositories, mandates and metrics as well as to provide the mechanism for those deposits that may need to be made Closed Access rather than Open Access: Repositories need to implement the "email eprint request" Button for all Closed Access Deposits. Any would-be user webwide, having reached the metadata of a Closed Access Deposit can, with one click, request an eprint for research purposes; the author instantly receives an automatic email and can then, again with one click, authorize the automatic emailing of one copy to the user by the repository software. This feature is important for fulfilling immediate research usage needs during any journal-article embargo period, and it also gives the authors of dissertations they hope to publish as books a way to control who has access to the dissertation. Digital dissertations will also benefit from the reference-linking and book-citation metrics that will be provided by harvesters of the distributed institutional repository metadata (which will also include the metadata and reference lists of all university book output). Dissertation downloads as well as eprint-requests will also provide useful new research impact metrics

Open Journal Systems 2.3 Released

The Public Knowledge Project has released Open Journal Systems 2.3.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

OJS 2.3.0 introduces a major rewrite of core aspects of PKP applications that reconciles common code (e.g. shared between OJS, OCS, and the Harvester) into a separate library called the PKP Web Application Library (WAL). Many parts of the system have been changed in a way that is transparent to users but that will vastly improve maintainability and the ease with which PKP can deploy fixes and new features across multiple applications. Wherever possible, this has been done in a way that minimizes code breakage e.g. for modified installs of OJS and custom plugins.

Read more about it at "OJS 2.3: What's New."

"Getting Started with Fedora"

Fedora Commons has released "Getting Started with Fedora."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The "Getting Started with Fedora" Guide is designed to offer new users, or potential users, a basic understanding of the Fedora architecture and the core repository management software, along with some general ideas about how to use it. Whether you want to adopt one of the existing Fedora-based solutions or develop you own, this general introduction should be useful to you.

Google Books Settlement Status Conference Reports

Kenneth Crews and James Grimmelmann have posted blog reports about the Google Books Settlement status conference on October 7th. An amended agreement is anticipated to be filed by November 9th.

Here's an excerpt from the Grimmelmann's post:

Judge Chin is trying to move this case, and his overall attitude seemed to be that he wants as clean a record as possible, and soon, so that he can act on it. That would incline me to think that he is hoping to be able to approve the settlement, or at the least to kick some of the legal issues upstairs to the Second Circuit for its guidance.

Read more about it at "Amended Google Deal Targeted for November 9."

Health Care Debate Sidelines Federal Research Public Access Act

In "Open Access Bill Stalls in Congress," Bob Grant reports on the status of the Federal Research Public Access Act in the Senate.

Here's an excerpt:

Congressional staffers in the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) of 2009 (S.1373) lingers, have been forced to shift their attentions to health care and away from the bill. "They're definitely swamped," Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, told The Scientist. Joseph added that movement on FRPAA is not expected "until after health care gets sorted out."

You can send an e-mail supporting the bill to your Senator using the Alliance for Taxpayer Access Web form.

Embedding Repositories in Research Management Systems: Final Report

JISC has released Embedding Repositories in Research Management Systems: Final Report. (See JISC's "Research Information Management" page for more information on research management systems.)

Here's an excerpt:

The main finding from our research is the variety of disparate "systems" (i.e. both technology and process) in use. Management information is derived from many different systems and processes: HR; student administration (e.g. SITS); finance; research support; and information services/library.

A number of universities use business intelligence software such as Cognos or Oracle Discoverer for monitoring activity and performance, and for resource allocation and forecasting. However, some rely on tools as simple as a series of complex interlinked spreadsheets.

The role of institutional repositories is still small. IRs are near-universal, but mainly lack critical mass of content. Publications and research expertise databases are widespread and are the main research assessment management tool for many HEIs: few of these connect to the IR, although in a small number of cases the two are linked.

We could find no implementations of a research management system with embedded repository; further, where both RMS and IRs do exist within the same HEI they are not well-integrated.

Georgia Tech Library Awarded $857,005 Grant to Build Statewide Digital Repository

The Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center has been awarded a $857,005 grant for its "The GALILEO Knowledge Repository (GKR): Advancing the Access and Management of Scholarly Digital Content" project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Georgia Tech, in partnership with the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, the Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Valdosta State University, Albany State University, North Georgia College and State University, and the College of Coastal Georgia, will build a statewide digital repository to provide access to scholarly works and research information. The principal investigator on the grant is Tyler Walters, Associate Director for Technology and Resource Services, the Georgia Institute of Technology Library and Information Center; the co-PI is P. Toby Graham, Director, Digital Library of Georgia, University of Georgia Libraries.

The scholarly works and research information to be held by the GKR are materials such as:

Annual Reports; Audio/Video Recordings; Conference Papers; Electronic Theses and Dissertations; Instructional Materials; Lecture Series and Symposia Materials; Newsletters; Pre-Prints/Post-Prints; Proceedings; Research and Technical Reports; Web Sites; White Papers; and Working Papers.

The GKR program has five activities that it will complete during the grant:

  1. Conduct a survey and focus groups of the USG librarians' and faculty's usage and perceptions of digital repositories.
  2. Establish a service to host individual repositories for four participating USG institutions (Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Albany State University, College of Coastal Georgia)
  3. Build a central, searchable web site and database from all eight GKR-related digital repositories, featuring the GKR-developed repository collection mapping tool. This will be done by harvesting database records from all eight GKR-related digital repositories (the four hosted repositories mentioned above, plus existing repositories at Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and Valdosta State University).
  4. Establish repository-related services for the GKR partners: copyright assistance, digitization, content submission into their repository, and digital preservation
  5. Design and offer to a nationwide audience a symposium and workshop on managing statewide and consortial repositories. The goal of the training program is to increase the number of digital repositories operating in the U.S. and the number of information professionals with the knowledge and skills to manage repositories consortially.

Swedish Research Council Adopts Open Access Mandate

The Swedish Research Council has adopted an open access mandate. The Swedish Research Council is "a government agency that provides funding for basic research of the highest scientific quality in all disciplinary domains. Besides research funding, the agency works with strategy, analysis, and research communication."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement (translation from the Swedish by Ingegerd Rabow):

The Swedish Research Council requires free access to research results.

In order to receive research grants the Research council requires now that researchers publish their material freely accessible to all.. . .

Researchers are required to guarantee that everything published shall be freely available according to Open Access not later than six months after publication.

The Council's decision regarding Open Access has been taken in close cooperation with SUHF, the Association of Swedish Higher Education. To promote free dissemination of research results is not and isolated Swedish occurrence, The so called Berlin Declaration aiming to implement Open Access has been signed by several large, mainly European research funders.

The Open Access-mandate covers so far only refereed journal articles and conference reports, not monographs and book chapters. The mandate will be included in the new grant conditions from 2010.

No Contract Awarded for GPO Mass Digitization of All Federal Publications

The U.S. Government Printing Office has been unable to award a contract for the digitization of all Federal publications.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In 2004, GPO proposed digitizing all retrospective Federal publications back to the earliest days of the Federal Government. Following the conduct of a pilot project in 2006 and its evaluation in 2007, we issued an RFP in 2008 for a cooperative relationship with a public or private sector participant or participants where the uncompressed, unaltered files created as a result of the conversion process would be delivered to GPO at no cost to the Government, for ingest into GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys). Unfortunately, we were unable to make an award for this RFP in the allocated timeframe.

We are very disappointed in this setback, but are currently developing new digitization alternatives. In addition to our longstanding goal of serving as one of the repositories for electronic files through the submission of material to FDsys, our focus for digitization will be on coordinating projects among institutions, assisting in the establishment and implementation of preservation guidelines, maintaining a registry of digitization projects, and ensuring that there is appropriate bibliographic metadata for the titles in the collection.

University of Illinois' IDEALS Repository Tops One Million Downloads

The University of Illinois' IDEALS institutional repository has topped one million downloads.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS), a digital repository for research and scholarship developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has surpassed its one-millionth download.

The service, offered through the University Library and Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services (CITES), is sponsored by the Office of the Provost at Illinois and was launched in 2006. The campus institutional repository includes articles, working papers, preprints, technical reports, conference papers and, data sets in various digital formats provided by University faculty, staff, and graduate students. Although central to the University of Illinois, anyone can access and benefit from IDEALS collections and services. "Today, over 12,000 items have been uploaded into IDEALS," said Sarah Shreeves, associate professor and IDEALS coordinator. "The success of this service has surpassed what anyone envisioned two and a half years ago, and we hope that others in the Illinois community will take advantage of its services."

The mission of IDEALS is to preserve and provide persistent and reliable access to digital research and scholarship in order to give these works the greatest possible recognition and distribution. IDEALS endeavors to ensure that its materials appear in search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, and Bing and that the majority of the research is openly available for anyone to access. As a result of its efforts to disseminate research produced at the University of Illinois, IDEALS was recently ranked in the top 10 of institutional repositories worldwide. "I am delighted with the exposure that IDEALS has provided us with. Whenever we place a thesis or a report, the downloads start and never stop. We get many comments back from readers and researchers who have seen our work only on IDEALS," said Amr Elnashai, head, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

IDEALS contains a wealth of diverse information, from a Mid-America Earthquake Center report on the Kashmir Earthquake of 2005 to the Ethnography of the University Initiative’s publications and presentations, including campus folklore and cultural perceptions. "I appreciate that my thesis is archived in a stable location for reliable long-term access. The document is now freely available to anyone in the world, yet I retain the copyright," said David P. Hruska, an Illinois graduate. "Furthermore, my thesis is now displayed in search results returned by Google Scholar, improving the dissemination of my research."

Dean of University Libraries Candidates Interview at Indiana University

Candidates for the Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries position at Indiana University are interviewing this week. The candidates are Brenda Johnson (Dean of University Libraries at the University of California, Santa Barbara) and Diane Parr Walker (Deputy University Librarian at the University of Virginia).

Read more about it at "Library Dean Candidates Visit Today."

Deputy Director at UKOLN

UKOLN is recruiting a Deputy Director.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

UKOLN is a centre of expertise in digital information management based at the University of Bath, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities.

We are seeking to recruit a Deputy Director to provide outstanding leadership and strategic direction to all technical activity within UKOLN, to assure our position at the forefront of innovative Digital Library (DL) developments. This is a key senior post within the UKOLN organisation and will be based at the University of Bath.

The post requires vision, strategic insight and innovation associated with the implementation and development of DLs within the education, research or cultural heritage sectors. Applicants should have extensive and in-depth technical knowledge of DLs and associated interoperability issues, knowledge of emerging Web technologies and an understanding of their potential for education and research. An established international reputation in the DL arena, together with a track record for leading and shaping innovative activities, is highly desirable.

The post also requires significant experience of securing funding awards and income generation. Applicants will have extensive experience of leading teams, directing multiple projects to a successful outcome/completion and be outstanding communicators with well-developed influencing and negotiating skills and a proven ability to produce high quality reports, papers and presentations.

SWORD PHP Library Version 0.9

The SWORD PHP library version 0.9 has been released. SWORD is "a lightweight protocol for depositing content from one location to another. It stands for Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit and is a profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol (known as APP or ATOMPUB)."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Changed swordappservicedocument to build the servcedocument from the xml response rather than having the swordappclient do the work. This allows the service document to be parsed at a later time.
  • Changed the swordappclient deposit method to stream the file being deposited straight from disk rather than via memory to avoid using excessive memory and potentially exceeding the PHP memory limit. I’ve successfully tested this against DSpace with deposits of 600MB CD images.
  • Added some validation to the SWAP/METS packager to allow it to cope with filenames and metadata containing ampersands

Gawronski v. Amazon.com: Amazon's New Kindle Deletion Rules

As a result of the settlement of the Gawronski et al. v. Amazon.com Inc et al. case (about the deletion of George Orwell e-books), Amazon.com will comply with new rules regarding deletion of digital works on Kindles.

Here's an excerpt:

For copies of Works purchased pursuant to TOS granting "the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy" of each purchased Work and to "view, use and display [such Works] an unlimited number of times, solely on the [Devices] . . . and solely for [the purchasers'] personal, non-commercial use," Amazon will not remotely delete or modify such Works from Devices purchased and being used in the United States unless (a) the user consents to such deletion or modification; (b) the user requests a refund for the Work or otherwise fails to pay for the Work (e.g., if a credit or debit card issuer declines to remit payment); (c) a judicial or regulatory order requires such deletion or modification; or (d) deletion or modification is reasonably necessary to protect the consumer or the operation of a Device or network through which the Device communicates (e.g., to remove harmful code embedded within a copy of a Work downloaded to a Device). This paragraph does not apply to (a) applications (whether developed or offered by Amazon or by third parties), software or other code; (b) transient content such as blogs; or (c) content that the publisher intends to be updated and replaced with newer content as newer content becomes available. With respect to newspaper and magazine subscriptions, nothing in this paragraph prohibits the current operational practice pursuant to which older issues are automatically deleted from the Device to make room for newer issues, absent affirmative action by the Device user to save older issues.

Read more about it at "Amazon Settles Kindle '1984' Lawsuit" and "Amazon.com to Pay $150,000 to Settle Suit Challenging Take-Back of 1984."